Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Kane Parsons
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Earlier in the week I was at an event where the fella who wrote orthodox bad-child drama Adolescence, Jack Thorne, was interviewed. Like you, at about two days following the Netflix mini-series' initial release I was fed up hearing about it, and being told how important it was, and how it should be "shown in the schools" because apparently a Stephen Graham starring television programme could do the work of a high school teacher better than they could. So god knows how Jack Thorne feels to be still answering questions about it over a year on, but fair dues he did his best. What was interesting to me was amid vague notions of "the manosphere," the interviewer (actual Julie Etchingham) kept pushing about a sequel to the show (what, where the kid murders someone else?), and probing for answers: she asked Thorne if he knew why Jamie killed his schoolmate, for instance. It struck me that this old-school quest for closure, for "restoration of the equilibrium" really wasn't the point, which was confirmed when Throne confessed he wasn't even sure if the kid himself knew why he did it. Adolescence isn't a show which presumes to explain psychopathic actions, but instead details the consequences and manifest fall out of such behaviour. And the thing about Adolescence is that it did strike a chord, as even though we probably don't know murderous children, we do know kids like Jamie: young people whose lives are mainly played out in liminal online spaces, a hyperreality which the physical world falls short of, and from which they are increasingly estranged.
We see it in the consecration of "influencers" (the noun from a verb specifically implying a need to follow, to be impressed upon), the copycat trend for viral "stunts" (remember when the kids were eating washing liquid tablets?), the impunity of YouTube pranksters (so satisfying when that little prick Jack Doherty got arrested). Troll culture. The 6/7 phenomenon: a monkey see/monkey do behavioural replication where children mindlessly imitated the actions of others staged within the interstitial online space which they inhabit like little digital hermits. The map has preceded the territory, and the online world, a heightened simulacrum of insistent extremity, has become more real than reality itself (w.r.t. Baudrillard). It's what filmmaker du jour Curry Barker's Milk & Serial is about, this uneasy correlation between amplified online performance and actual consequence. It's the impulse of the lonely sadness which characterises Jane Schoenbrun's wonderfully haunting films. In fact, I think it's increasingly the material of horror cinema itself, even recent curio Faces of Death takes the phenomena as its narrative lead, compounding the theme with a clinical mise-en-scene of antiseptic workplaces and quotidian suburbs; a physical reality eerie in its cold and shiny emptiness.
Based on his short film which went viral, which was itself grounded upon a self-replicating internet meme, YouTuber-come-A24 filmmaker Kane Parsons' (co-written with Will Soodik) phenomenal Backrooms (the Matryoshka model of the film's origins is delightfully congruous to its subject matter) perfects the aesthetic. The Backrooms phenomena is founded upon images of abandoned interiors, "disquieting images" of liminal spaces "that just feel 'off'" according to the mandate of the original 4chan message board. Looking Backrooms up you'll see yellowed pictures of empty office space, corridors lit with sickly silver strip light, artificial realms of worn carpet, hollow walls, gypsum tiles. The best images give you an uneasy tug in the tummy, a creepy instinct that you shouldn't be there (perhaps the concept can be traced further back to the resolutely analogue House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski: a novel beloved by BookTok).
Establishing threat, Parsons opens his film with a throwback to the found footage of his short film - a guy lost in the hinterland of "the backrooms," where reversed "Stop" signs block corridors, and plastic banners set in the ceiling ("dedeen tiderc on") drape down upon the panicked random as he rushes away from an unseen threat, begging whoever is at the end of his radio for an out. We see antique analogue tech, a startled seagull (the weirdest of all birds), and doors which lead into a looping world of similarly anonymous rooms with their repeated motifs of cheap furniture and wires: a corporate interior designed by Escher and constructed by a smooth, insidious evil. Offscreen, someone or something gets him.
Cut to Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, dependable as ever), who owns pirate-themed furniture store Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire. Clark is on his uppers, drunk and divorced, with his furniture store going under. Perhaps my favourite shot of the film is preceded with a medium frame of Clark in bed watching TV and sipping on a liquor bottle: we transition to a wide angle which reveals he is actually in the store after hours, and that the vast shopfloor of pretend domestic arrangements is his living space. He works with a couple of Gen Zers (how well drawn these co-players are is a mark of Parsons' skill as storyteller - Lukita Maxwell's disgruntled little looks to camera, ha!) - or maybe not Gen Z as, in another marker of modern horror cf. It Follows, the time period of Backrooms is ambiguous, a further aspect of the film's supreme abstruseness. Troubled Clark visits a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve, god she's amazing), whose encouraged remedial role-play seems to exacerbate Clark's abiding fury further. They're an interesting pair of leads, these two; deeply lonely, antagonistic to each other and yet resolutely unsympathetic (I also like how for a film based on youth phenomena they're both early middle age). She has written a book, "The Window Within", about coping with loss, and Clark paces the hollow space of the Ottoman Empire (the shop's name surely a cruel joke) alone in the evenings. Even before entering strange subterranea, they are both lost and unsatisfied, looking for meaning in a world which holds none.
Clark finds it in the basement of the shop. After fiddling with the breakers and switches which he believes are to blame for the store's fluctuating power, he sees an impossibly lit outline of a door in the basement wall. Upon further inspection, Clark noclips into the Backrooms, and becomes obsessed with its ochre hauntological space. As the film continues, he ropes in (literally) other characters to help explore the increasing subsections, eventually becoming lost in the maze, like Theseus or Pac-Man. A lesser film may have made more sniffy allusions to cultural precedents, or, god help, referenced Alice in Wonderland, but Backrooms' pristine blankness is its own thing; as hermetically sealed as its intransigent milieu. A vibe of a movie, and as we see Clark and others navigate the weird nested zones, the effect is an unsettling evocation of that atavistic sensation of being lost but is also numbing, almost narcotic in its perniciously bland repetition. The obvious comparison is like watching someone play a vintage first-person shooter video game, with scrolling backgrounds of low-poly furniture providing ersatz verisimilitude: a corrupted file of a reality.
But the emotion of the film, an impeccable sadness, is highly authentic and tangible. Backrooms presents a series of facsimiles of domestic space - the arrangements in the furniture store, Mary's practice, the actual Backrooms - which are completely devoid of human love and warmth. By way of deliberate contrast, we do witness domestic human connection in a pointed cutaway where one of the shady scientists who may or may not be behind the singularities is making popcorn for his kids and watching The NeverEnding Story (the infinity promised by the title is another example of Parsons and Soodik's witty attention to detail), emphasising the respective isolations of Mary and Clark. It's an instructive moment in a film which is otherwise destabilisingly obtuse; where iconography is so weighted and evocative that an image could have symbolic meaning (Chekov's stool), or equally it might not (seagulls, pirates): high Surrealism, indeed. Likewise, there are strange echoes of other horror films (I spotted The Blair Witch Project, The Shining, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) which are less references and more features of a shared cinematic language, a bricolage which is allusively recognisable (as if the film itself is recalling genre standards in a similar manner to how the Backrooms "remembers" reality). Like anything that is worthwhile, Backrooms will not be for everyone. But for those of us who fall under its strobe-lit spell, it offers a pressing reflection of a synthetic world that is false and treacherous, and all too easy to get lost within.
Backrooms is in UK/ROI cinemas from May 29th.
