Backrooms
He is a failed architect, separated from his wife and spending his nights sleeping in the bedroom section of the furniture store he runs, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire on a retail park in the Santa Clara Valley, his employees Kat and Bobby indifferent as Clark spirals down, attempting to make a success of the place so he can launch a proper career, drinking each night and pouring his frustrations out to his therapist.
Doctor Mary Kline a woman who promises that she can “open the window within,” Clark is frustrated at his progress, unable to move past his anger and disappointment, but astonished when a power surge wakes him and draws him downstairs to the circuit board where he notices a seam of light where there should be none, stepping through a supposedly solid wall into hidden backrooms of endless corridors of tobacco stain yellow walls, looping voices, snaking cables and discarded clothes and furniture.
Directed by Kane Parsons from a script by Will Soodik based on Parsons’ own viral web series, itself inspired by the long-running internet meme of imaginings of strange hidden spaces begun in 2019, originally initiated by an archive photograph of a furniture store under renovation, empty yet filled with eerie possibility and quiet dread, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark and Renate Reinsve as Mary Kline with Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett as Kat and Bobby.
Clark a man who dreams in shapes and spaces unlimited and unfolding, the backrooms are an irresistible temptation, a vindication of who he is and something he alone has access to, a selfish conceit for a man overlooked, determined to investigate and map the backrooms though he does not understand how they came to be or the implications of their impossible existence, filled with the discarded debris of the world, flotsam melted into the walls and floors, the madness of a nightmare or a botched AI image, distorted, malformed and mutated, all text rendered backwards.
A puzzle without all the pieces, and those that are present having no rational guide to fitting them together, Mary having spoken of patterns of behaviour repeating, of the need to find new paths, if consciousness is an evolving room of memories this is a misremembered memory palace of odd angles and diminishing dimensions, the rooms bright and evenly lit with no threat apparent yet representing something deeply wrong, the menace present in their very existence.
Recalling the inexplicable spaces of John Brunner’s The Analysts and Mark Z Danielewski’s iconic House of Leaves, a descent into a terrifying labyrinth of incalculable vastness hidden in the walls of a family home, despite the presence of a therapist Backrooms does not wish to be analysed or helped, a silently raging manifestation of lurking trauma where echoes of the past are left behind by those who pass through, fractured golems of forgotten lives persisting in the dark spaces of the mind, an inescapable loop of self-created and perpetuated misery.
Backrooms is on general release now
