There should already be hundreds of scary movies set in backrooms. The 4chan meme is only a few years old, but the concept of a vast sunless lair of fluorescent light, mildewy carpeting, and pasty drywall has been loathed for longer than I’ve been alive. Something like every third ’90s movie was built on the idea that spending time in this sort of place is a fate worse than death, so it’s strange nobody until now thought to add monsters.
Kane Parsons’s debut feature, adapted from his recent series of meme-inspired YouTube videos but set in 1990, literalizes the tacit horror of Office Space and American Beauty (both released at the end of that decade) and adds nostalgia. This last ingredient may surprise fans of the earlier versions, though it makes a certain historical sense. Malls, big-box stores, and white-collar workplaces don’t have fans, exactly, but now that Amazon is exterminating all three, the middle-class life they represented can nearly pass for utopian. Hence, Backrooms, the premise of which isn’t just, “What if there were a vast sunless lair of fluorescent light, mildewy carpeting, and pasty drywall?” but “What if people actually wanted to live there?”
Some bits I enjoyed: Chiwetel Ejiofor doing a pirate voice, a fly that steals every scene it’s in, a Christmas tree that has ruined Christmas for me, the sickly yellow glow of the sets, the terrific prologue, Mark Duplass not talking. Less enjoyable: the obligatory traumatic backstories, the characters resolving their traumas whenever the plot tells them to, Mark Duplass reciting exposition—basically, everything that makes Backrooms a serviceable blockbuster as opposed to an ingeniously freaky web series. Ejiofor is mannered and hammy as always, though Renate Reinsve acquits herself pretty well by refusing to sound American. The script makes sure we know the backroom is a metaphor for the way certain things (toxic men, capitalism) mindlessly perpetuate themselves, until all that’s left is an inferior knockoff. Watch the videos that got Parsons his gig with A24 and perhaps you’ll agree that the backroom is also a solid metaphor for this movie.