Backrooms review

BACKROOMS: 

A CREEPY AND FASCINATING TRIP INTO THE UNKNOWN! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: **** out of 4

A24

Renate Reinsve in Backrooms

 

            A furniture store owner and his therapist discover a mysterious dimension of endless liminal spaces in Backrooms, the new horror film from A24 and directed by YouTuber Kane Parsons in his feature film debut. The film is based on Parsons’ 2022 webseries of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the creepypasta also of the same name. 

            The movie looked interesting when I saw the trailers, which didn’t show much outside of people discovering the backrooms and something terrifying lurking inside. Also, we’re currently in this sweet spot for horror movies with this, Obsession, and Hokum, which came out earlier this month, and YouTubers making their jumps from computer and phone screens to the big screen. 

            Bottom line, it got my interest and became a priority watch when it was released, and…damn! Horror fans are eating well between this and Obsession. Backrooms is amazing and as fascinating as it is frightening, I was glued to the screen from start to finish. 

            The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor-12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange 1 and 2, The Life of Chuck), a down-on-his-luck furniture store owner who discovers a door to a strange dimension in the basement of his store. It turns out, this dimension is an endless liminal space of uncanny hallways and malformed furniture known as the Backrooms, but as Clark and eventually his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve-Sentimental Value), venture deeper into it, the more nightmarish and terrifying it becomes. 

            The film also stars Mark Duplass (Creep 1 and 2, Safety Not Guaranteed, Tully) as Phil, Finn Bennett (True Detective: Night County, Warfare, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms) as Bobby, Lukita Maxwell (Generation, Shrinking, The Young Wife) as Kat, Avan Jogia (Caprica, Zombieland: Double Tap, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City) as Naren Warne, and Krista Kosonen (Jade Warrior, Princess, Blade Runner 2049) as Nora Kline. 

            Overall, Backrooms is a chilling, surreal, and engaging experience with an interesting premise, some very tense sequences, and even some thought-provoking subject matter. I was locked in during a lot of this movie and was on the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen and how everything would come together by the end. 

            The movie looks incredible in terms of the production design, with much of the film being shot in an empty, maze-like office set with digital effects to enhance, which really gives this sense of claustrophobia and the unknown as you’re watching the film. I can see this film striking a chord with people who are claustrophobic because the way the backrooms look and are filmed is genuinely frightening. 

            The film also utilizes some found-footage moments where certain scenes are shown from the perspective of a cameraman, and I honestly found these sequences to be the most tense and scariest parts of the whole movie. Despite found-footage being overused to death, Backrooms found a way to inject new life into that filmmaking trope, even if it isn’t 100% the entire film. 

            For the most part, Backrooms leans into suspense and psychological horror, but there are elements of body horror, and while nowhere near as grotesque as a film like The Substance, it’s pretty unsettling. That’s all I’ll say. There are definitely some weird body horror scenes and images in the movie that will stay with me. 

            The performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are stellar, especially the former; Ejiofor really sells his performance as a man who’s clearly on edge, not just in the backrooms but events outside the backrooms as well. Even before he discovers this unknown series of rooms in his shop, he’s the kind of person where one little push is enough for him to completely lose his mind, and the backrooms are gonna make things much worse. It's one of the best performances from him I’ve seen in a while. 

            Renate Reinsve is also magnificent as Clark’s therapist, who ends up in the backrooms later on in the film, just a level-headed therapist trying to help him out, and as he’s explaining what he discovered to her, she rightfully doesn’t believe until she begins experiencing it for herself. Her character also has a past that’s glanced at at certain points in the movie, and ultimately comes to terms with it once she enters the backrooms. She’s easily the most normal character in the film, but the latter half is where she really shines. 

            I will say, as much as I love this movie, I felt the runtime could have been cut short a little. The film is an hour and 50 minutes, and with constant slow-burning scenes without many straight-up scares. It’s not a huge issue and doesn’t ruin the movie, but I think the film in general would have been better paced had it been trimmed down to 90 minutes with fewer scenes that drag. 

            Despite some minor runtime issues and a few things about the ending that I’m a little torn on, I enjoyed the hell out of Backrooms and found it to be a genuinely unnerving, clever, and fascinating horror movie. Like I said, this and Obsession are feeding horror movie fans good to the point where I completely forgot that Passenger came out recently.