Backrooms

 

Writer/director Kane Parsons' Backrooms offers moviegoers reprieve from real-world craziness by ushering them through the ocre-colored liminal spaces "under" Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire furniture store in Santa Cruz, where interiors appear to have been designed by M.C. Escher.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, the beleaguered proprietor of the furniture store, who discovers an alternative universe of interconnected rooms beneath his store. He entered through a dimensional portal, and the spaces appear to be both vacant and inhabited. Some contain remnants of lives and consciousness, products of either the supernatural or the psychotic.

Clark tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about what he's found, but she greets his news about mysterious, abandoned rooms with anxious skepticism. Unknown to Clark, Mary's history with both abandonment and empty rooms has been traumatic. Clark, disappointed in her responses, storms out, promising to bring her proof.

Clark enlists his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), and her boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him document on camera the strangeness he's found. This, as one might expect, is a really bad move, as the picture's cold opening of found footage suggests.

After leaving a cryptic message on Mary's phone, Clark disappears. Mary goes to the store to check on him. She finds Clark and much more in the cavernous, disorienting backrooms.

I was not familiar with Parsons' YouTube series The Backrooms, created under the name Kane Pixels, and so I am not sure if having that background would help me better parse the movie's themes of disconnection and detachment and the fabrication of nightmares from lived experiences.

Backrooms might best be viewed as akin to the work of absurdist filmmakers like Buñuel and Lynch, where trying to make sense is, well, nonsense.

Just go with it.