Movie Review: 'Backrooms' goes from internet meme to the big screen
Kane Parsons directs a fitfully unsettling horror film that struggles to turn a 2019 4chan meme into a sustained story.
- A24 greenlit 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker Kane Parsons' Backrooms adaptation, bringing the internet-born horror concept to theaters Friday, May 29, rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and violent content.
- An anonymous 4chan post in May 2019 sparked the Backrooms phenomenon with an unsettling image of a vacant Oshkosh, Wisconsin furniture store; users expanded it into collaborative creepypasta fiction through references to video game 'noclipping' into liminal spaces.
- Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a divorced failed architect and furniture store owner who discovers a portal behind his store's walls leading to an impossible, ever-replicating space where fluorescent corridors contain piled furniture and something unknown lurks.
- Despite a paper-thin concept, Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve deliver standout performances, with Ejiofor embracing fevered mania and Reinsve bringing slinky intelligence to her first horror film, capturing Lynchian aesthetics in suburban America's sinister underbelly.
- Unlike failed creepypasta adaptations such as Slender Man, Backrooms succeeds by requiring no prior internet knowledge, leaving lingering unease in a spectacle-based film environment where most movies are forgotten before audiences leave theaters.
32 Articles
32 Articles
The Movie Guru: ‘Backrooms’ unsettling, but ‘Jack Ryan: Ghost War’ disappointing
Backrooms (in theaters) “Backrooms” is very vibe-based horror. That off feeling you get when it seems like you’re completely alone someplace. The hallway that never seems to stop, the way that rooms seem to multiply and twist in nightmares. The knowledge that you no longer remember how you got here, and you’re not sure how to get back out. The challenge of turning those vibes into a feature-length movie wasn’t an easy one, but the movie version…
The big problem with a lot of contemporary horror movies made by young (or extremely young) directors is that sometimes one feels that they are not filming a movie, but all the films they love at the same time. The result usually becomes a kind of hyperreferential collage or cinephilic buffet where each scene remembers another better. And that’s exactly what happens with Backrooms. Kane Parsons is just 20 years old and that inevitably arouses so…
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