Michael Andrillon | Staff Writer
Frightful murmurings and audible gasps as the gritty analog camerawork shifts into first person and things begin to move in the corners of our eyes.
“This guy gets it,” I tell my friend once it’s over.
Backrooms assembles a collage of slow-building dread in the sense of walking through those familiar and quiet halls of a building or even your own home in the dead of night when no one is around. The lights are off, where the imagination is allowed to run wild, and you instinctively conjure all the ways something can emerge from the shadows.
That horror carries a multitude of layers for Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose mind is stimulated by these spaces and their underlying structures. As a failed architect turned furniture salesman, he finds himself washed out and trapped in his own consumerist dead end embodied in the store that now takes up his life.
When he discovers the means to “clip” beyond the walls, his exciting discovery quickly becomes a trip through a surreal labyrinthian nightmare, as the camera shifts at times from this first-person camcorder perspective, channeling the found footage work of “The Blair Witch Project”, “V/H/S”, and horror video games like “Routine” and “Outlast”.
In playing with these retro aesthetic touches, it taps into much of the Millennial and Gen Z fixation on these liminal spaces in which entire internet subcultures have been defined. Dreamcore, Weirdcore, and various other “cores” have provided plenty of opportunities for anyone with a camera on hand to recontextualize empty rooms and abandoned malls into places of the uncanny.
Director Kane Parsons, who brings us this film at the age of 20, was a child of these corners of the internet, who now adds his name to the recent influx of YouTubers such as Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, and recent sketch comedian Curry Barker, taking their talents to the cinema.
Parsons has clearly shown not just his knack for subtlety, but also in taking these trends and elevating them beyond recognizable memes. Translating them into a rich fusion of tightly paced modern horror with a dose of the metaphysical harkening to Kant and Lovecraft, through strange architectures and dimensions beyond our understanding.
The Backrooms going from niche creepypasta to existentialist A24 cinema was not on my bingo card this year. But it’s a good time that might just inspire those with creative tendencies to remember that all this came from a single picture posted on a message board years ago.
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