‘Backrooms’ Review: From YouTube Sensation to Lynchian Horror

Anyone who has ever traveled through the United States and stopped at one of those enormous highway-side malls—with their sprawling big-box stores and vast parking lots—has probably noticed just how eerie those non-places can feel. Gray, monotonous environments, often empty and devoid of any warmth, illuminated by huge fluorescent light panels that give everything a strangely clinical yet ghostly atmosphere. The massive furniture store that serves as the gateway into the world of Backrooms could easily be located in one of those places. But this film, itself adapted from YouTube videos that in turn sprang from internet memes and creepypasta lore (more on the phenomenon here), goes a step further: it ventures inside those spaces, probing their hidden interior, their most abstract—and perhaps most unsettling—dimension.

Both effective and deeply unnerving as it shifts between realism and fantasy, the mundane and the poetic, Kane Parsons’ feature debut—made when he was just 20 years old—could be described as a cross between a Lynchian exercise in dream logic and a more conventionally structured, though no less enigmatic, psychological horror film. Backrooms combines an immersion into the mysteries of the human psyche with an exploration of workplace alienation, all wrapped inside what feels like the opening chapter of a brand-new fantasy mythology—something in the vein of Stranger Things, perhaps—that seems destined to expand further and further if the film’s success is any indication.

Backrooms begins much like many arthouse horror films (A24, the studio behind it, has also released titles such as Beau Is Afraid, I Saw the TV Glow and Undertone): as what is essentially a psychiatric exploration of its central characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, an architect who owns a gigantic, barely frequented furniture store, to the point that he stars in its TV commercials dressed as a pirate. We first meet him during a session with Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), where he opens up about his painful divorce, his frustrations, his alcoholism, and his crushing loneliness. The psychologist herself hardly seems emotionally stable, as she’s also haunted by what appears to be a deeply disturbing past involving a mother who was somewhere between obsessively controlling and paranoid.

One day, while sleeping inside the furniture store—a massive, multi-story building—Clark hears strange noises, the lights begin to flicker, and he senses some kind of presence. Unable to find any technical explanation, he eventually stumbles upon something impossible: he discovers he can walk through a wall in the basement and somehow cross into a parallel world. At first glance, what’s waiting on the other side is an even more suffocating, liminal version of the place he just left behind: what appears to be an endless maze of yellow-walled corridors leading nowhere. Clark is able to enter and leave the place at will, and even tells his therapist about the discovery, though she naturally doesn’t believe him. Hoping to prove it exists, he returns with one of his employees and her boyfriend, bringing along a video camera to document everything. That’s when the real trouble begins.

Backrooms immerses itself in an imaginary landscape that stretches from the banal to the esoteric, from the ordinary to the profoundly uncanny: a seemingly endless collection of rooms, hallways, and corridors that may initially stand empty beneath those hideous fluorescent ceiling panels, but gradually evolve into something far darker, more classically horrific… and no longer unoccupied. Clark becomes trapped within this world, and before long Dr. Kline follows the same path, while the place itself seems to shift and transform in response to each of their emotional states. At the same time, we meet Phil (Mark Duplass), a man who, from the outside, appears capable of witnessing at least some of the events unfolding inside. It isn’t until the film’s closing stretch that we begin to understand how these threads connect. Or at least, some of them.

Expanding on the original concept—which essentially consisted of a home-video camera wandering through these cryptic non-places and occasionally stumbling across paranormal phenomena in the style of Paranormal Activity—Parsons gradually guides his characters into new environments that lack the stark sterility of the original setting. The fear inspired by an enormous, half-empty building filled with flickering fluorescent lights and an incessant electrical buzz is quite different from that generated by the more familiar horror settings that appear later on. Although the film never loses its essential strangeness, the creatures, situations, and locations introduced as it progresses don’t possess quite the same dry, suffocating quality as those first endless corridors. Even so, thanks to the growing accumulation of impossible mysteries woven into the screenplay—there’s clearly a journey into the subconscious at work here, but perhaps something else as well—Backrooms never sacrifices its sense of mystery or its identity as a deeply unsettling psychological trip. More than outright terror, what the film evokes is unease, anxiety, and a lingering sense of disorientation.

Having two outstanding actors at its center, along with a remarkably disciplined command of pacing, allows Backrooms to avoid slipping into the kind of formulaic resolution it occasionally seems to be approaching. The film’s greatest strength lies in the way it continually subverts expectations, as much of what emerges within these impossible spaces feels deliberately arbitrary, cryptic, and unpredictable. In that sense, it remains unmistakably lynchian from beginning to end, taking familiar pieces of quintessential Americana—the cavernous mall furniture store here, the suburban home there—and surrounding them with an overwhelming atmosphere of existential dread. Much like Severance or The Shining—a television series and a film that share more than a few thematic affinities with Parsons’ work—reality may seem sterile and painfully ordinary on the surface. But all it takes is opening the wrong door to find yourself staring straight into Hell.