By C. Ramsay
Having developed the web series of the same name throughout his teenage years, director Kane Parsons’ feature-length directorial debut Backrooms seeks to transliterate the appeal of his indie passion project to suitably extend it to a more commercial audience. Parsons’ willingness and excitement towards working with a variety of media, allowing him to mix approaches as he sees fit, has here resulted in an impressive collection of practical effects and built sets that help feed the environment for the actors and audience alike.
The most notable component of the film is its incredible atmosphere, on which every other component relies to be successful in their own ways. The concept of the Backrooms, this sort of extradimensional, never-ending liminal space of mostly empty corridors and rooms, preys on a variety of broad and specific fears, and at times almost invites its audience to project our fears onto it as much as it can bring brand new sensations of fear to us. Shifting between the sense of confinement that can be felt through both narrow and open space, between feelings of disorientation and being watched, between the dread of the unknown or of the inability to see a threat hiding in plain sight, Parsons has orchestrated the creation of a nightmarish world that is fueled by displacement and helplessness. Viewers are repeatedly held to the POV of the cameras being used by the people within the Backrooms, giving the sense that we’re being used as human shields to protect the characters as they move through the hallways, rooms, pools, doors, and archways. Whatever might be lurking will meet us first, and the stress of this is amplified by the fact that more often than not what’s lurking is simply nothing at all.
The narrative woven into the film is at times less cohesively put together than the Backrooms themselves, but this feels like a minuscule negative when propped up next to the richness of the rest of the project. Arguably, some of this disunity ends up feeling on theme with how the Backrooms seem to function, developing iterations of things typically understood within the world we know, but that become less sensical and often more exaggerated within the context of this alternate dimension. This is a solid debut that deserves to be seen on a big screen with a crowd, though will probably be equally as fun to watch at home alone with all the lights off.
Star rating (/5): ★★★½
Recommend?: Yes