Backrooms review – Kane Parsons’ icily disturbing horror rewrites the genre rulebook

Debut from 20-year-old director examines memory, reality and fear after Chiwetel Ejiofor accesses an infinite series of hidden rooms that all feel creepily askew

All the lonely people … where do they all belong? YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut with this icily brilliant and genuinely disturbing conceptual horror film based on his web series, and scripted by Will Soodik. There is something here of J-horror, the V/H/S found footage franchise, Dan Erickson’s Severance and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. It’s about people walled up in their own memories, imprisoned in endlessly remembered scenes from their past, or miserably perceived versions of their present existences in which they have become caricatures of themselves, gargoyle stars of their paralysed inner world of failure. Or perhaps the action of the film is not metaphorical in this or any other sense, and the “backrooms” of the title simply exist.

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary; it is the early 90s and Clark is a failed architect, separated from his wife, and an alcoholic who to make ends meet self-hatingly manages a drearily and eerily vast discount furniture store, called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He does dumb TV ads dressed as a pirate while uneasily aware he should be a sultan to make the “Ottoman empire” pun work. He goes to see a therapist, Mary, a sad, gentle person who markets her own self-help audio tapes and is haunted by childhood memories of her abusive mother.