Directed by Kane Parson
Imagine a dead end that just keeps on going. A bile-yellow maze-work of horror, Kane Parson’s Backrooms plumbs the depths of a 90s furniture megastore, serving up a death-trap puzzle for the subconscious to unpack. The store’s manager, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is at a dead end of his own, taking refuge in the store to escape his failed marriage, his ruined architectural dreams, and his own alcoholism. Faulty electricity and a breaker box with a peculiar switch activates a portal in the basement wall. All you have to do is simply walk through the wall. It’s that easy.
The back rooms, dark, suffocating, an infinite mashup of colonial furniture and dirty laundry that just keeps on going, make the lemon-squeeze hallways and dark recesses feel like an array of waiting rooms that would have had Samuel Beckett crossing his eyes and biting his own hand with excitement.
A former MRI company named Async claims responsibility for the creation of the back rooms, yet readily admits to not understanding the inner workings of their own creation. Sound familiar? The movie acts as a relentless allegory for the black box of Artificial Intelligence, chewing up its founders, generating soulless mutations of people with multiple fingers, duplicitous eyes, and leaving everyone gazing into a uniquely terrifying abyss.
The fizzy, light-headed terror of the film is driven by the shadows of our own culture. The evil within appears to operate on the human psyche, amplifying our inner demons to bread-and-puppet proportions with the hungry ghosts of capitalism pulling the strings.
Backrooms is a zenlike hell of being and nothingness that’s sluggishly fascinating until it kills you or sends you home quasi-lobotomized chewing on your own lip over what you’ve just seen. Flip the switch. Walk through the wall. Proceed with caution.
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