NEW YORK (OSV News) – “Backrooms” (A24) is that rarity among contemporary horror films, an intelligent and unsettling psychological study that doesn’t substitute wallowing in blood for the work of evoking real chills. While the movie is mostly free of graphic imagery, however, it does include some briefly intense mayhem.
Relentless vulgar dialogue, moreover, further restricts this thriller’s appropriate audience.
Set in the early 1990s, the plot centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a California furniture shop. A failed architect, Clark is also a recently divorced alcoholic. He’s working with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), to try to overcome these difficulties and gain a fresh start in life.
Having taken up residence in his store after being kicked out of the family home by his wife, Clark is annoyed by the fact that the electrical system there has suddenly become weirdly erratic. Investigating the problem leads him to a wholly unexpected, eerily surreal discovery.
A section of the wall near the basement fusebox turns out to be the permeable portal to an alternate world, one made up of a seemingly endless series of mostly empty rooms and hallways. As he explores these areas, though, Clark is eventually disturbed to find that they’re actually inhabited by unseen but menacing occupants.
As the story unfolds, Mary — who, unsurprisingly, reacted with incredulity when Clark first told her his strange tale — also visits this uncharted environment. Once within it, she’s subject to the same indefinite sense of fear Clark experienced before her.
The irony is that the spaces through which both wander are, to all outward appearances, unrelievedly bland and characterless, anonymous dentists’ or accountants’ offices in waiting.
Thus director Kane Parsons’ intriguing adaptation of his own web series cleverly plays on the banality of Clark and Mary’s suburban surroundings, a landscape of parking lots and strip malls.
The pathetic ad for local TV Clark tries to record, in which he dresses up as a pirate with a wooden leg, is equally vapid.
With frightened characters dropping F-bombs in practically every scene, the milieu of “Backrooms” is not one in which many will feel comfortable. Yet those grown moviegoers who don’t mind such gritty details may enjoy following Clark and Mary as — in the words of an old Doors song — they “break on through” to their own version of the other side.
The film contains fleeting gruesome violence with gore, a drug reference, a couple of profanities, pervasive rough language and several crude terms. The OSV News classification is L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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