Down the Rabbit Holes: Review of Backrooms
★★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Cinema has a unique ability to embody the subjective conscious—and unconscious—through a purely visual narrative. In short, it has the ability to create nightmares. It could be argued that literature, the theater, and music can also effectively get in a character’s head and transmit those thoughts to an audience, but these art forms do not convey the same nightmarish sense of mystery or the psychological dread of the unknown that film can. Cinema transforms nightmares, delusions, and hallucinations into a common reality in a way no other art form can.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Eraserhead, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula created an expressionistic narrative flow that stepped outside the flow of an objective reality—a sometimes-surreal depiction of the unconscious mind. David Lynch was a master of bending cinematic reality inward. Blue Velvet and the masterpiece Mulholland Drive literally turned psychological realities inside out. Dunkirk tells the story of one of the greatest triumphs of World War II almost completely through images. El Topo, Un Chien Anadolu, and Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight take us deep into the nether regions of the subconscious.
Backrooms is a stunningly brilliant and haunting excursion into the life of the mind. Simultaneously enigmatic and horrifying, it is engrossingly hypnotic, like seeing an accident on the highway and not being able to turn away.
The film opens as a worker for Async Research is separated from his team while investigating a strange phenomenon and is attacked by an entity. The footage of the attack is subsequently viewed by other Async workers.
We meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) an embittered furniture store owner who has failed as an architect—and as a husband. His business is not doing so well either. Clark complains to a repairman about problems with the lights in the store which flicker on and off unpredictably. The worker shows Clark a strangely designed switch in his circuit breaker but cannot explain the weird behavior of his lights.
Clark visits his therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who is trying to coach Clark through his alcoholism and his anger at his wife through role playing. While staying at the store that night, Clark investigates the flickering in the subfloor and finds a door into an unknown space—the Backrooms—behind a sort of portal. He walks through room after room after room. Most seem very plain but some have strangely stacked furniture, weirdly place pictures, and signs with reversed lettering.
Clark returns and persuades his assistant manager Kat Taylor (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to accompany him as he explores the back rooms. When descending down a ramp into a new space, Bobby disappears. Kat follows him and is also lost. Clark returns and attempts to explain the backrooms to Mary, who seems to think he is delusional.
Mary receives a garbled phone call from Clark in the middle of the night saying that he will not be coming back, that he will be staying in the backrooms. Mary goes to the store to investigate and soon finds herself wandering through the horrors of the backrooms.
Backrooms is much more than a simple psychological horror film. Director Kane Parsons is able to create a sense of foreboding, dread, and horror that transcends its material. As we see Clark and Mary travel more deeply into the backrooms—down their respective rabbit holes, as it were—Parsons creates settings and situations which became increasingly surreal while at the same time drawing from Clark and Mary’s previous experience—the stuff of nightmares.
Other people in the backroom do not seem to be sentient beings, but—like bad AI images—they have multiple overlays of facial features, clothes, and mannerisms. One, who Clark recruits to help with Mary’s roleplaying, could be his wife. They are familiar but not, surreal but real.
The Async Research lends a sense of reality to the backrooms. Apparently, they do not exist solely in the subconscious beings of Mary or Clark. The backrooms is a real place affecting everyone. Yet, there are hints in the film including scenes from Mary’s childhood and Clark’s furniture store alter ego that the backrooms is a simulacrum of the memories, past traumas, and fears of both Clark and Mary—an enactment of their respective subconsciouses. I was reminded of the film Forbidden Planet when Dr. Morbius gives life to his id—his animal subconscious. At one point, Mary seems to travel through different iterations of her childhood home, each one becoming more surreal than the last. The couch becomes semi-swallowed by the floor, as if covered in sand. Pictures disappear into the wall.
Even if the narrative explains this surreal space as an alternate universe, it is irrevocably attached to the deepest reaches of these characters’ psyches, and, as such, it becomes nightmarishly surreal.
Parsons has woven the production design, the sound design, and the pacing to create an eerily familiar vision of the unknown. We’ve all been in corporate or retail spaces that all look the same. Parsons’s spaces are—at the beginning—familiar, but become increasingly odd, increasingly strange. A stop sign with reversed letters standing in a hall seems like a warning. Spaces that taper, curve, and dwindle, like Alice’s Wonderland—into tiny doors that turn upward. M.C. Escher-like staircases that go to a trapdoor in a ceiling. The further Parsons takes the viewer, the closer we find ourselves to the bottom of the rabbit hole.
What makes Backrooms unique in the horror genre is not jump scares or terrifying villains or indomitable evil, it is his ability to embody and personify personal dread. As the film progresses, the viewer is not frightened at what she sees, she is frightened at what she cannot see, but can sense, the same way that any one of us can sense the direction of a nightmare we are having.
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve turn in remarkably understated performances as Clark and Mary, respectively. While Efiofor’s Clark is acerbic and nasty at times, he is a pitiful character, a man unable to navigate his life. Reinsve’s Mary is measured but empathetic, but one senses she is deeply insecure. Reinsve is able to convey this portrayal in a way that seems almost effortless.
Backrooms, like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, or Mulholland Drive, takes us into uncharted territories. While internal realities become externalized, these portrayals of inner life are more than expressionistic, more than surreal. In a strange sense, Backrooms almost seems like a shared experience, a communal nightmare, perhaps part of Jung’s collective unconscious.
You won’t see many films like it—and you should take a dive down the rabbit hole and see this one.
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