Room to Grow
Maybe the Oscars do belong on YouTube?
Backrooms
Director: Kane Parsons • Writer: Will Soodik, based on the YouTube shorts
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
USA • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong June 4 • IIB
Grade: B+
Director Kane Parsons is a whopping 20 years old, and he’s just released his first feature film. I say good for you, guy, but it’s amazing how many are saying “Who dis kid?” This shouldn’t surprise us; resistance to all things new has always been met with ire and suspicion, and to be sure, Parsons represents the next generation of filmmakers that are making films in ways that buck the trends of the last 50-odd years. He’s not a film school nerd – quite possible because film school is out of reach for so many now he simply can’t be. But if we look back at the film school generation, many said “These brats have no idea how to make a movie. They haven’t learnt by doing,” meaning they weren’t privileged enough to have a father (yes, a dude) at a film studio. Let’s not forget that George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Ringo Lam, Martin Scorsese, Ann Hui, Edward Yang, David Cronenberg, Zhang Yimou, Takashi Miike, Guillermo del Toro, Todd Haynes, Ryan Coogler, Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron… were all next gen brats at one time that people tsk-tsked.
Who’s tsk-tsking now? Parsons made a film strong enough to get A24 interested, and he’s not alone. Late last year the self-funded and, more crucially initially self-released Iron Lung emerged from the mind of gamer and YouTube filmmaker Mark Fischbach AKA Markiplier, and after word-of-mouth demand it made US$50 million on its $3 million budget. Australian YouTubers Danny and Michael Philippou – or RackaRacka – struck gold with Talk to Her and Bring Her Back. And Backrooms just fucking trounced Disney (Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu) at the box office, hoovering up US$81 million. It was followed by 26-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker’s horror-romance Obsession (coming soon).
There are two takeaways from all this: Let’s cool it on tsking the kids before they get a chance to get their sea legs, and let’s hope the cheque-writers are listening and clueing into the one thing these films have in common. They’re original. STFU with the hand-wringing about people “not going to the movies”.
Which is the long way of saying Backrooms is the chilly feature expansion on Parson’s own original, so-called creepypasta short films – creepy, freaky written or visual stories on the internet – from a few years ago. The story unfolds in the unknown, hidden yellow office-ish space underneath (behind? adjacent to?) divorced, bitter Clark’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discount furniture warehouse. Clark is alone, but not, in these backrooms, composed of Escher-esque doors and hallways that defy physics and signs and portents worthy of Alice’s Wonderland. When he tells his unfulfilled therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) about his discovery she’s very therapist-y and listens and nods until Clark storms off. A cryptic voice message from Clark later sends her to the store looking for him, drawing her into the mystery space too. Parson’s liminal space chiller toys with elements from multiple horror tropes, including the tired found footage angle, but he never overplays his hand. The early 1990s setting makes a camcorder the logical medium for capturing random weirdness (and impossible to text anyone for help), and also sinks Clark and Mary into a dead-end, low-rent suburban nightmare the backrooms might actually be an escape from. Check out Mary’s ill-fitting professional wear. It says as much about her as her words, as does Clark’s equally bereft store.
And the farther they venture into the backrooms the more Parsons’ first-timer status shows. As soon as Backrooms feels the need to try and explain itself it loses momentum and jettisons the disorienting tone that carried it so adeptly for the first two acts. Backrooms slots in nicely in the liminal space horror sub-genre, which counts Kyle Edward Ball’s divisive, taxing Skinamarink, Genki Kawamura’s recent Exit 8, and to a degree stuff like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the Others’ netherworld in Jordan Peele’s Us among the ranks. It’s not a new concept, but it feels as if it’s gaining momentum. Parsons built his story on the skeleton of a liminal, analogue world loaded with local advertising familiar to anyone who spent time in front of a TV in the 1980s and ’90s – or who went down a retro rabbit hole on YouTube, and its inscrutability is its strength. We don’t need to know much about the world beyond the store, and Backrooms doesn’t need pop psychology Deep Thoughts about memory and the corners of our minds bogging down the back half to make its point. Not with Oz Perkins’s production designer Daniel Vermette (Longlegs) on hand to recreate the wonky space, and Jeremy Cox’s pitch-perfect cinematography; Cox knows when to go shaky cam and when to calm down.
Despite the narrative stumble, which could also be laid at the feet of relatively green writer Will Soodik, Parsons clearly has an eye for unsettling imagery and for stoking slow-burning, unexplained discomfort, and he’s clearly schooled himself well in the language of psychological horror. He exploits his spaces with the kind of sure hand that makes you want to see what he’s going to come up with next – and some of the “best in the business” want to know too: among the producers here are Perkins, James Wan (M3GAN) and Shawn Levy (the in-production Star Wars: Starfighter), who dropped him a couple of Oscar nominees to work with. Let’s just hope it’s not a sequel to this. Oh, shit… wait, what?