“Backrooms” is a modest but effective horror flick mainly driven by mood and idea, and I like that enough. While the movie is inherently a bit too simple in terms of story and characters, it is still interesting to observe how the movie expands its oddly nightmarish background across the screen step by step, and the result is one of the more interesting genre films of this year in my inconsequential opinion.

How it was developed is as fascinating as the movie itself. It is based on director Kane Parsons’s web series which was started a few years ago, and this was inspired by the “Backrooms” creepypasta on the imageboard website 4chan in 2019. The latter was initially just a series of images of empty rooms looking rather odd and disquieting, but these images led to the creation of an imaginary world full of such spaces thanks to numerous online users out there, and that was the starting point for Parsons’s web series, which is presented as a series of low-quality video clips supposedly shot inside this weird fictional world.

In case of the movie version, the screenplay by Will Soodik adds more substance to the original concept. At first, the movie, which is incidentally set around the 1990s, introduces a furniture store owner named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and the early part of the story quickly establishes how much he has struggled in both his work and personal life. While his furniture store has not been so successful to say the least, his wife recently left due to their estranged relationship, and he also has a serious drinking problem.

At least, Clark has a regular session with his therapist, but it turns out that his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), has her own personal issue behind her phlegmatic appearance. She often finds herself haunted by her painful childhood memories involved with her mentally disturbed mother, but there is nothing she can do except maintaining her cool professional appearance in front of others as usual.

Meanwhile, Clark comes to discover something odd in his store on one day. In the basement of the store, there is a hidden portal to a dimension of seemingly endless liminal spaces, and he becomes more curious about that as exploring here and there in this weird hidden world. He subsequently has his two employees joining his exploration with a video camera, and that is where the movie overlaps with Parsons’s web series to some degree. As Clark and his two employees delve into this alien world more and more, we see more of strange things to baffle or disturb us, and the rough texture of low-definition video generates some verisimilitude to engage us more.

Needless to say, it does not take much time for Clark and the two other characters to realize that something dangerous is lurking somewhere in this strange world. Wisely not showing much of whatever is menacing them, the movie deftly generates the sense of dread around the screen, and we get all the more unnerved thanks to its dexterous sound design and the ambient electronic score by Parsons and his co-composer Edo Van Breemen.

Above all, Parsons deftly expands his genre playground more and more along the story. Around the narrative point where Clark’s psychiatrist also enters that strangely labyrinthic world, we get more of those weird liminal spaces, and the movie has a wry fun with that before culminating to an intense moment which somehow reminded me of both “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974) and “The Shining” (1980).

The movie stumbles a bit when it later brings a character played by Mark Duplass mainly for a bit of explanation and ventilation, but that is not much of a problem thanks to Parsons’s competent direction. Despite his rather young age (He is soon going to have his 21st birthday a few weeks later, by the way), he got the full support from his producers including James Wan and Osgood Perkins, and he demonstrates well here that he is a promising talented filmmaker who knows how to engage us via mood and details. Considering the critical/commercial success of the movie at present, he will soon move onto whatever he wants to make next, and it will be interesting to see whether he will advance further from his commendable result here in this movie.  

I also appreciate how deftly Parsons draws the interesting performances from his two dependable lead performers. Chiwetel Ejiofor, a wonderful British actor who has seldom disappointed us since his breakout turn in “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), subtly conveys to us his character’s despair and frustration, and that is the main reason why a certain crucial moment of his later in the story works. Renate Reinsve, a compelling Norwegian actress who becomes more prominent after her unforgettable performance in “The Worst Person in the World” (2021), holds the other part of the film well, and her good performance brings some human qualities to the movie as much as Ejiofor’s.

On the whole, “Backrooms” is a solid genre work to be admired for its several strong aspects including mood and performance. Even if you do not know that much about Parsons’s web series or the “Backrooms” creepypasta, you will be intrigued and then entertained by its distinctive artistic qualities, and then you may want to check on Parsons’s web series currently available on YouTube. This is surely a good starting point for Parsons, and I think we can have some expectation on his burgeoning filmmaking career.