Backrooms Review — Real horror comes from the ‘sterile world’ beyond Kane Parsons’ horrifying setting

“There is among all your memories one / Which has now been lost beyond recall. / You will not be seen going down to that fountain / Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.” – Jorge Luis Borges, Limits (Lines 25-28)

It’s not often while watching a modern horror film that I find myself thinking of Jorge Luis Borges. In our current landscape of trauma narratives and social monsters, the Argentine master’s liminal, philosophical stylings have been all but eradicated from the genre that owes him so much—even the recent Silent Hill film somehow managed to lack the Borgesian undertones that the games received mediated through David Cronenberg and Colin Wilson. Nevertheless, as the credits rolled, I found myself thinking of Borges’ poetry, with its Janus-faced remembrances, histories whispered in unknowable languages, and houses carrying secret memories of those who once inhabited them.

Kane Parsons may be the first horror filmmaker in decades to share Borges’ thematic and aesthetic preoccupations. The past as an alien territory and memory as a flawed construction pervade every aspect of his debut film. The fictional 1990s in which The Backrooms takes place is not an attempt at recreating the past, but an idealised, sterile version of a world that once was. The setting of the film is itself a kind of backrooms — a world that never existed; a network of associations and imagery smashed together in a way that simulates and evokes the past without actually resembling it at all. 

As the film goes on, one wonders if this isn’t all intentional and the “real world” of The Backrooms is not itself part of the film’s titular infinity. As the film plays with the idea of boundaries between the world above and the world below, idealised, identical beach houses and platonic warehouse stores seem to be simplified recreations of something that once existed somewhere else—real, sharp-edged, and dirty. The lines blur between the mundane and the bizarre, and the hallways of government buildings become indistinguishable from the endless hallways of the backrooms — you begin to wonder if it hasn’t been bleeding into our world for decades, colonising us. Even the recurring motif of the cardboard caveman cutout — the archetype of baseline humanity — is a modern man dressed as a caveman, clean and well-groomed, deliberately anti-historical.

As the distinction between the backrooms and the real world melts away, the film opens up like an orchid. Is Clark himself a construct? He lives in an environment visually similar to the backrooms—one we later learn has no hard threshold between it and the backrooms—and his memory seems to repeat, a loop degrading with every iteration. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance, tinged with rage but hollow and cold, seems to play into this — even after following in the footsteps of the unnamed protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper, his madness seems affected, there’s no depth to it. Is he merely another automaton created by the backrooms? Renate Reinsve’s complimentary performance—roiling intensity confined within a cold, reserved exterior—seems to suggest an intentional contrast, positioning her character, Mary, as the film’s true protagonist. 

While Mary has flashbacks to her childhood and her life before the film, Clark never does—in fact, the only flashback he’s involved in is one in which he shows Mary a map of the backrooms, firmly establishing him as a character within her world. We don’t ever see his divorce or his life beyond the backrooms and his interactions with Mary. He is a character we’re told exists, but nothing in the film reinforces this. Clark is a cypher, a patient for Mary to deal with, but little else. Clark’s furniture store may well be an extension of the backrooms, and his own adventure into the yellow realm may just be a way to draw people in — first Bobby and Kat, later Mary. Viewing Clark as a lure sent out by the backrooms to entice in beings rich with memory and emotion changes the backrooms into something hostile, almost like a predator. No longer a place, but a sprawling multi-dimensional entity; a devouring god — a parasite attached to our world, changing it, consuming it, and, for whatever reason, attempting to replicate it within itself.

By the end of the film, it’s unclear if it’s possible to actually leave the backrooms — the viewer is left wondering if the scientists have made the terrible discovery that their perpetual present is just a mirror of a more complex and crunchy world beyond their reach. Are their own lives simply the misunderstood, mechanical, purely aesthetic representations of something that once had weight and meaning in another reality? Are the characters and the world they inhabit just hazy remembrances that barely resemble the things they were copied from? It almost feels like a meta-critique of nostalgia culture and the current state of the American film industry — in much the same way that the dinner table scene can be read as a refutation of ‘trauma horror,’ in which horrific experiences serve as a way for victims of tragedy to achieve self-actualisation through their overcoming.

And yet, despite having so much meat on its bones, what’s magical about The Backrooms is simply how immersive it is. While it certainly has something to say, none of the film’s dense thematic/philosophical content is ever explicit. No actions or conversations ever break the logic of the universe just to reinforce a theme; nothing ever seems contrived to make a point. Symbolism and depth come naturally to Parsons, and so, despite making what may be the densest horror film of the decade so far, he doesn’t feel the need to go out of his way to make it a polemic.

I imagine this is how it felt to watch The Matrix for the first time in 1999—a pure work of high-concept science-fiction that asks fascinating narrative questions about its world, its story, its characters, while also managing to reflect and critique our modern society without ever getting bogged down in direct commentary. The Backrooms is a very raw and honest piece of fiction—it’s a product of its time, but it’s not didactic. It feels like the first real piece of Gen-Z cinema—a film that could only have been made by somebody born into, and trying to find their way out of, The End of History.

It doesn’t hurt that the film is also gorgeous. Kane Parsons is a meticulous, confident first-time filmmaker, and he films the backrooms like he’s been living there his whole life—beyond beautifully shooting characters through doorframes and down hallways, he exploits the environment to frustrate the viewer’s perception of scale and distance. Parsons’ off-kilter filming of his off-kilter environments creates a genuine sense of unease that simultaneously reminded me of Polanski’s best moments and midnight gaming sessions playing Silent Hill 4 alone as a kid while everyone else in the house was asleep upstairs. It’s a romantic, vaguely disturbing uncanny that I thought I was no longer capable of feeling—it turns out there just aren’t many artists trafficking in that kind of thing anymore.

There is, of course, the elephant in the backrooms: the persistent rumour that Osgood Perkins ‘ghost-directed’ the film. Personally, I can’t really understand how this rumour got started. Parsons’ style is uniquely his own, and The Backrooms is much more conceptual than Perkins’ films, while also being far less thematically explicit. While I don’t doubt that the experienced filmmakers involved in the project—James Wan, Osgood Perkins, Mark Duplass—provided advice and guidance during production, the film feels fresh and exciting in the way you only get from young filmmakers who haven’t yet had their wings clipped by the Hollywood machine.

Really, other than disbelief (and maybe envy) that someone so young could craft something so impressive, this focus on the idea of a secret director seems to stem mostly from people having spent the last decade and half watching movies designed to spark “discourse” rather than discussion. People want to stand outside the film and talk about it as an object, rather than immerse themselves in the film as a work of art. Unlike the other major films at the cinema right now—The Odyssey and Obsession—The Backrooms actively resists discourse, and so the last recourse of those seeking to talk about the film from the outside is simply to argue that the film itself must have some core element of fraud running through it.

The reality is, we shouldn’t be talking about Kane Parson’s age, because The Backrooms would be an achievement for a director of any age. It’s a wonderfully crafted work of horror which, while not as well received as other recent horror films, will stand the test of time far better than most of its contemporaries. 

A genuine work of art from one of the most promising young directors of the 2020s so far, The Backrooms represents Generation-Z’s first real attempt at dissecting their perpetual present to find some kind of truth in the world around them—a god’s-guts of nostalgia and lies; the wall at the edge of the Truman Show covered in graffiti and stained with piss. The Backrooms is Kane Parsons’ declaration that he sees the simulacra in which he lives—what remains now is to see what he does with it.