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‘Backrooms’ has been a creepypasta phenomenon for some years now, and it was inevitable that Kane Parsons’ web series would be turned into a feature film at some point. With shades of David Lynch, it documents a portal into another world, a strange maze of often empty rooms and spaces accessed through a kind of supernatural door in one’s own reality.
Clark, played by Chiwitel Ejiofor, is the owner of a low-grade furniture showroom, in therapy with Renate Reinsve’s Mary Kline. His dreams of working as an architect have come to nothing, his marriage has collapsed and he has disintegrated into alcoholism. The discovery of the doorway in the basement of his store gives him a new energy and dynamism, which his therapist takes to be a manic, delusional state, until eventually she too enters the ‘backrooms’.
These are endless spaces, with rooms of all shapes and sizes, corridors, shafts, office areas, bathrooms, pools, utility rooms, narrow passageways and tunnels, yet never directly identifiable, more like hybrids of different environments. They evoke abandoned businesses, and although living spaces appear, the feel is at first more office than residence, with an aura of loss, emptiness and failure rather than hope or promise.
