In some ways Backrooms lives up to the hype – others, not so much. While it is arguably a relatively weak horror, however, I do want to sing the praises of Backrooms, for its conceptual vision and its unique approach to critiquing the swivel-eyed hype around AI.
If I were to put it at its most reductive, I would say Backrooms felt like a corridor-based remake of The Blair Witch Project, with a little class-satire thrown in for good measure. A nicely designed piece of filmmaking, which managed to make a limited concept into a feature that didn’t overstay its welcome.
As dismissive as that sounds, I have to admit that to some extent, that is already a win. Because anyone who has heard me complain about the endless corridors of Black Summer knows, I hate… HATE films which use this as a substitute for that other loathsome low-budget environment of the woods (which there are plenty of in season two of Black Summer). It’s usually delivered with such disdain for the audience, such a lack of effort, as if the filmmakers assume we will all simply be impressed by them bothering to shoot at a cheap indoor location, just to change things up.
Kane Parsons – the now-21-year-old filmmaker who helmed this production, deserves some of the credit for this. In part because he got to the punch first in terms recognising the conceptual potential of AI for metaphoric horror. Not in a Charlie Brooker sense where punchline is always “Wow, it’s terrifying how society’s ruling class has all these really effective technological weapons to police us now.” But rather, “Wow, it’s terrifying how society’s ruling class is completely enamoured with this really shitty technology and is determined for it to force it on everyone else.”
The Backrooms is a concept which has been hashed and rehashed by online creepypasta forums for years, before Parsons used it as inspiration for a web-series, on which this film is based. In this iteration, the Backrooms is an unexplained phenomenon which ‘trains’ itself on any people or structures it encounters. It then “remembers” those objects, approximating them as a series of sad and disturbing echoes – always missing the unique essence that made the original at least functional, if not beautiful. We first encounter it in a basement beneath a furniture emporium, which is empty of customers, and filled with items nobody wants. As the Backrooms set to work, they translate this input into cavernous buildings which (reminiscent of Ned Flanders’ post-hurricane home) shrink into impossibly tiny doors, chairs with legs at either end of their back, and, of course, ‘humans’ with the wrong number of eyes, fingers and mouths.
That is an aspect of AI which I am surprised it has taken so long for a filmmaker to capitalise on, but this production makes the most of that in a technical sense – as I will note later. Even so, in wider culture, it is not an especially innovative point. Instead, what I think is more interesting, though, is Parsons’ willingness to deploy this to paint the dominant class of people – so easily impressed by all these artless, shoddy plagiarisms – as the painfully unexceptional, smooth-brained narcissists that they are.
The worst people you know
Because who are the people who are most interested in the concept of the Backrooms here? The one working class person exposed to it immediately understands they need to get the fuck out of Dodge – and is roundly ignored by everyone else. No, the only people who really marvel at it are those who have at least a hand on the keys to the kingdom; but simultaneously have an unwavering victim complex. They are the kind of characters who you’d find in Elon Musk’s replies. The worst people you know.
We have a corporate jobsworth from the world of health-tech, and a petit-bourgeois furniture store owner, who immediately find themselves immediately bewitched by the beauty of what unfolds before them. And what is that ‘beauty’?
In the case of Phil – a man whose company used to manufacture MRI machines, but now pours all its resources into the vacuum of the Backrooms – sees it as some great miracle, which reifies his own power, as he has taken ownership of its mystery, possibly with the intent of harnessing it to pump out poorly ‘remembered’ and dangerous equipment. His company used to have to employ people and make something useful for that ideological status – but he now has an opportunity to divorce that entirely from any kind of productive forces, regardless of the cost or human suffering we see the spread of the Backrooms is causing.
At the same time, Clark – struggling to flog unwanted furniture, in the shadow of several great failures – sees the Backrooms as a redemption. Having failed to make it as an architect, and recognising the elements of his own store that the Backrooms has cannibalised and misremembered, he looks to claim this as evidence of his actual brilliance as an architect. Meanwhile, having driven his wife to file for divorce with the alcoholism and emotional abuse he meted out while refusing to process his failure, he finds the monstrous hallucinations dwelling in the Backrooms soon provide him with an echo chamber; again reassuring him that actually he was right all along. These are pathetic, hate-filled figures who we recognise in the modern day as prime candidates for AI psychosis – the people who because the technology is an obsequious toady, designed to coddle users into using it for as long as possible, and indulge every reactionary inclination they cling to in the process.
To make a film where this critique exists in this moment – where the people you need to appeal to, to finance and (more importantly) distribute a movie are almost exclusively falling into that category is, brave – and also an important blueprint for artists going forward. The extent to which OpenAI has its hooks in the studio system means Luca Guadagnino’s movie about the company – billed as a kind of The Social Network for the AI moment – likely only offers the most tepid of critiques, but due to the cry-baby nature of CEO Sam Altman, will now almost certainly never see the light of day.
A24 – which distributed the film – is no stranger to this. Its films have already been caught sneaking generative content into them to pad out or cheapen production – and the company has just signed a $75 million deal with Google to experiment on ‘filmmaking’ AI tools. That is more a deal that will work for advertising the health of the AI market, rather than actually demonstrating its ability to make a return on investment, with the hope A24’s threadbare indy credibility (come on, it’s a part of the studio system at this stage) being used to launder the still-hypothetical credibility of the AI money-pit. I don’t think the technology will actually be replacing much of anything (yet) at A24, because it can only put out slop. BUT a big part of that will also serve as de facto hush money – an encouragement not to distribute any films that make negative points about silicon valley’s fragile little baby.
I think that perhaps the most important thing Backrooms does, then, is shows there are clearly ways of getting round that – even when a studio you’re working with is such an obvious stooge now. In the abstract realm of horror, Parsons has shown you can still circulate AI criticisms, without being cancelled in the event of an Altman-style hissy-fit.
Grand designs
Elsewhere, Parsons also deserves commendation because he co-composed the ambient electronic score with Edo van Breemen. And again, escaping the dullness of the ‘corridor movie’ can really be helped by a good soundtrack. It means even in the film’s lulls; it is simply a joy to listen to it.
Other technical credit must go to designer Danny Vermette and cinematographer Jeremy Cox. On a practical level, they are probably the film’s true MVPs.
Vermette’s architectural nightmares are impeccably thought out. They are each deceptively singular – an apparently infinite series of featureless, mustard yellow rooms – but the longer actors observe and interact with them, the more their tailored peculiarity sings. It might be the closest we ever get to seeing what Lovecraft meant by his famously vague “Cyclopean cities” of “non-Euclidean geometry”. Meanwhile, Cox’s framing of the sets (three square kilometres, across four gigantic sound stages) picks up that potential and runs with it – succeeding in making the colossal verticality of a number of the rooms seem cavernous in one second, but claustrophobic the next.
Neither of those artists is 21 though, so I can see why the distributors at A24 decided to go a different way for their marketing.
Someone else who isn’t 21 is veteran writer Will Soodik, who was picked to script this film. In this case, however, I think his work was unlikely to win much room in the hype package – even if he were only just of drinking age. It’s here that what might have been a great piece of conceptual horror really gets dragged back down to fine territory.
The material horror of the piece is still derived from the same nuts-and-bolts, chase me clichés that so many low-budget horrors depend upon. And on a primal level, that still works well enough for audiences to want that experience – hence the $300 million the film has already raked in at the box office. But beyond that, we need something on top of that to distract from the formulaic nature of the scares, and give us a more rounded, human experience. In the best examples, that comes from characters we can recognise and related to, for better or worse, and dialogue that sparks chemistry between the actors.
Soodik’s script delivers none of this. A set of cynical copy-paste moments are rolled out to signify ‘tension’ between therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) and her patient Clark – the terminally divorced small business owner. Each interaction between the pair draws jarring attention to just how derivative it is, and led me to consciously categorise each one before the actors had delivered most of their lines. Oh, this is the scene where she doesn’t believe him about X. This is the scene where she finally admits psychotherapy is useless and gives him some REAL TALK about how everything is ultimately the fault of the individual.
Of course, the film does a lot of ‘derivative’ things consciously as part of its commentary on generative AI. But that’s all well-thought out, intentional visual satire. This is dull. And as the story runs out of road, with a ‘big reveal’ of the violent, long-limbed creature that has been pursuing our leads serving us something with all the visual threat of a sports mascot, having so little intrigue in terms of the relationships or dialogue on screen means we are fully exposed to just how goofy this finale is. A damp squib instead of a crescendo.
Limits of independence
All of this highlights the paradoxes of independent art. Or at least, the paradoxes of it under capitalism. Without challenging that base, there are limited opportunities to really change the kind of productions which are considered viable.
The independent production companies wanted a risk – but not too much of a risk – because the ultimate goal behind commissioning Backrooms was triangulating to as many audiences as possible to make a fat profit. Whether it’s a studio, or a set of independent companies, that immediately leads something considered ‘out-there’ to have to take a more risk-averse route.
In Backrooms, there is a clear tension between the odd design choices, permitted to bring in the artsy crowd, being paired with the more standard methods, including name-actors to draw a general crowd. Believing (somewhat patronisingly) that more general audience needed to be babied, or they would hate the movie, someone in the mile-long producer-roster seems to have panicked and brought in a ‘safe’ pair of hands to write.
Because of this, what kind of legacy this movie has remains to be seen – at least in the sense of other productions. Making more than $300 million on a $10 million budget means distributors will be looking to learn from it. But producers desperate for a new ‘thing’ to draw jaded audiences in, as comic books or action franchises wane in popularity, may well take the wrong lessons from the success of Backrooms.
I suspect someone will mistake the novelty of a young ‘YouTuber’ director, or of basing IP on a meme (which I previously warned might start happening) was the draw – especially as the increasingly ancient captains of Hollywood struggle to connect to younger viewers. And they may also therefore decide the other, edgier stuff, can probably be phased out. And then, like the Backrooms, like AI, the norm will revert to half-remembered rehashes of previous works; rather than using the opportunity to welcome new ideas that can revitalise a flagging film industry.
