‘Backrooms’ Review: Experimental Horror Comes Out of the Margins in Kane Parsons’ YouTube-Gone-A24 Head Trip
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a troubled furniture-store owner in a movie that turns the Internet memes of liminal space into an atmospheric freakout.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
@OwenGleiberman See All
In “Backrooms,” a creepy meditative dada horror trip in the what-is-reality? tradition of “Eraserhead” and “Skinamarink,” the director Kane Parsons turns our fears into a funhouse that’s got a lot of walls but no bottom. The central character, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a divorced furniture-story owner who’s simmering with resentment over what a junk heap his life has turned out to be. Clark sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), and the two do a role-playing game in which they reenact Clark’s angry sob story of how his wife threw him out of the house. He’s now living in the store, which is called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire (he does TV ads for it in a pirate costume). It’s a big ugly place that sells cheap ugly furniture, and one day, when he’s trying to fix the store’s janky lighting, he’s drawn to a wall, then into the wall, which he passes right through.
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