Backrooms: The Terror of Getting Lost in the Void

What begins with a strange door appearing out of nowhere in the basement of a furniture store quickly becomes a free-fall descent into absolute madness. If you have ever been left alone in an empty office or the back hallways of a shopping mall and felt a chill down your spine, this film is going to play with your mind in a very cruel way.

To understand its roots, there is a concept by anthropologist Marc Augé that perfectly defines what happens in this film: non-places. Augé defined the transit spaces of supermodernity this way—places of transit that lack identity or history, such as an airport waiting room, a generic hotel room, or a subway station. Backrooms is the ultimate consecration of this concept brought to horror cinema. It is the primal fear of existing in a space that, by definition, denies your human existence.

We are talking about architectural horror in its purest form. If the Overlook Hotel in The Shining disoriented us with its impossible layout, and works like House of Leaves or the recent Skinamarink showed us that a house can completely throw you off, Parsons takes that seed and creates a sterile labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape. Here, the hostility lies in the geometry. The structure lacks Euclidean logic; hallways curve into nothingness and doors lead to new levels of emptiness. The film plays with the claustrophobia of the limitless, proving that being trapped in an infinite space is infinitely more terrifying than being locked in a cell.

Adapting a creepypasta (those urban legends born on the internet) and turning it into a fully realized feature film was a huge risk. It could have been an empty disaster, but the director respects the source material and knows how to maintain tension without falling into over-explanation.

It dives headfirst and embraces the dreamcore aesthetic. The film manages to capture the exact feeling of being trapped in a dream that is strangely familiar and nostalgic, but at the same time turns your stomach because you know something is wrong. It appeals directly to what Sigmund Freud called The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche): that which is intimately familiar to us but, at the same time, has undergone a mutation that makes it profoundly strange and threatening. Those hallways ring a bell to all of us; we have walked them in dreams, feverish and disoriented.

Backrooms is a work of relentless purity. It dispenses with the easy gratification of the jump scare to settle into your psyche like a parasite. Kane Parsons has managed to materialize the contemporary anxiety surrounding the depersonalization of the modern world. It is a barren, uncomfortable, and fascinating experience that forces you to confront the void. A film that is not just watched, but endured, and which undoubtedly stands as a new pillar of contemporary psychological horror.

Take the opportunity to watch it next week during the Cinema Festival. I promise you that, just as it happened to me, it will give you nightmares.

@LOVACAINE