“There’s even a pool in there!” says Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) – and of course, these words make the hairs on the back of the neck stand up for anyone who has ever fallen into the Instagram rabbit hole of liminal space art. “The Backrooms” by Kane Parsons, 43 years after the Intellivision game “Treasure of Tarmin” and 26 years after Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel “House of Leaves”, is the film about the phenomenon that horrifies people, even though it doesn’t show a lot of things. Not even a monster. Although: This definitely exists in “The Backrooms”.
The “Backrooms” are seemingly limitless interior spaces that can only be reached by falling out of reality – via glitch (in “The Backrooms” there are even glitch-moved plugs in the fuse box). Monotonous, deserted structures that expand like endless labyrinths and appear to be automatically generated: pools, halls, corridors or stairs to the sky that end abruptly. In the background there is a soundtrack on which every movement sounds echoing, and sometimes you can also hear wind. Part of the thrill of these minute-long videos is that you’re expecting a monster that just doesn’t come – or, as in “The Backrooms”, very late.
Liminal space art looks both familiar and wrong: it seems eerie because it shows places that should actually be used but are empty: shopping centers, ball pits, that doesn’t fit what we expect. We recognize the place, but something is missing. No resolution is presented. We look for explanations but can’t find an answer. This uncertainty can feel like a threat even though nothing is happening.
The discomfort of the familiar
These images are also disturbing because many of them seem so familiar – they remind you of your own experiences, for example from childhood. The optics play a crucial role: The recordings look like old photos or surveillance cameras from the nineties, like vaporwave or the VHS films from “I Saw the TV Glow” – slightly blurry recordings with outdated furnishings and dropouts.
A feeling of nostalgia and unease arises because the past no longer seems as golden as it was stored. Anyone who wants to stretch the envelope very widely sees Edward Hopper as the fundamental inspiration of the “Backrooms”. In any case, it can’t be Kubrick’s “Shining” – its corridors end in concrete horror. Ben Stiller’s “Severance” is more like it.
In Kane Parsons’ “The Backrooms,” set in the vaporwave year of 1990 and based on Parsons’ hugely successful YouTube shorts, furniture salesman Clark discovers the entrance to another world in the basement of his department store. “This world,” says Clark, looks “as if they were designed by construction workers on acid.” The audio vocabulary of this dimension – whirring ceiling lamps – is no less irritating than the artificial world of a fake home built in a real store. Which child has never been afraid of the unlit, black, unlined, seemingly endless space on the ceiling of a furniture store?
Reportedly, 30,000 square feet of real sets were built for “The Backrooms.” Whether this was further inflated by CGI or not: the set design impresses with its many small details. Rooms, bathrooms and hallways of various sizes intertwine, leading towards claustrophobic central perspectives, while the multilingual greetings of the Voyager Golden Record echo through the corridors; a possible indication of the presence of an extraterrestrial force.
Elevated horror and its limits
“The Backrooms” is an atmospheric film – which also means that the backstory of the backrooms doesn’t add up 100%. Director Parsons and his author Will Soodik join the “elevated horror” trend, which is not always recommended: the fantastic film gets its “elevation” from the fact that horror characters represent the manifestation of psychological suffering. The creature as an allegory. Tiring.
When it comes to teen comedies, no one would think of demanding such an elevation. This doesn’t apply to romantic comedies either. War films can be war films, relationship dramas remain relationship dramas. Only films in which unreal things happen are forced to pass this test.
Scroll through the countless reviews of horror films like “The Babadook” (2014), “The Witch” (2015) or “The Backrooms” and you will come across sentences like: “A complex study of grief, loss and injury.” Might be. But it’s actually about the monsters in it, right?
The monster in “The Backrooms” is extremely impressive, also because the film has mastered the art of building tension and the creature only remains acoustically present for long stretches. The VHS opening with the explorer in the yellow anti-radiation suit seems like targeted fan service for the early YouTube apologists.
Monsters, psychotherapy and lynching territory
Basically, if you look at the elevated level, “The Backrooms” is a film about the failure and futility of psychotherapy. Regardless of the fact that one wonders how the unsuccessful couch salesman Clark even managed to get sessions with the star psychiatrist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) can achieve: The film increasingly tries to present the “backrooms” as a spatial expression of unconscious trauma. The often great Reinsve doesn’t seem completely in her first major American role – and in the horror genre at that – especially in the final confrontation dialogue with Clark, in which his sufferings are recited in a textbook manner for everyone who hasn’t already guessed them.
The problems are Dr. Kline’s is not that dissimilar to that of her patient – and at the same time extremely different: it was drilled into her from childhood not to go out into the endlessness of space, to “unfold” like Clark, but to isolate herself in a small space. “The Window Within”, as one of her bestsellers is called.
Beyond this unnecessary psychologization, Kane Parsons’ debut film is a work that is not always understood, but is very good. That’s probably why it’s so good. And as long as you let the unconscious work within you and don’t question the manifestations; because that’s exactly how horror films should be. A lynching territory – and there is also a mystical dwarf in “The Backrooms”.
The hallways are endless. They offer countless possibilities for sequels, which hopefully there will be. It is to be hoped that Kane Parsons does not suffer the same fate after this film as Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez once did after “The Blair Witch Project”: being paid off while other directors continue his wonderful invention.
