Backrooms film review: Sense of dread
Utilising a vibrant box of tricks to create an unsettling and tense mood, this viral-based chiller is a spinetingling experience
Like Talk To Me’s Philippou brothers before him, Kane Parsons comes from online notoriety to fully-fledged feature filmmaker with Backrooms. Back in 2022, Parsons published a found-footage video on his YouTube channel. ‘The Backrooms’ went viral (78 million views, no less), leading to a web series and now a feature: and he’s still only 20. An ultra-creepy psychological tale, Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, the divorcee owner of a failed furniture store. He’s seeing a therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Sentimental Value’s Renate Reinsve), to try and work out some of his anger issues, but it’s clear he’s not in a good place. Then comes the real twist as Clark discovers a labyrinthine series of empty rooms in the store’s basement.
All painted a sickly pastel yellow, this never-ending series of interconnecting spaces, filled with junk furniture and more, is as strange and unsettling as the netherworld created in Apple’s Severance. Parsons ramps up the tension, thanks to some brilliant Alice In Wonderland-like production design from Danny Vermette, a smart use of sound and a score which he co-wrote with Edo Van Breemen that really jangles the nerves.
Wisely, the script by Will Soodik (TV’s Westworld, Homeland) holds back on too many reveals, making this a horror that tingles the sensations. A backwards-written stop sign. A mysterious ‘End Apartheid’ t-shirt. A speaker blaring out foreign-language greetings. What do they all mean? In truth this is a story that’s best felt rather than explained, and Parsons does admirably to leave you with a queasy sense of dread.
Backrooms is in cinemas from Friday 29 May.