"Backrooms": A 20-year-old YouTuber without film education made a film that everyone is discussing and racking their brains over to solve its mystery

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in the Backrooms. Film still

It all started back in 2019 on the anonymous forum 4chan. One user posted a disturbing photo of an empty room with yellow wallpaper and unpleasant fluorescent light, adding a caption that if you carelessly "clip out of reality," you could end up in an endless yellow labyrinth.

The picture, as internet researchers found out, was taken in 2003 during the renovation of a toy store in Wisconsin, USA, but the myth began to live its own life and grow with fan theories.

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Director Kane Parsons became the youngest director in history whose film topped the box office

In early 2022, sixteen-year-old Kane Parsons drew a short film in Blender in the style of found footage and uploaded it to YouTube. The video went viral, gathering tens of millions of views, and the talented boy attracted the attention of the famous independent studio A24.

With a laughable budget of 10 million dollars for modern cinema, the full-length "Backrooms" grossed 118 million in its first weekend. Parsons became the youngest director in history whose film topped the box office. Moreover, the low-budget horror left Disney's "The Mandalorian and Grogu" far behind.

American analysts are already comparing this situation to the 1960s, when Hollywood, in a panic over television, was making bloated and unwieldy epics, while youth went to the movies for cheap but daring counterculture films. Today, young people are similarly voting with their wallets for "cinema for us and about us," leaving corporate franchises to pensioners.

The liminal aesthetic of an office purgatory

The plot introduces us to Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, known for the film "12 Years a Slave"), the owner of a depressing furniture store and a failed architect. He is going through a divorce, struggling with alcoholism, and attending sessions with psychotherapist Mary (Renate Reinsve, star of the drama "The Worst Person in the World"), who herself has trauma from the destruction of her childhood home. Clark's sad routine is interrupted when an electrician finds three strange, angled, unconnected switches in the store's basement. Soon, Clark notices a glowing crack in the wall and literally falls through it into another dimension — the very Backrooms.

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Clark in the Backrooms. The architecture of this place is devoid of any logic. Film still

For an architect whose ambitions were limited to selling cheap furniture and imitating home comfort in a showroom, this place becomes a personal professional hell. It is architecture devoid of humanity and logic, an infinite space, built, as the hero himself aptly notes in the film, by "builders on acid" — a mockery of his dreams of building something.

What Clark sees resembles an office purgatory from the series "Severance". The aesthetic of this place is entirely built on the phenomenon of liminal spaces. This term describes transitional zones — empty corridors, abandoned shopping malls, underground passages. They are created for people to pass through them, but when these spaces are devoid of people, the human psyche begins to experience deep horror.

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Psychotherapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) also finds in the Backrooms a reflection of her childhood traumas and fear of her own madness. Film still

It's a kind of "uncanny valley" of architecture — the place looks familiar, but under this dead office light, there is no real life.

While in Christopher Nolan's film "Inception" architects designed maximally plausible cities in dreams so that the victim wouldn't guess the illusion, the Backrooms is the result of someone's sick architectural fantasy. The interior is deliberately incorrect: unclosed rooms, gaps between walls too narrow to fit a finger, pointless protrusions, vines, and chaotically arranged furniture.

This architecture could only have been born in our digital age. The dimension looks as if it was hastily put together in a computer program.

Rotating objects along their axes here does not cause them to fall; they simply merge through walls and floors. An incorrectly set floor height causes windows and partitions to partially protrude above the ceiling, and an arch can be cut through the corner of a room.

All this resembles an architect student's sandbox, who doesn't create space for life, but experiments with space within the program to test its limits.

What makes "Backrooms" scary

In this endless labyrinth of the Minotaur, there are its own inhabitants and monsters. These are not aliens, not hellish demons; they are the incorrect "memories" of the Backrooms itself about what enters it, like the pirate sultan — the mascot of Clark's furniture store.

The mechanism resembles Alex Garland's film "Annihilation," where the anomalous zone "The Shimmer" worked as a prism, distorting and refracting the DNA of everything that entered its borders. The Backrooms does the same with people and material things.

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Assistant Kat and her boyfriend Bobby undertake to help Clark explore the Backrooms. Film still

To document the existence of the anomaly, Clark brings along his subordinates: assistant Kat (Lukita Maxwell, known for the series "Shrinking") and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett, "True Detective", "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms"). It is through their video cameras that we see a significant part of the horrors.

Noise, interference, and blurry silhouettes captured on camera do not allow the threat to be immediately discerned. This leaves the brain much more room for unsettling conjectures than any Full HD horrors. The continuous hum of ubiquitous fluorescent lamps, pressing on the ears, also builds anxiety.

The film very convincingly imitates feverish dreams at 39 degrees, in which the space around you loses all logic, where you try to escape an unknown danger through endless corridors, staircases, and enfilades of rooms, devoid of meaning in their arrangement. In such dreams, it's impossible to hide, just as in the Backrooms, but they also can't catch you, because you would immediately wake up. But in the Backrooms — no. It is at this level of hidden, childlike fears that this horror operates.

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Any path out of the Backrooms might just be the Backrooms' "memories" of the places the characters came from. Film still

A sandbox without answers

The Async institute monitors what happens in the Backrooms, sending scientists in protective suits to explore the space to understand the nature of the phenomenon. But, as can be understood, without success.

The interconnection of this place with the characters allows for dozens of different assumptions, none of which will have definitive confirmation. Any answers that the creators of the film give or will give in the future may literally mean nothing, be erroneous, or outdated.

The illogicality of the place provides fertile ground for many sequels, because in a world that doesn't obey rules, no single solution leads to the unraveling of its main mystery.

Critics met this indie film with enthusiasm, noting that the horror genre is finally turning away from cheap gore and primitive jump scares towards other, more ambitious narratives.

And Gen Z on social media are literally raving about the mysteries of the Backrooms universe, trying to understand from small details and the characters' own words what is happening there and whether the film's ending is real.

As the famous internet meme says: if we knew what it was, but we don't know what it is. Zoomers have already cast their verdict with money, showing Hollywood that they are little interested in maniacs with chainsaws or cursed dolls. Another matter is a slightly wrong, endless office where one can spend an entire life — what could be more terrifying and relatable today?

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