Backrooms (2025)

I became obsessed with liminal spaces a long time ago.  There was a Stephen King novella called The Langoliers, which unfortunately is better known for an awful television miniseries adaptation from the 1990s.  It tells the story of a group of people on a private plane that lands at an empty airport.  they discover that they have somehow slipped a moment into the past.  The world is empty, everything has an aura of age about it and, worst of all, there are creatures coming that devour that world in order to clean up the remains of the past. 

This simple premise has lead to dreams as well as some influence over my photography and storytelling.  I'm sure for many others the disquieting feeling of being stuck in a bland service corridor in a mall or some other place that is in stark contrast to the world around it has had an impression.  A large part of the appeal of the original Dawn of the Dead is that the main characters are forced to live in these spaces while the dead roam about in the world of color and sunshine they are used to.  This was long before the concept was brought forth on 4Chan or that Kane Parsons started his series of shorts on YouTube.  

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner of the furniture store in which he sleeps due to being thrown out of the house by his wife.  He is seeing a psychiatrist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) to help deal with his divorce and overcome his anger issues.  Mary herself is the product of a childhood in which her mother major issues and seeks to help others through a popular therapy method she created. 

One night when investigating power issues and unable to sleep Clark finds a passageway in the store's basement leading to a series of winding hallways that seem to go on forever.  The hallways contain incomplete echoes of the real world and, when he brings his assistants Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) to investigate, also discovers there are dangerous inhabitants as well.  He tells Mary, who at first doesn't believe him, but then he shows her.  Meanwhile, a secret group of researchers are trying to unravel the mystery of the strange dimension as certain aspects glimpsed years before become familiar. 

Kane Parsons is the youngest director hired by a major Hollywood studio to direct a film.  He didn't create the Backrooms, but he managed to take the bare-bones description from 4Chan and expand on it.  Others have done so as well adding to the lore, much the same way H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos evolved far beyond the few stories he wrote.  However, those expecting the Entities from the shorts to show up will be a bit disappointed.  The inhabitants of the Backrooms range from friendly to catatonic to outright destructive.  However, they are imperfect doppelgangers of people referred to as "Still Lifes".  

Both Ejiofor and Reinsve give interesting performances especially as the Backrooms start taking their toll on both of them.  The mystery and the exploration of the spaces takes up a good portion of the film and makes the run-time feel shorter than it is.  However, the inclusion of a long post-credits scene involving earlier exploration of the corridors pushes things too far, providing dry research video that is neither disturbing nor integral to the plot.  

Backrooms (2025)

Time: 126 minutes

Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve

Director: Kane Parsons