Backrooms

A series of unpalatable mile markers puts ageing into perspective. One day, the world’s greatest athletes are younger than you. Then the CEOs running world-changing companies are a decade younger. Eventually, your doctor is younger. You look back and wonder: when did this happen? Where did the time go? What happened to my life? My ambitions? My dreams?

I felt that way watching Backrooms. I got tattoos, had sex, crashed a car, worked a couple of jobs, graduated from university and travelled overseas before director Kane Parsons was even born. What the fuck? How?

After shedding my old-man tears, I leaned in. Kane came across a post on 4chan about a fictional place called the Backrooms. It began with an anonymous interpretation of a photograph showing a large, empty room bathed in an unsettling yellow light. The photo was taken inside a former furniture store in Wisconsin. Over time, people expanded the idea into an endless maze of interconnected backrooms with different themes and hostile entities roaming through them.

Kane turned that idea into a YouTube series. During Covid, he taught himself to build 3D environments in Blender, recruited a few friends to act and got to work. Boom. Some of the videos have more than 100 million views. The kid was simply having fun. He was passionate about what he was doing, and that passion opened the door to the film industry. His feature is now the highest-grossing A24 film to date. How awesome is that?

Chiwetel Ejiofor takes the film to another level. That is the biggest difference between the web series and the feature. A gifted young director on the rise meets an actor at the top of his game.

There is not much to say about the plot other than that it is an acid trip with a bit of intense play therapy thrown in. The story may not carry much meaning, but I'm okay with that; it was fun.