GENRE | 'Backrooms' Finds A Psychological Horror Detour

"It's every place that ever was."

A24 / Elevation Pictures

Twenty-year-old YouTuber and visual effects artist Kane "Pixels" Parsons turns his nightmarish creepypasta web series of the same name into a full-fledged psychological horror feature. Filmed in Vancouver, the basic premise revolves around a mysteriously elaborate but oddly abandoned series of secret "backrooms" found beneath a suburban furniture warehouse located in a generic strip mall somewhere in 1990s middle America.

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as the deeply troubled store manager and his concerned therapist, Parsons' assured but distinct vision moves the standard horror vibes into bizarrely interesting directions. Ejiofor and Reinsve's emotive characters anchor the strange happenings well enough, but what these strange series of events and rooms expose feels far too insular for the otherwise immersive cinematic experience.

Written by genre television screenwriter Will Soodik, his sparse script lets Parsons set the moody and eerie atmosphere of internal dread with only the necessary amount of dialogue, exposition, and explanation needed. As other characters (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Mark Duplass) move further into the video game level environment of open-world exploration, more and less are revealed at the same time to mixed audience reactions.

Produced by a cadre of film directors, including James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins, Backrooms is an impressive horror film debut for anyone, much less someone barely in their twenties known for producing online videos. It's a confident but ultimately a little too ambitious and subsequently slight for the kind of visually-focused film it eventually reveals itself to be.


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