Is it easier to write a tantalizing opening act than a gratifying conclusion (1)?
Those were some of the questions that were floating through my mind during and after watching Backrooms, the brainchild of 21-year-old Kane Parsons, who parlayed a web series into a feature film that currently ranks as the highest-grossing film ever for arthouse studio A24.
We have already seen musicians burst onto the global stage by initially bypassing record labels and taking their work directly to the public, and it makes sense that filmmakers would make the same sorts of leaps with horror tales (2). The late Clarence Ewing and I once discussed how horror is the genre of cinema that’s most likely to welcome new voices and original stories, because these movies rarely risk large sums of money or the reputations of established stars.
In Backrooms, poor Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is in a bad state. His marriage has crumbled. Bottles of liquor in his presence are rarely neglected. His closest confidante appears to be his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve). To add insult to injury, instead of pursuing his passion as an architect, he’s saddled with the day-to-day operations of a struggling discount furniture store.
One day, while investigating some electrical problems at his business, Clark finds a portal to an extra-dimensional space where things are a bit off. The corridors tend to resemble those of the store’s basement, but furniture is often splayed in odd ways. Unsettling noises are heard in the distance. And is anyone monitoring this realm from afar…?
This is where things get a bit murky, with scientists, flashbacks, and assorted trauma thrown into the soup of a localized dystopia. Is it even possible to spoil this film? Yes, there are reveals that may or may not provide helpful edification, but Backrooms is more of an “idea" as opposed to a story. The original web shorts were even more so, and screenwriter Will Soodik was brought in to shape the concept into a narrative. Your Mileage May Vary with regards to the finished product — an amalgamation of David Cronenberg’s body horror, Terry Gilliam’s dark whimsy, and David Lynch’s slow-burn dread. But judging by the vast sums of money (nearly $400 million!) that have filled A24’s coffers this summer, it’s a vibe that has resonated with filmgoers (3).
There’s nothing wrong with storytelling ambiguity in general. The closing scene of Sirāt (by far my favorite film this year) was mesmerizing, with the surviving characters riding a train bound for… well, wherever they were headed, ’twas bound to be bleak. A great finale often encourages the audience to extrapolate past the credits.
But here’s a good rule of thumb: could a filmgoer easily recap the action that they’ve just seen? If you immediately sequestered a Backrooms audience after a screening and asked them to write a one-page synopsis of the plot, how disparate and lucid would those summaries be?
Even better, how about a corollary follow-up a week later? If I love a film, I’m able to lay out a detailed rundown a long while afterwards. Backrooms certainly features vivid imagery, ranging from distorted human replicas (er, made of some sort of edible substance?), harrowing staircases, and a Boogeyman Pirate Clark. But as to Mary’s role in all this, or what the scientists exactly found (or hoped to find), my memories are rather hazy.
The comparison to Lynch bears repeating here. Mulholland Drive is widely considered to be the best of Lynch’s films, and cinephiles went over the picture with a fine-toothed comb, gleaning hidden messages throughout the labyrinthine thriller. But then there was Inland Empire (4), about which the descriptor “fragmented” would be a understatement. If one went searching for meaning within IE’s string of non-sequiturs, it was a pointless task — Lynch didn’t even have a finished script when he started filming, and often finished penning scenes just before they were shot.
It’s clear that Parsons has tapped into something in the zeitgeist — Backrooms is far more commercially successful than anything produced by the aforementioned Cronenberg/Gilliam/Lynch triumvirate, and offers up real chills and an aura of menace, particularly during the film’s opening act, when the viewers are spelunking along with Clark and his colleagues.
Ultimately, however, the needle seems to tilt more towards Promise than Payoff. Will Parsons be motivated to direct a more coherent tale during his second go-around, when audiences are already rewarding him for this one?
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Footnotes:
1: See: Lost, Annihilation, and practically David Lynch’s entire oeuvre. Seems like it takes less in the way of storytelling chops to drop folks on a mysterious island than to come up with satisfying reasons for all the wacky goings-on? Or maybe this involves two different skillsets entirely?
2: Curry Barker, director of fellow summer blockbuster Obsession (also discussed here), made a similar leap, though his breakthrough film wasn’t a continuation of an earlier web project.
3: This ain’t a groundbreaking observation, but the limitations of review-aggregation websites like Rotten Tomatoes are on full display with a film like Backrooms, which seems to enjoy mile-wide/inch-deep support. My own unofficial research (namely, feedback from friends and colleagues) backs this up, with the general vibe best described as “interesting, but left me wanting.” The binary nature of RT compresses feedback to thumbs up/thumbs down conclusions, but wouldn’t you be more curious about a picture that perhaps only half the audience enjoyed, but those that did felt passionately about it?
4: Unsurprisingly, Lynch’s final film.