Backrooms Review: A Liminal Space That Intentionally Confuses

Backrooms is a liminal horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a talented 20-year-old YouTuber. The script is in charge of Will Soodik who had the challenge of adapting this complex story to the cinema. The story is starring the actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, who did a great job.

Backrooms tells the adventures of a furniture store owner whose existence is in decline. After becoming homeless due to a divorce, he begins to spend the night in one of the exhibition beds of his establishment and, surprisingly, discovers a type of portal that leads him to an enigmatic place that seems to be a distorted version of his own store. At that moment, his therapist decides to investigate how much of all this is simply a worrying hallucination of his patient.

The whole film is imbued with an atmosphere of unnatural intrigue with a sophisticated style. It is a horror film that practically lacks scares and a real sense of fear. Although in its first hour it presents the occasional jumpscare attempt to remind the audience that they are watching a movie while playing with their phone, it fails to offer a good second part as compensation. Undoubtedly, the highlight of the film is the sequence that separates the film into two halves corresponding to its two main characters.

Weaknesses

The real attraction of the proposal is based on its design of scenarios and environments, making the transition spaces the real opponents of the story. By incorporating the idea of liminal horror into popular cinema, the narrative uses places such as empty offices and endless corridors to provoke a deep sense of desolation. In these scenarios, the concept of the strange intensifies, that peculiar feeling of recognizing something familiar but that is, at the same time, altered or distorted.

Despite having an imposing and geometric architecture, the continuous repetition of yellow walls causes a feeling of confinement that is really oppressive. This surreal atmosphere suggests comparisons with the works of authors such as David Lynch, acting as a mirror of the human mind and concerns.

Strengths

The experience becomes a trip full of tension that alters the rhythm of the viewer without resorting to the predictable scares of traditional cinema. Although this risky artistic proposal could affect its income compared to more commercial productions, the true value of the film is in its creativity. Therefore, the audience should go to the theaters prepared to immerse themselves in an atmosphere of psychological horror that favors constant tension instead of the easy effects of current films.

Backrooms is technically impressive. Jeremy Cox's cinematography and Danny Vermette's art direction create really oppressive environments. That yellowish lighting of a deserted shopping mall is very effective and conveys a continuous feeling of disturbing artificiality. Parsons clearly knows how to provoke anxiety in space. There are scenes in which simply seeing an empty hallway generates more anxiety than many scares in current horror cinema.

Ejiofor manages to offer humanity to the conceptual chaos that surrounds him. His character reflects anger, frustration, immaturity and a genuine emotional resentment, which makes us suspect, without it being openly mentioned, that he did something terrible to his wife. The same happens with Reinsve, a therapist with a painful past and defender of a message of self-improvement in which she herself does not believe, although it is not explicitly said either. Both performers manage to maintain a level of dramatic seriousness even when the film seems more focused on showing a liminal aesthetic than on delving into their characters.

Conclusion

Backrooms presents a very different story in the contemporary horror genre. Parsons manages to expand on the original idea without losing what made it effective, taking the concept of liminal spaces to a much grander and more cinematic scale. The combination of found footage and conventional narrative integrates excellently, the performances keep the most human aspect and the visual creation has really impressive moments. It may seem disconcerting at first, but you will discover a claustrophobic, uncomfortable and difficult to forget experience.