The marketing for The Backrooms is top-notch. As someone who appreciates good marketing and a well-produced trailer, I am in. Our 16-year-old son has been watching the web series of the same name. He made us aware of its cultural prominence and then I started to see it in the classrooms. My students were all watching it, once their assignments were done, I like to tell myself. As a film, The Backrooms has a high bar to overcome.
The plot of The Backrooms is very simple at its core. A manager of a floundering furniture store is missing. He’s been exploring the backrooms, a meandering series of rooms that flow like an endless maze in retail offices in shopping malls in the early 90’s. Just before he disappears one time he calls his therapist and lets her know that he’s going deeper and that this is goodbye. She goes to his place of work to see if she can help him. Once she gets to the ‘door’ she realizes that the seemingly insane ramblings he previously told her were true.
The Backrooms is slow boil. It looks at paint and asks it why it’s moving so quickly. It looks at the pot of water and wonders if it really needs to boil. The movie essentially exists of five acts. They aren’t labeled or anything, it’s just simpler to break them up this way so that you can understand it, without giving away any cues or spoilers.
The first act introduces the characters. The second act, roughly one-fifth of the film it seemed like, follows our furniture manager as he traipses through the backrooms for the first time. This act is edge-of-your seat stuff. It’s from the school of less-is-more, and it really delivers. It alludes to the evil that lives in the backroom, shows you just enough to remain hooked and puts audiences in his skin for that period of time.
In the third act our furniture store manager is trying to tell the world about this mysterious place he’s discovered. He would tell his wife, but they’re divorced, so he goes to his therapist. She’s nice enough, but obviously doesn’t believe him. He goes to the film student who is the boyfriend of his part-time employee and offers them both some cash if they help him research the phenomenon.
The fourth act deals with the therapist going into the backrooms in her efforts to help her patient. The fifth act deals with the therapist’s experiences and time in the backroom. The Backrooms is a movie that can live rent free in your head. Even as I’m writing this I’m thinking about a grain of information that I missed, a clue that would’ve told me something else, or putting two points together from the film.
However, as the movie ended I was nonplussed. It ends very curt. Our 14-year-old son, who is not the intended demographic, didn’t get it at all. However, the effective pangs of the film’s marketing have made this a movie that high school students want to see.
The Backrooms is not a horror movie in the manner that kids will think about it. There are violent, gory images, but they aren’t the focus of the plot. Moreover, for a movie whose main set is a series of 90 degree turns, there aren’t any surprise jump scares. The young teen next to me (not mine) was wanting to see a scream fest horror film with jump scares and slashing delight. She was yelling at minor scares and talking to the screen as if she was watching Friday the 13th. This is not that kind of horror film.
The Backrooms lives in the more cerebral realm of scary movies. It’s Hannibal Lecter instead of Jason Voorhees, but take away 50% of the dialogue and 90% of the cannibalism. The film has elements of Stranger Things. Its hidden world aspect, the fact that it takes place in 1990 and that Shawn Levy was one of the producers. The Backrooms also has a strong sense of dread. James Wan was also one of the producers on the film. There’s also a nice entourage of monstrous freaks who would be at home in Wan’s, Kane Parsons’ or Levy’s individual movie.
It wasn’t until 12 hours after seeing The Backrooms that I fully understood it, and even now, I’m confident that I’m missing something. It wasn’t until I thought of the furniture store manager and his interactions with the backrooms that I understood it fully. What was his desire in life? When I remembered what he wanted to be, and how he approached researching and mapping the backrooms, it became clear. When I took that information and applied it to the therapist’s experience, the lights really clicked with me.
When that clicked, I realized that there were probably more things that I missed. I didn’t explain our newfound discovery to our son. He was intent on seeing more monsters, including the black monolith thing he wanted to see in the sequel. The concept of the backrooms is fascinating to think about, presuming that I’m thinking about it correctly. It opens itself up to another world and more stories in the best of all possible Stranger Things ways.
The Backrooms is rated R for language and violence.
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