Backrooms brings our worst nightmares to life (review)
Director Kane Parsons adapts a mythology born on the Internet, and plunges Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve into a yellowish nightmare. A very successful horror film, whose unhealthy atmosphere is the number 1 attraction.
In 2019, a user of 4chan publishes this photo of empty (?) offices, with pee-yellow wallpaper and brown carpet on the floor. Another Internet user lets his imagination run wild and invents the founding principles of backrooms, places made up of immense empty spaces, located outside of our reality, and in which we find ourselves when we accidentally slip from our world to theirs. To put it quickly: backrooms are somewhere between a feverish nightmare and limbo. Endless mazes, a succession of rooms with an atmosphere as familiar as it is distressing. And, sometimes, populated by creatures on the borders of reality…
Tons of interpretations and creepy stories followed, but it was Kane Parsons, aka Kane Pixels, who popularized the genre and established a mythology through several videos (totaling a little over two terrifying hours), most of them in found footageand produced in photorealistic 3D with Blender software. Hollywood having smelled the right move, here is the prodigy at the head of a film taking up his universe. With a tight budget of ten million dollars, Parsons, only 20 years old, expands the contours of the backrooms in what can be taken as much as a sequel to his videos as a gateway. Doors will be the subject in the story of Clark, a furniture salesman at the end of his rope (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers by chance, in the basement of his store, the entrance to a network of corridors and rooms with no apparent end. There he hears strange human voices and unexplained noises, and observes chairs and other chests of drawers placed erratically here and there. Clark explores this parallel world more and more deeply. Without news of his alcoholic patient and in serious depression, his psychologist (Renate Reinsve) goes looking for him…
Backrooms is above all a little miracle of lighting (it certainly took a lot of ingenuity to prevent everything from becoming yellowish) and production designwith labyrinthine and unhealthy settings that make you lose all bearings. There is Shining and Maurits Cornelis Escher in these impossible constructions, where each intersection of corridors seems to hide the worst. Parsons bases a large part of his anxiety-provoking mechanics on this disturbing atmosphere, regularly injecting brilliant horrific intuitions – which we will not reveal here. But the atmosphere is so strong that it devours everything (the actors, the direction, the script) and the trajectories of the characters, very strong, seem a little bland in comparison.
Slag which betrays the lack of experience of the young director, who we imagine to have been a little restrained so as not to cut himself off from a part of the public which refuses XXL scares: some terrifying images from his shorts – the kind that make you want to hide under a duvet and never come out again – have been evacuated here.
No worries though, the immense success of Backrooms in the United States will inevitably give rise to sequels. And we bet that Kane Parsons will then have complete freedom to shape the ultimate nightmare.
Backrooms by Kane Parsons, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass… 1 h 51. Released June 17
