Backrooms

After seeing the film, I watched Kane Parsons’s entire Backrooms series on YouTube. Though there are some tells here and there that it’s the work of a teenager (and one who’s played a lot of Portal), he’s clearly a prodigious talent, and it’s easy to see why A24 scooped him up to make a feature. Parsons didn’t invent the Backrooms concept—essentially an empty (or is it?), windowless, inescapable yellow maze of a corporate campus—and I’m not terminally online enough to dig too deeply into its bottomless lore, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else in creepypasta land imbuing it with as much dreadful life as Parsons has. Both the YouTube series and the film are at their best when they’re quietly basking in the Backrooms’ unnerving ambience, and that’s unfortunately weakened by underwhelming attempts to demystify it, whether it’s the loose corporate/government conspiracy shared by both or the character-neuroses-made-manifest of Will Soodik’s screenplay. But the core vibes are quite effective, and seeing Parsons’s eerie Blender models transformed into acres of practical sets is a welcome treat.