Young filmmakers whose foray into the movies began with content creation on YouTube are currently having a moment. Following the success of numerous indie debuts for the video sharing platform, perhaps the most hyped movie from this wave of new filmmakers has hit theaters.
Backrooms introduces us to Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect turned furniture salesman dealing with a messy divorce. After Clark discovers a mysterious backroom in his store, he disappears into a dimension beyond reality. His therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) then ventures into the unknown to try to find him.
If horror movies were to be judged solely on their ability to build a sense of dread within its viewing audience, Backrooms hits the mark on the bullseye, right out of the gate no less. The movie opens from a first-person perspective of a character being pursued by a mysterious entity. The scene lasts ten minutes and is shot with a grainy, handheld camera that gives it a found footage feel while the first person perspective is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. All of these elements combine to perfectly place the viewer in the shoes of the character, conveying the fear that they feel of being pursued by something unseen but clearly a threat. It sets the tone for the rest of the movie going forward and it how it builds its scares.
Backrooms smartly establishes its horror by keeping its scary figures hidden from view with only sound to aid what creates the fear within the film; the imagination of the audience. Parsons cleverly recognizes that what often is most scary is not what a creator and his production design or visual effects team can come up with, but what a viewer will create in their own mind with just a little suggestion from the filmmaker or storyteller. What is making that sound or slowly shuffling down the hallway toward a character? That’s up to you to picture in your head and what someone may create is often scarier for them than what the creative would have placed there. It’s a great way to make a large impression on the audience and thus strengthen the film.
Adding to the sense of eerie mystery is the performance of Ejiofor as Clark, a man struggling with the dissolution of his marriage and the resulting mental toll whose descent into madness is captured perfectly by the longtime actor. Ejiofor convincingly portrays a man whose journey into the unexplained breaks his brain and turns him into someone just as unknowable as the mysterious backrooms of his furniture store appear to be. As Clark tries to figure out what the labyrinth is, so too is the audience, which makes his loss of sanity just as creepy as the film’s setting. What did he see in his time there that made him lose it? The audience is also trying to figure it out as he was and is now left to wonder if what he finally got to see, that they still have not, is so terrible that it’d make them lose their minds too. That synergy behind the establishment of the mystery of what’s lurking in that store and Ejiofor’s performance selling the potential fallout of a reveal is key in powering Backrooms as a movie.
While all this mystery can create a fantastic sense of dread in a movie’s atmosphere, it can also create problems if it extends to a movie’s story. The exact nature of the backrooms, what they are, where they came from, and what they’re capable of, is left vague and hard to interpret directly. There is no straightforward answer and much of the origin of the maze where the story takes place is steeped in psychological horror rather than any plain language entity of setting. This esoteric element of Backrooms doesn’t detract from its entertainment value in the slightest, but some viewers who like easy to understand fare may be frustrated by the abstract nature of the horror at its core.
Which begs the age old question, does a movie have to be easy to interpret or digest in order to be good? The point of a horror movie is to thrill its audience through fear and scariness and Backrooms achieves that quite easily. Does it matter that you may not fully understand the extradimensional, liminal space concept, particularly if you haven’t watched the web series the movie is based on? For this reviewer, that wasn’t a problem as Backrooms thrilled and kept me engrossed for a full two hours, even if I didn’t fully understand what I was watching in real time. And at the end of the day, that’s good enough for a good time at the movies.
Image: A24
