Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

After experiencing a surprising amount of success with Obsession, I wanted to give another independent horror movie an opportunity, and wouldn’t you know it: there’s Backrooms! I actually had Backrooms on my watchlist for longer than Obsession, so expectations were high. These two 20-something directors must really have the sauce, because even though Backrooms wasn’t my jam as much as Obsession was, the movie still impressed in stretches (and very much creeped me out).

Where Backrooms predictably excelled was its vision and its visuals, which were specific and unsettling. You could tell from the trailers that this movie was going to give you the heebie-jeebies, and it did that from its first scene. Kane Parsons perfectly channeled the scary liminal space horror vibe reminiscent of the YouTube videos that you’d regrettably watch at like 2am at a sleepover in the 2010s, and my jeebies were very much heebied. Backrooms felt like if Severance was made by those AI generators that couldn’t figure out Will Smith in 2022, and it was pretty horrifying, especially that pirate guy near the end. I didn’t know that was coming, and that image hasn’t left me yet.

Despite the visual and technical prowess on display from this 20-year-old director (that’s crazy), Backrooms failed to connect all of its great dots and ideas into a cohesive, truly meaningful narrative. I appreciated its attempt to tell a story about trauma and therapy with these backrooms, but it didn’t feel like it ever fully materialized. That didn’t stop Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor from trying their best to wring those themes out of this movie; they were both great, and have been great in everything I’ve seen of theirs. The narrative cohesion and complexity was where I felt like Obsession really triumphed over Backrooms. Not that Obsession was complex—smartly, it wasn’t—but that film knew exactly what it was and flourished within those bounds. Backrooms tried to be so much more than it truly needed to be, and it backfired.

Unfortunately, Backrooms did not live up to the hype that it had generated over the last couple of months for me. Fortunately, though, that doesn’t mean the movie didn’t deserve the hype. Kane Parsons showed remarkable poise in the director’s chair for his first feature; his vision was clear (at least from a visual and sonic standpoint), and I’d be seated for his next movie if it came out next week. He may just need some help taking the big ideas he has and synthesizing them into more digestible, effective stories. At 20 years old, that’s not a problem at all, and he has a bright future ahead of him. For now, though, Obsession has won the May Indie Horror War, and Backrooms will sadly find its new home in my indie horror backrooms.