Kane Parsons, the creator, director and co-writer of the ‘Backrooms‘, will turn 21 on June 18, which means he won’t be able to legally buy a beer in the United States for a few more weeks to celebrate the success of his film. And what a success! It’s the most prolific first week for an A24 film, and it’s an original and fresh production that stands out even in a film season that has no shortage of competitors in the horror genre. Much of the originality is due to the fact that ‘Backrooms‘ adapts for the big screen a series of video productions that were broadcast on Parsons‘ YouTube channel and went viral on the Internet. I haven’t seen them, so I can’t comment on them or compare them. But what I saw on the big screen is one of those cinematic phenomena that show up every few years, and it’s also the promise of a filmmaker who could become big, if movie making manages to keep him in its orbit. I’m not sure that’s the case.
The story takes place in 1990, and Kane Parsons proves to be not only a good connoisseur of the period dated 15 years before his birth, but also of the cinema of those years, because the beginning of the film uses the pretext of ‘rediscovered video’ that ‘The Blair Witch Project’ would be launching at the end of that decade. Clark, the main character, is a failure from all points of view. He is the manager of a furniture warehouse store that customers avoid, his family life is destroyed after his wife kicked him out of the house, he sleeps in the store and drinks whisky from the bottle every night until he falls down. As any American personal failure, he needs a shrink. Clark has Mary, with whom he shares everything, including the discovery of a mysterious space, with its own laws, adjacent to the furniture store. Clark and Mary will explore this space, one by one, and their destinies will take them on a path of no return. Anything I write from here on would be a spoiler, so I’ll stop.
After the spectacular beginning, the story progresses a bit slowly, and some off-screen comments bothered me until I understood their purpose. Visually, the film looks formidable. Danny Vermette created spaces from an alternative world that represent a variation on the concept of liminal spaces, which in the aesthetics of the Internet are empty or abandoned places that seem strange, deserted and often surreal. Jeremy Cox filmed them. Anyone who saw Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ encountered this concept many years before using the Internet, and the labyrinth that swallows its heroes and forces them to fight for survival is familiar to us from several other horror movies. The treatment, however, is very different. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve play the roles of Clark and Mary – two imperfect contemporaries of ours, each carrying traumas from the past (but who doesn’t?), confronted with the impossible and trying to make sense of the discovery of the alternative space. Their slide into the other dimension of existence is described without Hollywood flourishes, even if it suffers from too many explanations. In horror, sometimes it is better to explain less in order to preserve the supernatural effect. The ending even leaves a door open for sequels. I will watch them, of course, but I will especially watch the evolution of this talent launched spectacularly by this film, whose name is Kane Parsons.