Entering the theater without any prior knowledge or information, the movie The Backrooms was truly the epitome of the unknown. The only fact I knew about this work was that it was a horror-esque genre film exuding a peculiar and bizarre atmosphere. Because I walked into the theater without even looking at a trailer or a plot summary, there was a coexistence of vague dread and a strange curiosity about which direction the story unfolding on the screen would take. What was even more surprising was that despite it being a weekday afternoon—a relatively quiet time slot—the number of audiences filling the theater was much larger than expected. This was a fascinating scene proving how hot the word-of-mouth for this bizarre work is among the public, and how immense people's primal curiosity about unknown horror truly is.
As the movie officially began and the logo of the production company A24 appeared in the opening sequence, I became certain that this film would not follow an ordinary trajectory. A24 is a production company renowned for consistently breaking the grammar of existing commercial films and presenting the most unique and experimental mise-en-scène. Recently, as the number of works they invest in and produce has rapidly increased, it feels like their rarity or cult-like color has faded slightly compared to the past, but the fact remains that they are still the place that builds the most unconventional and original cinematic universes in the global film industry. With just the name A24, the expectations for the psychological pressure and visual shock that this bizarre space would deliver naturally reached their peak.
The introduction of the work clearly presents the temporal background of the 1990s, welcoming the audience with a found-footage-style screen that preserves the rough and crude camcorder texture of that era. In the noise-filled screen, a figure presumed to be a researcher conducting some kind of experiment conveys a strange sense of pressure, as if desperately running away from something in extreme terror. Just as the audience anxiously anticipated, a bizarre and unidentifiable entity suddenly reveals itself in that closed space, and a suffocating attack begins. The attack inflicted by that unknown entity, whose silhouette is hard to even properly grasp, maximizes psychological terror rather than visual gruesomeness, and the film naturally passes the baton straight to a narrative in the same period without jumping through time from that specific point in the past.
After that, the screen transitions to an ordinary scene of seemingly constructing or remodeling a normal house, and I couldn't hide my surprise at the unexpected casting that appeared during this process. Because I had absolutely no prior information about the movie, I completely did not expect that the globally acclaimed actress Renate Reinsve would appear in this bizarre horror film. She takes on the role of Mary, a psychological counselor in the play, brilliantly expressing an intellectual yet somewhat unstable inner self. Mary is a famous psychological counselor well-known enough in the local community to appear in television commercials to promote herself. Despite having a profession of looking into and healing the inner minds of others, she paradoxically induces a subtle tension in the environment surrounding her, playing a core role in increasing the immersion of the play.
Another central pillar that appears intersecting with Mary's narrative is the character Clark, played by the masterful actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. Clark is a person who once dreamed of becoming a glamorous architect and lived with his own ideals, but currently, he has fallen into the exhausting situation of surviving day by day as the owner of a petty, struggling furniture store. He struggles to make a living and promote his store by directly planning and filming clumsy television commercials, but the wall of reality is too high. He is a person standing so close to the edge of the cliff of life that he cannot even afford a proper living space, solving his room and board on a bed displayed in the showroom of the furniture store he runs. Then one day, while examining the wall to investigate the cause of the frequent power outages inside the furniture store, he accidentally discovers the Backrooms—a bizarre space where the laws of the real world do not apply.
The relationship between Clark and Mary is not a simple coincidence; it is tightly connected through the professional realm of psychological counseling. Clark is regularly receiving psychological counseling from Mary, and Mary understands better than anyone the decisive reason why Clark ended up divorcing his wife and his deep wounds. Clark was living with extreme dissatisfaction and a victim mentality regarding the fact that his wife merely wasted the money he had painstakingly earned through bone-breaking work on luxury and pleasure. As Clark, who had been crushed by such oppression of reality and economic and psychological deprivation, accidentally steps into the Backrooms—an unknown space where time and space are twisted—the film strongly draws the audience out of an ordinary drama and into the vortex of full-fledged, bizarre events.
As the infinite and closed space called the Backrooms unfolded on the screen, initially, I had a strong suspicion that this film might be thoroughly dealing with psychoanalytical metaphors. It felt like a space where the suppressed unconsciousness of Clark, who had stepped foot in it, was manifested. Furthermore, as it was revealed that even Mary, who analyzes the minds of others, also harbors deep trauma and mental issues related to her mother, this psychological approach seemed to gain even more persuasive power. In a word, all the characters entangled in the deformed space called the Backrooms are people harboring their own deficiencies and inner problems. It came across as if the film was metaphorizing in the form of a space the universal truth that any human living in this complex modern society inevitably has at least one mental wound or flaw they want to hide.
However, as the play crossed the midpoint and rushed toward the second half, I began to feel certain that this work was not simply correlated only with an individual's psychoanalysis or the projection of the unconscious. The Backrooms is not a fantasy created by the character's psychology; it is closer to showing very dryly and realistically the bizarre survival story people experience in a strange, independent parallel universe where the principles and laws are unknown. Searching for related information due to the curiosity that surged after watching the movie, I found that this work was not a standalone original screenplay but was based on a famous series that already commands a massive fandom online, such as on YouTube. The original universe created by creator Kane Pixels, based on the concept of Liminal Space, an urban legend wandering the internet, was the very backbone of this film.
An even more surprising fact is the background of director Kane Pixels, who visually realized this massive and bizarre universe. He began serializing this overwhelming Backrooms series on YouTube at the incredibly young age of 16, and even now, with the feature film completed, his current age is only 20, making it perfectly fitting to call it the birth of a genius director. The production scale of the movie is also a hot topic; despite being made on a relatively low budget by Hollywood standards of about 10 million dollars, it is currently recording a mega-hit, earning massive revenues of over 130 million dollars globally. Starting merely based on the text of a ghost story wandering in internet communities, a teenage boy added flesh to it through YouTube videos, and is finally writing an unprecedented box office myth of achieving tremendous commercial success in the global theater district.
Realizing by assembling the fragmented clues of the movie after finishing the entire viewing, I learned that this film, in particular, is a work where you can feel a much more diverse fun if you watch it with sufficient prior knowledge. This is because the film itself does not kindly explain the supernatural phenomena occurring inside the Backrooms space and the true nature of the bizarre creatures, leaving no way to know the reasons at all. Especially, the reason why the protagonist Clark decides not to try hard to escape the Backrooms, where terrible threats lurk, but rather decides to stay and live forever in that bizarre maze is also left to the audience's interpretation without a clear answer. Ultimately, even after the movie's ending credits roll, it will be deeply remembered as a very fascinating and unrivaled experiential horror film that makes the audience themselves wander online, eagerly searching for and studying related videos and the settings of the hidden universe.
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