THE BACKROOMS REVIEW: A DISORIENTING TASTE OF THE FUTURE

 

First and foremost: it’s good. 20-year-old (19 during the time of production) Kane Parsons has spent the past weekend breaking local and worldwide box office records with his debut feature film effort, The Backrooms. The size of this production is impressive for any creator (the sprawling and unnerving set designs act as one of the greatest highlights here), but for a first-time director who just graduated high school, it's an objectively monumental achievement. With a $10 million co-sign from A24 and almost-universal acclaim from audiences and critics alike, the future looks bright for Parsons and his creative endeavours. However, there’s an unshakeable feeling that whispers words like “longevity,” and statements like “progression of the horror genre.” When I stop to think about it, I can’t help but feel like contemporary filmgoing audiences are in very good hands.

Immediately, Parsons snaps the audience into a found-footage segment that acts as the narrative’s prologue, a style of filmmaking that is instantly reminiscent of Parsons’ YouTube videos, which were adapted from the internet urban legend (his most popular of which, essentially, got him this job). These moments don’t appear throughout the film very often, but they operate as essential axis points for Parsons’ world of paranoia, uncertainty, and existential dread. When we’re not exploring these beige and fluorescently lit office spaces, Parsons is exploring the “real world” that surrounds the central characters with an equally as potent flavour of doubt and despair; just like the backrooms themselves, there are glimpses of hope within the lives of these characters, but they’re almost always shot down in a self inflicted manner; we are seeing characters who are, more often than not, hell-bent on their own self-destruction, who are then introduced to an unexplained space that feeds off these types of personalities. As previously noted, these scenes of exploration inside the backrooms, whether it be on behalf of VHS found-footage or consistently uncomfortable long shots and pans, are the creme de la creme of this piece.

The preceding paragraph is essential because it’s important to remember that this movie is very smart, creepy, and poignant; it has a unique grasp on horror and existentialist dread that isn’t commonly explored throughout the contemporary landscape of 2020s cinema. However, there’s always that thought of what could have been. What if Parsons made a non-linear narrative that was entirely found-footage, with a narrative flair akin to The Blair Witch Project, which primarily featured a person/group of persons running away from unexplained evil; a story that refused to hold your hand and simply placed you in the middle of the madness? Well, a small group of people would be very happy. Albeit this is a fantasy, production companies wouldn’t make their money back; it would be an incredibly hard movie to pitch through advertising, and it would be shot out of its (inevitably, within this hypothetical) limited release within a couple of weeks. If you’re yearning for an entirely liminal/found-footage/vhs-esque horror flick that’s somewhat recent, Buffet Infinity (2025) or Skinamarink (2022). I digress, this acts like more of a fusion between the sensibilities of abstract found-footage fear and the scares that can be provided when embracing the fundamentals of a high-budget production. The entire third act is filled to the brim with positive representations of this fusion, proof of its effect. 

Parsons, Ejiofor, and Reinsve can work off each other with seeming ease, and it’s easy to see during dramatic scenes that Parsons is an impassioned and personal director. The character writing can often feel ambiguous and relatively conventional; you can tell that certain elements of the script have been doctored and workshopped to appear tighter and more digestible in the final product. However, Parsons is aware of his strengths as a creative and leans heavily into the idea of exploring the dread of these characters in the present tense, rather than spending ample time developing their backstories; the narrative works better when Parsons shows as opposed to telling, which is thankfully more often than not. 

Parsons, during the third act of the film, pulls off the impossible and shows the “monster” of his backrooms universe, a central creature(s) with violent tendencies that acts as a threat towards the central characters. It’s a being that is impossible to describe and fits into a realm of uncanny valley that is represented and reinstilled throughout the course of the narrative. Whether Kane wants to prey on the audience’s possible fear of heights, the unknown, liminal spaces, or just the odd unnatural noise, one thing is clear: he’s very much aware of and inspired by the environment he’s controlling. At the end of the day, all of this plays an incredible role in how the film became such a hit (and will inevitably go on to be a moneymaker for the next few weeks/months). If this movie is proof of anything, it’s that the future for horror creatives (without the use of AI!) is alive and well, and is seemingly inspiring younger audiences to get involved in the contemporary state of film a bit more. It’s not without its faults, but I can’t help but feel like horror is truly alive and well, all thanks to the younger generation.