Backrooms

‘Surreal’ is a word that, through a century of overuse, has lost most of its original meaning to the point where it’s just become a synonym for ‘weird’. Sci-fi horror Backrooms is certainly weird, and deeply so. But it is also, in a very accurate sense, utterly surreal. 

Its landscape is a vast, labyrinthine interior of harshly lit, mustard-tinted rooms and corridors, where furniture and unexpected objects meld disturbingly with the floors, walls and low ceilings. The film mirrors the way our subconscious slightly misremembers mundane architecture in dreams, with its masterful production design weaving a netherworld of soulless, sunless office spaces in which horrible things could lurk around any of its infinite blind corners. Think Stranger Things’ Upside Down by way of Severance.

All of this will ring a bell for anybody aware of the recent online obsession with liminal urban spaces, specifically the Backrooms web series. And fans of this skewed digital phenomenon (which, by the way, partly inspired the look of Severance) may be pleased to hear that its A24-backed cinematic incarnation comes direct from the Backrooms boy himself. Namely, VFX-wrangling enfant terrible Kane Parsons, who was only 16 when he made the original YouTube short and now, at the still crazily tender age of 20, has been given a budget, a quality cast (Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor) and some serious studio space, which allows him to build this nightmare for real rather than in pixel-form.

Think Stranger Things’ Upside Down by way of Severance

Parsons acquits himself astonishingly well, building on the analogue style and twisted visuals of his web-series. Crackly VHS-filmed found footage segments punctuate the disorientating action, which mostly takes place in a dangerous pocket dimension discovered in the basement of a failing furniture warehouse store during the early ’90s. Parsons also draws strong performances from Reinsve and Ejiofor as a tightly coiled therapist and her rapidly unravelling failed-architect patient; Reinsve is particularly impressive in the way she manages to sell primal terror without ever once screaming.

What’s less convincing is writer Will Soodik’s attempt to fold in the theme of therapy. It’s unclear exactly what he and Parsons are trying to say about it, while they also keep their world’s lore fractured and frustratingly oblique – right through to a whopping question mark of an ending – in a flagrant attempt to dangle some sequel bait.

Even so, Backrooms is hard not to recommend as a genuinely surreal horror experience. It has shades of the two Davids, Lynch and Cronenberg, but with its horrifically rendered malformations, both architectural and organic, it also feels like a commentary on the risible rise of AI slop art. This is very much a journey into the heart of the uncanny valley.

In cinemas worldwide Fri May 29.