I'm writing this review tonight, because I saw a matinee showing and I need to start putting words down before I lose all sense of the film. Not that there is any sense to be made of it. Because this film is deliberately perplexing and has no consistent logic or framework to make sense of it with. It's a bit of a psychological tease, dressed up as horror.
Clarke (Chitel Ejenfor ) runs a furniture business. His life is a bit of a mess. His wife threw him out of his own home, so he has ended up living in the back of his own showroom. He goes regularly to see his psychiatrist Mary, to make sense of what has happened and try to move on. One day, whilst trying to discover why his shop lighting is flickering and going on and off all the time at night, he discovers there is a part of a wall in his basement display area that is permeable. He can walk through it into a whole complex of backrooms, corridors and doorways. With random stacks of furniture, on many different levels. Aspects of his own furniture showroom appear but are backwards, or chopped off half trapped in walls. The whole backrooms are a vast space, but it makes no logical sense. He brings in two employees to help him document it on film, so he can show Mary. But this goes wrong and they end up being killed by a malevolent creature that lurks somewhere in its depths.
That's about as far as I'm willing to go with plot, to tell you more would spoil the film. To be honest providing more information will not make the film any more comprehensible. The film appears placed very confidently in the world that is created. There are moments of real shock and tension, but most of it is not in what you are being shown, but in the terrific sound design that impresses a huge feeling of foreboding upon you, very loudly. This is undoubtedly a cleverly constructed film. Previously it was a series of short films on You Tube, that went viral. It's director Kane Parsons, does appear to know how to conjure nightmarish surrealism out of nothing.
This the sort of film nerds of all ages will absolutely love and get off on. Spending endless amounts of time theorising about what its meaning might be and knowing references. I think this will largely be a complete waste of time, but it will happen regardless of my view. You will not discover some great profundity hidden in these backrooms. It is fundamentally a film that constructs a realm out of human emotional memories and the psychology of recollection, how through remembering them, things often become more and more inaccurate with each repetition. That we all live with some area in our psyche that we never want to look into, lest we discover some demon in the dark corners of our past. These are the sorts of themes the film attempts to explore.
It's in the nature of this type of film, that nothing is without significance here. The film one family is watching is A Never Ending Story. The psychology book Mary has written is called The Memory Within. This story, for what it is, presents itself as though based on someone's psychologically mangled memories, it's just not entirely clear whose. I dare say, given its success, a sequel will quickly follow. But I'll give that one a miss. Seeing or knowing more will be of no help here. I began to find The Backrooms tiresome by the time we reached it's last half hour. It's certainly diverting entertainment, but only the once. It is, just one long tease, that I found in the end, exasperating. That said, the Backrooms will probably be the highest grossing film of the year, primarily because it was also one of the cheapest to make.
CARROT REVIEW - 4/8
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