‘Backrooms’ Review: Kane Parsons’ Freaky Liminal Horror Is Both Mind-Bending and Brain-Freezing

With echoes of "The Blair Witch Project," "Annihilation," and the novel "House of Leaves," Parsons adapts his own YouTube series into a feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as broken people who enter an acid-yellow maze of multiplying horrors.

Imagine if “The Blair Witch Project” had sent Heather, Josh, Mike, and their trembling camcorders shrieking through the consciousness-mutating Shimmer of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” instead of the dark Maryland woods, and you’ll have some sense of the mind-bending but occasionally brain-freezing horror of Kane Parsons’ mesmerizing feature debut, “Backrooms.”

Parsons adapts his own wildly popular 22-episode YouTube series, itself based on an internet creepypasta born from a place of true, unknowable evil: 4chan. The open-source online campfire tale centers on explorers of a windowless, acid-yellow office building that becomes a maze of transmogrifying rooms and corridors — all hallways and doors leading to nowhere that seem to feed on the existential and psychological fears of anyone who walks through them.

Parsons, by the way, is 20 years old and the youngest director ever commissioned by A24. (Feel the sting of your own underachievement yet?) He also, at just 16 years old, taught himself how to build digital models using the computer graphics software Blender, which Parsons then ran through Adobe After Effects to create eerie, miniature, fictional found footage films told from the perspectives of people who went into the Backrooms… and often didn’t come out.

In the movie “Backrooms,” we largely follow Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture salesman with a busted marriage and vacated dreams of becoming an architect, who now runs the Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire showroom in Northern California’s Santa Clara Valley.

But first, the film‘s tense opening tells us we’re in June 1990, which “Backrooms” experts will know is right around the time the canonical events of the YouTube series started. In a nod to Parsons’ calling card, “Backrooms” begins as its own work of found footage, documenting a hazmat-suited researcher who has lost his colleagues within the maze of the Backrooms.

Via handheld camera, the scientist directs us to the ad hoc headquarters where his team has set up, a desk strewn with floppy disks and wires, cords spewing from the backs of oversized computer processors. But a palpably hostile entity is stalking the videographer, one we only get glimpses of, until the footage cuts out, and a reflection on a TV screen reveals another team of researchers watching the tape.

Back in the “real world” — a place that already feels liminal and isolated due to the at least meter’s worth of space Parsons persistently puts between any two given characters — Clark shuffles between the Ottoman Empire and appointments with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). She’s a pop psychologist behind the infomercial-friendly self-help book “Guided Openings,” but she’s also a doctor with an anguished past of her own.

Flashbacks reveal haunting mommy issues triggered as Mary watches her childhood home get demolished to make way for a high-rise apartment building. Those blast-from-the-past moments threaten to literalize, over-explain, and impose on the film’s present day, effectively stymying the narrative momentum established by Parsons’ spectacular cold open. But be patient, as they prove key to “Backrooms” final act of grand myth-making… whether it works or not.

Meanwhile, it’s revealed that Clark, amid his divorce, is now living inside his own showroom, sleeping on a mattress that’s for sale. Clark and an electrician puzzle over unexplained power outages and new breakers that have formed on the circuit board. One night, Clark flips them to reveal another world on the opposite side of the basement wall, a portal he passes through like a porous membrane, into the familiarly yellow labyrinth of the Backrooms (though they’re never identified by name in this film).

Before Clark is a threatening stack of chairs, desks, sofas, almost like the unconscious of the showroom itself has assembled some mocking shrine to the empire of failure that Clark’s life has become. As he wends his way through the space, more doors lead either to dead ends or to more halls that yield more piss-yellow rooms — where objects that should be situated firmly on the ground defy gravitational logic and sometimes appear to be growing out of the ceilings and walls.

Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette have a hell of a time conjuring spatial uncanniness with images we’ve never before seen on the big screen — maybe because they’ve been lodged inside our minds. Recounting those images, as Clark frantically does to a disbelieving Mary with his own galaxy-brained hand-drawn map in hand, are “like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog, and then asking them to draw it.”

That’s where postmodern lit heads who are hip to Mark Z. Danielewski’s deeply troubling tome of an experimental novel, “House of Leaves,” will get a big kick. That book — partly a retelling of a fictional found footage movie about a family terrorized by their own house, a house bigger on the inside than the outside that only keeps growing — essentially started the 21st-century fascination with liminal horror.

Whatever’s swiped or not swiped from that book here, who cares, as Danielewski has promised it will never, ever be adapted to the screen. “Backrooms” gets us close to what an adaptation could ghoulishly, chillingly resemble, like when Clark tasks his spooked assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her undaunted, stoner boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to spelunk the Backrooms’ widening corridors by tying a lengthy rope to themselves.

That plan obviously goes horrifically to shit, and the sequence that follows one-ups the movie’s opening with a haunted-house chase through the underground labyrinth’s grotesque and ever-expanding mutations. You might yearn for the scrappiness of Parsons’ early YouTube creations, which play on your small screen like freaky private dispatches from Hell, but nothing he comes up with in “Backrooms” the movie feels like a betrayal of what he started. Eventually, once Clark starts missing appointments, Mary heads to the Ottoman Empire and into the Backrooms herself — revealing a far huger, vaster network of structures the size of a small city.

A murky lore starts to form in the backend of “Backrooms” like a cancerous tumor — are these halls and rooms and doors and the creepy, everyday stuff within them — like shoes half-sunken into the ground or armchairs jutting out of drop ceilings — projections of their entrants’ psyche? Or is the space building a kind of set out of its own dreams about… itself? Is “Backrooms” deep art, or just a nifty, narratively slight episode of “The Twilight Zone”? You decide; the door opens in either direction.

The budget-goosed maximalism of Parsons’ movie might make it less likely to scare the hell out of you than watching his forbidden-feeling videos unspool out of your laptop in bed at night. Will Soodik’s script attempts to anchor the “Backrooms” lore in psychological realism that would feel hokey without performances so psychically attuned to Parsons’ vision. Ejiofor is a sad-sack melancholic before he turns increasingly crazed and tries to play liminal-space detective, while Norwegian actress Reinsve proves she’s both Final Girl material and “The Worst Person in the World.”

“Backrooms” is a movie more likely to blow young minds, but remember the first horror movie you saw that changed who you were? This movie will be that for a lot of people.

Grade: B

A24 opens “Backrooms” in theaters beginning Friday, May 29.

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