In Backrooms, 20-year-old YouTuber and director Kane Parsons takes us behind the scenes of Dundler-Mifflin and immerses his audience in an ongoing and endless maze of mundane office corridors. The end result is anything but mundane.
Absorbing, unsettling and frightening, Backrooms is like being trapped in one of your own nightmares, the kind where you are desperately trying to flee whatever is chasing you but no matter which way you turn, there is another hallway or staircase or hill to climb. Cast against flickering lights and muted colors, Backrooms shouldn’t be as disconcerting as it is. But as Clark(Chiwetel Ejiofor) wanders deeper into this seemingly endless world, things that appear normal on the surface begin to show their true colors. Furniture melts into the floor. Hallways narrow to unpassable crevices. Places appear where places shouldn’t be.
And something worse lurks in the shadows.
Unconventional and unwilling to conform, Backrooms is both Lynchian and strangely accessible—but it won’t register for everyone. Its suspense relies heavily on the sensation of being trapped in wide open places, of being somewhere you recognize but aware that something isn’t right. And yet, there is something dark and dangerous just around that next corner, something that is as frightening when it goes full frame as it is as a fleeting movement out of the corner of your eye.
Ejiofor delivers a stellar performance that is bound to go overlooked. He is both a figure deserving of empathy and someone who bristles with anger, unaware and emotionally unwilling to take responsibility for his own misfortunes. He sees the world askew through his own biased prism, similar to how Parsons’ maze also mirrors reality, only tilted into something else entirely.
Renate Reinsve is also excellent, her character more aware of her own shortcomings while bound by her own traumas (which did feel underdeveloped).
Speaking of underdevelopment, don’t expect Backrooms to feed you answers. There’s something satisfying about this approach, as providing real explanation to this unexplainable labyrinth would undoubtedly be unfulfilling. And yet the film’s final stretch loses a step as it attempts to turn its breathless concept into a fully realized picture, one with some semblance of an ending. It makes me wonder if Parsons even knows what Backrooms is really about. Perhaps he doesn’t care.
Backrooms isn’t perfect, but for much of its runtime it’s an enthralling journey into a Dunder-Mifflin hellscape.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.