Backrooms

Given how many endless, empty geometric hallways our main character had to wander through, having Justin Long’s character from Barbarian pop up with a tape measure to calculate the square footage would have genuinely made this a 5-star masterpiece. Backrooms completely nails the atmosphere in the first half. The grainy, handheld "home video" style shots build an insane amount of tension, and making the entire environment harsh and well-lit instead of hiding in the dark is a brilliant way to capture that pure, unsettling liminal space dread. The sound design is heavy and unrelenting, but the editing kills the momentum in the second half. The audio masterfully amps up your anxiety to a 10, but the actual visual reveals completely flatten out and fail to deliver on the build-up. Still, it's a solid watch on a big screen.

Anointing a young, first-time big screen director as the new filmmaking messiah of his or her particular genre is a risky undertaking, to be sure. Does the fledgling auteur have what it takes to live up to that auspicious title? Is this an ordination that’s truly warranted? It’s serious business, both for box office tallies and artistically speaking. But does the heir apparent truly possess the skills, talent and vision to achieve success on both fronts? That’s something worth considering in light of the debut feature from writer-director Kane Parsons, the force behind this aspiring smart horror release, which is quickly being praised to the hilt and drawing huge numbers in ticket sales. However, I believe that the coronation of this new voice in the genre is far from deserved and entirely premature. While it’s true that Parsons has a keen eye for the aesthetic, that’s only half the challenge when making a movie in virtually any genre. The other part – being an effective storyteller – needs work (and a lot of it). Based on a YouTube adaptation of his immensely popular internet TV series The Backrooms, the film follows a troubled (and largely unsuccessful) seller of cheap furniture, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who’s experiencing difficulties in his personal life and professional calling. His failed marriage and inability to make use of his training as an architect have led him to seek counseling from a high-profile therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). His progress takes a drastic turn, though, when he finds a maze of what appears to be a collection of office suites adjacent to his store’s basement – a discovery he makes by somehow walking through one of its walls. The spaces are seemingly devoid of people but haphazardly strewn with various items from his life, including his past. Has he stepped into a corporeal manifestation of his psyche? An alternate reality? Or something else entirely? That’s what he hopes to learn with the unexpected help of his skeptical shrink. And what will that be? The film’s opening half capably sets the scene, creating a legitimately sinister sense of creepiness. However, about midway into the picture, it becomes repetitive and directionless, as if it’s searching for what to do next. That’s where this offering goes off the rails, turning inexplicable, underdeveloped and outright goofy at times. The alleged scariness of this would-be psychological thriller vanishes, turning tedious, silly and more laughable than frightening. And a last-ditch effort to take the narrative in a redemptive direction involving a mysterious scientific research organization only muddies the waters further, doing little to salvage what has already fallen apart. Many have likened this release to a video game with a protagonist trying to solve the puzzle of the story. Others have said that it’s full of nuanced references to the YouTube series, although that would require an intimate knowledge of the source material to fully appreciate it. And others still have postulated a host of other interpretations given the inherently vague nature of the finished product. For my money, even though it starts out well, it turns into an incoherent cinematic mess that fails to hold attention and left me sighing a big “So what?” What became most apparent to me while sitting through this is just how difficult it is to create an engaging smart horror film, a genre I enjoy immensely but has been plagued by more failures than successes, with this one being yet another entry on that list of disappointments. Indeed, don’t be too quick to reach for that crown just yet. If the filmmaker hopes to assume that title, he’s still got his work cut out for him, beginning with an urgent need to get out of his own “Backrooms.”