My friend squints at the image on her phone. “Our seats should be here,” she says, prodding me toward the cinema’s front row. We squeeze past two young men, and I sink into a leatherette recliner. As I start pushing buttons, the chair stretches into the aisle and I snuggle into my seat. It’s almost too comfortable. The voices around us are high, giddy. I heave myself over the back of my seat and scan the crowded rows of the theater. My friend and I are a good fifteen years older than anyone else here. The teenagers around us chatter about “still lifes” and “levels.” Raised on YouTube, they know the correct lore and vocabulary. They’ve done the assigned reading. I wonder if I know enough to understand what I’m about to watch. I wonder if I’ve stumbled into the wrong place.
Twenty minutes in, as the teenagers fall silent, I realize that I’m exactly the right audience for the film. I may not have played the videogames or read the creepypastas or contributed to the fan wiki that celebrates the urban legend of the “Backrooms,” but I recognize the spaces nonetheless and the feelings which they evoke. With Backrooms, director Kane Parsons has crafted a sharp but sympathetic portrait of midlife anxieties and regrets. Backrooms is a young person’s nightmare of the ways that dreams and ambitions can atrophy (and turn destructive) in middle age.
Film offers plenty of depictions of midlife with all its attending crises and possibilities – American Beauty. Lost in Translation. Birdman. All these films address what it means to reach midlife and wonder if you’ve got it all wrong. What sets Backrooms apart is both its genre – horror – and the extreme youth of its director. Even those not steeped in the lore of the Backrooms (a liminal space that is both empty and familiar, tinged with cosmic horror and existential dread) have probably heard some buzz about the film, thanks to stories about its director. Urban legends about the Backrooms have been circulating since 2019, when an anonymous user on 4chan posted an image of an empty, abandoned, receding, yellow-tinged commercial space along with a warning about being trapped in a series of “randomly segmented empty rooms.” Users contributed with their own stories about finding themselves in abandoned malls and parking lots, spaces divorced from their function and severed from reality, a lore that was quicklydubbed the Backrooms. By 2022, a teenager calling himself “Kane Pixels” began posting short films set in the Backrooms on YouTube. These short films gained attention from fans, which meant that attention from studios followed close behind. Kane Pixels (real name: Kane Parsons) signed a deal with A24 that made him the studio’s youngest director.
But although Parsons’ youth comes up in every interview and think piece about his debut film, Backrooms is not, at first glance, a young person’s movie. Compare it to the other buzzy, low-budget horror film of the summer, directed by one of Parsons’ contemporaries. Curry Barker’s Obsession is a cautionary tale about the dating habits of Gen Z, its characters youthful, yearning and adrift. Its concerns are the concerns of youth: how do you tell the person that you like that you like them, and what happens if you make yourself vulnerable enough to expose your feelings?
Backrooms, in contrast, holds up a funhouse mirror to the preoccupations of middle age. It transforms the liminal space of the Backrooms into liminal time, with its main characters lost somewhere between the optimism of youth and the resignation of old age. The protagonist, Clark (played by 48-year-old Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a comprehensive failure – at his career, his relationships, his creativity. Clark once dreamed of being an architect (and the walls of his office are papered with architectural drawings) but he has ended up managing a bleak discount furniture store. His wife kicked him out of their house after he returned home late and drunk once too often. He sputters his way through therapy, blustering and yelling at his dutiful therapist. His only relationships are transactional. When his therapist asks him if he’s lonely, Clark protests that he has his employees and his customers. (It’s worth noting that we never see a single customer in the yawning store; he interacts with only two employees, and he pays his therapist to listen to him). Clark even bungles an attempt to film a commercial for his store, huffing and puffing his way between wall units and sectionals as a parody pirate on an obviously fake peg leg. Clark’s worries are the worries of middle age: a stalled career, an unsatisfying job, a floundering marriage. He has no interest in scrutinizing his mistakes and no way forward.
But then something happens that seems to offer Clark new possibilities. While tinkering with his store’s malfunctioning breaker box (one more dull annoyance in a life of dull annoyances), Clark tumbles through a wall into a cavern of rooms and corridors. Clark is both terrified and exhilarated. In the tradition of fairy tales and speculative fiction, Clark has, improbably, found new worlds to explore.
But the Backrooms aren’t Neverland or Narnia, and Clark isn’t Wendy Darling or Lucy Pevensie. The walls are Charlotte-Perkins-Gilman-yellow and fluorescent lights pulse and hum overhead. The long hallways are simultaneously empty and cluttered, dotted with pyramids of furniture (and the occasional ominous stop sign). The Backrooms offer an endless, repetitive vista of spaces that are both anonymous and familiar – empty offices, modular furniture, ineffective room dividers. One room looks very much like another. (It’s the kind of place that anyone who has ever worked a low-level office job will recognize immediately.) Clark, the would-be architect, finds himself wandering through and mapping spaces that refuse to conform to any plan or champion any aesthetic.
Most accounts of the Backrooms focus on liminal space. However, Parsons’ film suggests that the Backrooms are also liminal time. Late in the film, Clark tells his therapist that the Backrooms “remember” the people who enter them and the places those people have traversed. But if the Backrooms depict the vagaries of memory (people with blurred faces, randomly arranged rooms), it also makes tangible the disorientation and stagnation of middle age. Philosopher Kieran Setiya writes of his own midlife experience in the appropriately named Midlife that “I felt a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear.” Backrooms visualizes what nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear look like when mapped onto a space. Rooms narrow abruptly or slant into pits; artificial Christmas trees twinkle in darkness; hallways stretch into the distance.
Parsons indicates such thoughts when he sends two young characters into the Backrooms, and they are destroyed by this bland, repetitive hellscape. Clark presses his twenty-something assistant manager and her stoner boyfriend into exploring the Backrooms with him. (Because he is a college student, the stoner boyfriend has access to a video camera and knows how to use it, apparently proving that the younger generation always has a better understanding of technology.) The assistant manager recognizes the danger immediately and begs to leave before she is eventually separated from the group and killed. Her boyfriend, more enthusiastic at first, is dragged away and devoured by the creatures that stalk the halls. Youth can’t survive here.
However, Clark settles into this unsettling landscape like he belongs there. He lures his young employees into the Backrooms by promising, “It only gets better,” like an uncle offering encouragement at a high school graduation. It’s hard to see what “gets better” in this repetitive vista. Nearly every room is the same, with only a few pointless variations. The incoherent arrangements of furniture and the monotonous rooms defy the notion of improvement. There is nothing novel or revelatory here…and that ends up being why Clark finds the Backrooms comforting. When his therapist descends into the store’s basement with the intent of rescuing Clark, he confesses that he likes it there and has no desire to leave. Clark wants only to be told that he does not have to change, that he does not have to get better.
Parsons shows us precisely why the Backrooms appeal to Clark. The protagonist may be bad at everything he tries but he does not want to get better. The movie begins and ends with Clark undergoing the ritual of talk therapy: his therapist tries to guide him through his last argument with his wife in hopes of sparking a breakthrough. But Clark refuses to take responsibility for his actions. For instance, he claims that he came home late because “I was stuck at work.” But that tired excuse is not just a figure of speech. It becomes increasingly literal: after becoming estranged from his wife, Clark has set up camp in the furniture store, sleeping in one of the hideous, 90s-era beds and watching infomercials on a sales floor television. Well before he ventures into the Backrooms, Clark has passed into a liminal space, erasing the line between home and work. His identity is reduced to his disappointing job. Later, Clark ventures deeper into the liminal spaces that mirror and extend his sad little furniture emporium. He ends up stuck at work; he has the perfect excuse forever.
But this film isn’t a slice-of-life about marital and professional ennui. It’s a horror film, and much of this will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time exploring Hill House or the Overlook Hotel. Backrooms deploys the beats and conventions of a haunted house movie. Clark’s travels through the Backrooms are plagued by mysterious sounds and moving shadows. But the threat doesn’t come from ghosts or monsters. Parsons uses these tropes to depict both the terrors and the seductions of middle age. The creatures that populate the halls come from the anxieties and memories (or in Setiya’s phrase, the nostalgia, regrets, fears) of the humans who stumble into this realm. In fact, the monster at the heart of this labyrinth turns out to be a gigantic, grotesque version of Clark, wearing the ludicrous pirate costume that he donned for his botched commercial. The reveal of this monster with its bulging eyes and flailing limbs has divided viewers and critics. Some audiences have pronounced the creature disappointing, not scary, and worst of all, cringey. But that’s the point. Middle-aged Clark has been marked by disappointment in every endeavor, so the Pirate Clark creature is a distorted, ridiculous double…and don’t we become the cringiest version of ourselves in midlife? In generating this monster, the Backrooms have preserved Clark at his lowest moment. He is stuck forever in a silly costume, limping and lurching through these nonsensical halls as a persona designed to sell shoddy furniture to customers who never appear. But the creature’s goofy visual design makes it no less dangerous. It is relentless and voracious, devouring anyone it catches…including, finally, Clark.
The Backrooms, with their suggestion of potentially infinite space, seem to promise possibility for exploration, adventure, wonder, and dread. Backrooms fills this empty space with the detritus of failure and regret, with memories warped into ugliness and patterns congealed into stagnation. It maps anxieties about failing, about being stuck, onto the dreary interiors of the Backrooms. Kane Parsons’ film is less about the surprises that lurk around the corner than the horror of what happens when there are no more surprises.
