Backrooms ★★★
- 2filmcritics
- Jun 4
- 5 min read
Availability: Playing widely in theaters, including internationally. Streaming expected on Max September or October, based on A24 past practices. It may be available sooner on Apple TV or Amazon Prime Video. See JustWatch here for full purchase and streaming options.
Some Disassembly Required
“Backrooms,” the latest from independent production company A24, is drawing a young crowd, and not unexpectedly. Director and writer Kane Parsons developed the first iteration in 2022 with a 9-minute YouTube video, influenced by the video game series Portal and a 2019 4Chan thread obsessed with liminal spaces. He began film production with A24 at age 19, having just graduated from high school.
Director and writer Kane Parsons began film production with A24 at age 19, having just graduated from high school.
Another attraction for Gen Z is the film’s standard labeling: horror/sci-fi. Curiously, it may be neither. There’s nothing futuristic about it, and not much science, if any. Horror? Set in the pre-social media 1990s, it is full of scenes (one long one preceding the title) in yellow corridors and rooms—too many, really, and too much the same—in each case with a potential victim worrying about whether there’s someone around the corner or behind them, or opening a door they really shouldn’t open, and now and then someone gets chased. But there’s no guy with a chainsaw, no “final girl,” no maniac with ice pick, hammer, or axe, no revenge like 2020’s “Promising Young Woman.”
Clark (Chiwetel Eniofor) confronts piles of familiar furniture in one of the many subterranean levels of... of what? of his mind?
Instead, “Backrooms” resembles “Psycho,” a 1960 film whose backstory was sufficiently complex, and yet so central to the narrative, that as savvy a director as Alfred Hitchcock was compelled to bring out a psychiatrist to explain to the audience just what it was that was troubling Norman Bates. “Backrooms” is a psychological drama.
“Backrooms” resembles “Psycho,” a 1960 film whose backstory was complex and yet central to the narrative.
There are only two characters who matter and one of those more than the other. Clark (an excellent Chiwetel Eniofor, nominated for an Oscar for “Twelve Years a Slave” [2013]) is our protagonist. Trained as an architect, Clark is miserable, volubly self-pitying, and underemployed, working as a salesman in a furniture store (without customers), where his job requires that this proud man publicly humiliate himself by dressing up as a peg-leg pirate to film commercials for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. That he has only one name suggests an incompleteness.
Mary (Renate Reinsve), Clark's therapist, puts on a persona of reserve and control that belies the effects of her repression of childhood trauma.
In the basement of the store where Clark sleeps each night, he discovers a portal that opens through a wall (a bit of sci-fi here, as he walks through the wall), leading to other rooms, some containing furniture—or pieces of it, piled or stacked oddly.
Exhausted by his whining and tired of being blamed for his career failure and whatever is wrong with their relationship, his wife kicks him “out of my own house” (the complaint and plight of today’s American male). Time to see a psychiatrist. Mary Klein (an appropriately restrained Renate Reinsve, “The Worst Person in the World,” 2021, Oscar nominated for “Sentimental Value,” 2025), is presented as the yin to Clark’s yang, the introvert to his extrovert, the cool, unruffled, rational, in-control analyst who can help the traumatized, furrowed-browed, emotional man deal with a failed marriage and the demons that have made him believe he can walk through a wall. Her advice: open a door to a new level of personal understanding. As it happens, he’s already done that.
The repressed, low-affect Mary wants to feel more; Clark wants to feel less.
In a touch few movie-goers will appreciate (and that may not have been intentional, or even exist), Mary Kline’s name evokes Melanie Klein, an Austrian-British psychoanalyst who expanded on Sigmund Freud’s work, focusing not on adult sexual drives but on the emotional bonds between infants and mothers. You don’t need to know Klein to know that the real Mary is not the persona we see dispensing therapy. In a series of flashbacks, we’ll learn that her childhood past was as tortured as Clark’s adult present, and that the two—joined as client and therapist often are—are more alike than different. Both experience dream-like recollections (more Freud), both have artifacts on their bedside tables that reflect the problems and potentials of their lives, both are self-medicating. Mary needs that portal as much as Clark. How they differ is also significant. The repressed, low-affect Mary wants to feel more; Clark wants to feel less. “Can you imagine how good that must feel?” he asks her. “I mean, there’s no thoughts, no pain no ego. No fear.”
Mary (Reinsve) experiences the horror of the different levels to the furniture store, and herself.
Some of this “explanation” will unroll in the course of the film, but any substantial understanding of the film’s meaning—its substrata of ideas—is likely to be overshadowed by the long and frequent scenes of Clark, Mary, and others as they venture beyond the portal. The realm they enter might be described as a layered subconscious—not Freud’s two layers of the conscious and subconscious, but multiple, perhaps infinite layers, each murkier and more distorted than the one above it, and each with its own windows, doors, shafts, and narrow passageways, the nooks and crannies of the mind, the pitfalls and possibilities of probing the sub-basements of consciousness. As Mary the shrink tells her patient Clark, “We all have our loops. Our habits. Behaviors that keep us walking in circles.” Or, in the framework of the physical architecture of the film, on the surface of life, on the first floor of consciousness.
Piles of garments are stand-ins for memory as well as reflections on how we present ourselves as clothed, civilized persons.
The place where it all starts, the furniture store, functions metaphorically. Its erratic lighting system has its counterpart in Clark’s own faulty wiring. Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire also relates to those aspects of consciousness linked to domesticity, a theme revisited at other levels, in the piles of garments that are stand-ins for memory as well as reflections on how we present ourselves as clothed, civilized persons (the adjective “civilized” is set at issue in a late “dinner” scene—more Freud).
Phil (Mark Duplass) a minor character we see now and then, is—in one debatable interpretation—an ordinary guy performing a sinister role as the representative of a secretive corporation that believes the portal, and the layered consciousness to which it allows access, is socially destabilizing. Self-understanding is be suppressed, rather than encouraged. Lobotomies may be in order.
The film, as it unspools, could have been written to be more conducive to this sort of speculative reading. It’s there to be had, but only after the lights come up, and on the way home in the car, if then. The more common reaction will be something like “well, that was weird, and kind of scary, but what was the maze all about?” Some will wish that Parsons, channeling Hitchcock, had held up his hand and cued the psychiatrist—to explain it all.
He says: Kudos to A24 on green-lighting the project and hiring a 20-year-old to direct. $10 million up front has produced $100 million domestic box office. So far.
She says: Boring! But then, TV “Severance” fans, I found those hallways boring too. Coming out of the theater, I wanted to give it one star.
Date: 2026
Director: Kane Parsons
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Countries: United States and Canada
Language: English
Runtime: 110 minutes
Other Awards: none to this date
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