Director Kane Parsons has taken the malevolence of fluorescent bulbs to obsessive new heights with this debut feature.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons
Written by Will Soodik, based on the series Backrooms by Kane Parsons
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass
Classification 14A; 110 minutes
Opens in theatres May 29
I’ve long thought that there was something inexplicably evil about fluorescent lighting. The harsh wattage, the utilitarian shape of its tubing, its omnipresence in the most aesthetically unwelcoming of offices and classrooms. But director Kane Parsons has taken the malevolence of fluorescent bulbs to obsessive new heights with his feature debut Backrooms.
The lore behind Parsons’s project is as bewildering as the fact that the director has made his first film at just 20 years old. Born the same year that YouTube debuted, Parsons began his journey to Backrooms as a 16-year-old, creating a series of online short films expanding on a Reddit-sparked obsession with “liminal spaces” – empty areas such as an abandoned hotel lobby or mall foyer that give off an enigmatic, ultra-creepy vibe. As if the locations were pulled from a half-forgotten dream, or extra-dimensional nightmare.
Over the past few years, a cottage industry of short stories, videos and memes have sprung up centering on the “backrooms” phenomenon. Think of it as Gen Z’s version of the Blair Witch Project’s found footage craze, amplified by a culture that prizes online virality.
All of which to say that Parsons’s film is set to explode when it opens in theatres this weekend – even if most audiences over the age of 30 will be scratching their heads as to why, exactly. Because although the director has a deft touch when it comes to engineering unsettling imagery, his storytelling chops have a long way to go in terms of depth and maturity. It is not as if Backrooms is all journey and no destination, but it would help if someone involved in the production had a beyond-basic idea as to why anyone should venture from one room to the next in the first place.
The film’s story, such as it is, focuses on a disgruntled furniture salesman named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) running a derelict business in Southern California at some point in the early nineties. One day, he discovers that the basement of his store contains a seemingly endless warren of backrooms – a series of half-formed spaces, as Clark aptly notes, seemed to have been designed by “architects on acid.”
Why the rooms are there, and what designs its unseen engineers have on Clark remain a complete mystery, even after his therapist Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), who is holding on to her own vaguely detailed trauma, foolishly decides to enter them in search of her missing patient.
All set-up and no follow-through, Parsons’s thriller contains frequent and grotesque splashes of inspiration, from an extended opening sequence in which a researcher working for a corporation in the malevolent Weyland-Yutani mould gets trapped in the rooms, to a moment deep in the film where Clark discovers an unlikely source of sustenance.
Yet, if there is any thematic resonance meant to be found inside Clark and Dr. Kline’s shared odysseys – other than a blunt sense of “whoa, that’s weird” – it is buried far too deep inside of Will Soodik’s turnkey script.
What is far more unsettling than the environment itself, though, is how tedious the excursion winds up being, going from freaky to sleepy in the span of an hour. Once you’ve seen one of the backrooms, which begin to resemble a Leon’s showroom rendered by M.C. Escher, then you’ve seen them all.