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My familiarity with the Backrooms web series remains nonexistent, so if you're looking for somebody who can comment on how faithful of an adaptation this is or how much of the lore is explored, you're going to have to go elsewhere. What I can tell you is that the film version revolves around a recently divorced alcoholic named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who inadvertently discovers a portal to the titular alternate universe in the basement of his furniture store after noticing some weird anomalies with the electricity in the building. He soon becomes obsessed with exploring this vast space that looks like a slightly distorted version of the real world and recruits a couple of his employees (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell) to videotape his findings to prove its existence. Sometime later, Clark leaves an ominous voicemail for his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), which inspires her to do a wellness check on him. Upon arriving at Clark's store, Mary stumbles upon the portal and quickly gets a taste of the wonders and horrors that the Backrooms have to offer.
As an exercise in building a world that's fueled by dread, Backrooms is a roaring success. Parsons cleverly plays with the horrifying idea of regular people stumbling upon a place where everything is just slightly off and how the curiosity to explore a place that is so close to the one that they know gets them into trouble. There's a surreal brand of claustrophobia that emerges from being in a space that's a big looping maze full of near identical corridors, two-way mirrors and narrow tunnels that lead to rooms that could have anything in them. The sequences where Parsons deploys found footage techniques (technically, it's just the opening scene that's found footage as the other sequences in the format are being shot in real time by Bennett's character on a video camera) to capture this setting is where the film particularly shines as getting to see this world from the first person perspective of a camera lens puts you in the same headspace as the characters. I had absolutely no clue what was going to be waiting for them as they went deeper down this proverbial rabbit hole and getting to see all of the strange shit they stumble upon at the same time as them did wonders for the impact of the scares.
Where Parsons' greenness as a filmmaker emerges is in the final act where some answers to what the hell is going in this weird little world start to surface. Without giving too much away, the film eventually reveals itself to be an exploration of trauma. While these heavy scenes are admirably performed by Ejiofor and Reinsve, the material they're working with is too undercooked to have any real resonance. To be fair to Parsons, there is an interesting angle to this topic that's introduced that has the potential to be fleshed out in the sequels, but for now it's just something that kind of weighs down the narrative momentum and leads to a pretty underwhelming ending.
Despite unraveling a bit at the end, Backrooms is still an impressive start to Parsons' directorial career. A kid who had never made a project away from his computer stepping onto a set and confidently building an expansion of the world he created that could be appreciated by fans and non-fans of the web series alike is very impressive. Getting the chance to tell more stories in this world should do wonders for his skill as a director and I look forward to seeing how much he's grown as a filmmaker when the sequel comes out in 2-3 years.
Grade: B
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