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Backrooms Review: The King in Yellow Wallpaper
A story can begin with a single photo. Take the instigating image behind liminal horror Backrooms, a discovered photo of an empty furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, depicting a windowless space with nonsensical architectural flourishes, every surface covered in that sickly pale yellow that screams post-Reagan strip mall blandness. That image has haunted the internet for years, a visual metaphor for a Kafka-meets-Lovecraft purgatory, and now finally gets a feature film, Backrooms.
That sensation of a soft-edged null space has engulfed Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange). Instead of living his dream life as a happily married architect in 1990s San Jose, he’s separated and sleeping on the display beds at his failing and confusingly named furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. As one of his employees tells him, pick a theme, Clark. But then again, he’s used to not picking: As his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value), notes, his whole existence is about the path of least resistance. One might therefore think that walking through a seemingly impervious brick wall in his store basement might seem the antithesis of his closed, embittered mindset, but that’s exactly what happens when he falls into the titular Backrooms, a seemingly endless labyrinth of not-quite-right spaces that look like a continuation of his store but not quite. The geometry is off, ordinary items are warped copies of themselves or melded into each other, and noises and shadows indicate that the Backrooms may not be as devoid of life as they seem.
The Backrooms are not actually the invention of director Kane Parsons, since the original image has already spawned endless creepypastas, multiple video games, and even an episode of American Horror Stories. However, he’s undoubtedly helped popularize and expand the mythology through his YouTube horror series, The Backrooms, from which Backrooms is a spinoff. So when Mark Duplass turns up with an Async employee badge and delivers the most perfect Mark Duplass line delivery in years, fans of the web series will know exactly where – and on which moldy beige carpet – they stand.
For newcomers, Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik (Westworld, Ash vs. Evil Dead) steer clear of too much deep mythology, instead focusing on the psychological traumas that have led both Clark and Mary to a place in their lives where they are buried in memories and old traumas, something that the Backrooms … feed upon? Echo? Give form?
The inner tension of Backrooms is between mystery and explanation. The series is often more about Async than it is about the actual rooms, allowing it to remain somewhat open-ended. But a film has to give at least some clarity, and Backrooms is torn between its own enthralling enigma and that narrative necessity. Glomming wholly to one instinct or the other would cripple the film, subjecting audiences to either Skinamarink-style artsy self-indulgence or an answer that’s lesser than they imagined. So whatever story path the filmmakers take is inevitably a little dissatisfying.
What’s not disappointing is what Parsons achieves in these claustrophobic spaces. For someone raised on web horror, his ability to make something cinematic of a series of unremarkable spaces is in itself remarkable. Bar a couple of accent wobbles from Reinsve, he also elicits grounded and touching performances from his cast as ordinary people bringing their own baggage into a space that seems to thrive on it. When the most uncanny elements of the story are finally made a little more solid, Parsons has a truly fresh aesthetic, one that seems to draw more from early seasons of Channel Zero than easier, older standbys like The Shining. If Clark truly is the next great hope for horror (as fans and producers James Wan and Osgood Perkins seem to believe), leaving the over-explored Backrooms for new territories of terror may fulfill that potential.
Backrooms2026, R, 110 min. Directed by Kane Parsons. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell.
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Rating: 3 out of 5.The post Backrooms Review: The King in Yellow Wallpaper appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.