02/06/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Contemporary horror films by Gen Z filmmakers seem to be soaring to ever-new heights. Just last week, twenty-six-year-old Curry Barker’s Obsession proved a breakout hit on a budget that was just short of a million dollars, meaning that it was able to move into profit on its release day. More interestingly, the film bucked the usual trend by taking even more on its second week, buoyed by good word of mouth.

Now twenty-year-old Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (developed from one of the ‘creepy pasta’ shorts he’s been posting on YouTube since his teens) scores an even bigger opening. It does boast a budget of ten million (though this is peanuts compared to the excesses of most contemporary Hollywood blockbusters) but once again, premier production company A24 have spotted a filmmaker’s potential and granted them the opportunity to fulfil it. While Obsession has its roots in classic horror story, The Monkey’s Paw, Backrooms‘ closest cousin could arguably be Alice in Wonderland – if that book were transposed to the early 1990s and had moments of absolute terror.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the manager of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a down-at-heel furniture store, which despite Clark’s ramshackle attempts at a promotional video, appears to be struggling to entice any customers over the threshold. After a messy break up with his wife, Clark is actually sleeping in the store. He occasionally drives off for a session with his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who is trying to explore Clark’s anger issues – but she has some psychological baggage of her own, which she’s been lugging around since childhood.

Meanwhile, Clark is having major problems with the store’s electricity supply and, when investigating some strange noises in the basement, he discovers a portal that takes him to the backrooms of the title, a series of interconnecting sickly-yellow enclosures seemingly designed by Escher and heaped here and there with piles of furniture that defy all logic.

When Clark subsequently tells Mary about his new discovery, she’s understandably worried about his state of mind…

Backrooms is an incredibly immersive and occasionally heart-stopping film, that somehow manages to conjure moments of absolute dread from the smallest things: a muffled noise; a briefly glimpsed figure; a narrow opening a character is required to squeeze through. It’s all I can do not to shout warnings to the luckless fools who wander in there, despite knowing only too well that if I found a wall I could walk through, I’d most surely want to do it, again and again.

Co-written by Parsons with Will Soodik, the film boasts an incisive script which is open to interpretation, but nonetheless utterly affecting. The Jungian ‘Dream House’ metaphor is made frighteningly real, as the terrors herein bubble up from the central characters’ own psyches – and are all the more disturbing because of that. As the film careers confidently onwards, it carries me helplessly along with it.

A final revelation confirms a devastating truth: that we are all prisoners of whatever bad things happened to us back down the line. Parsons would appear to have a promising (and lucrative) film career ahead of him and on the strength of Backrooms, I’ll be first in the queue to see whatever he comes up with next. There’s already talk of a ‘Backrooms 2‘ but I for one hope it’ll be something entirely different.

5 stars

Philip Caveney