LIMINAL SPACE
Main Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve
Director: Kane Parsons
The boys at the El Pavo Real Night Club have outdone themselves by creating for me an absolutely stunning evening dress in peacock blue silk, cut on the bias with a trim with Aegean eyes and a peacock feather headpiece that is simply to die for. When I first tried it on, it was running a bit loose around the hips and the bodice but the boys were ready for this and had the most divine little pads ready which made the fit perfectly and accentuated by lovely natural curves. I’m not sure what made them use corn starch for the stuffing as Dacron fiberfill would have been more giving, but who am I to criticize the ways of foreign tailoring? I got myself dressed with the assistance of a most amazing little creature of indeterminate gender who told me to call them Lupita.
I sat in front of the mirror in the dressing room and put my face on, or as much as I could with the limited selection of Dollar General products available. One would think they would have stocked the many fine products available from Lesterene cosmetics but, alas, that was not the case. As I was finishing up, the other contestants began to arrive and change. There were the usual young things, but others appeared to be stevedores from the port whose wide shoulders and middle-aged paunches were going to contrast greatly with my sylphlike figure. I left them to their transformations and Michael invited me to use his office for some peace and quiet as there were still several hours until show time. He had a charming little fainting couch in a corner covered in a pale yellow damask which contrasted nicely with my gown, so I settled on it with a tequila sunrise, compliments of the house, and searched the films available on streaming for something to pass the time.
My choice was Backrooms, an inventive little horror thriller which came and went in the theatres during the time I was incommunicado in the Puerto Vallarta sanitarium. I had heard in mentioned a few times vaguely in passing with favorable comments so I figured I should check it out. The concept of Backrooms was developed by Kane Parsons, then a teenager in Petaluma, as an internet creepypasta (a word I had not heard before and had to look up – it’s basically a catch all term for an internet-based paranormal/horror meme or short film). It caught the attention of A24 films and, at the age of 20, young Mr. Parsons found a feature film greenlit using his ideas, with himself as director. And he succeeded with the film hitting number one in both the U.S. and globally, grossing 400 million on a budget of 10 million.
The film begins with what appears to be found footage. It’s the early 1990s. A scared man in a hazmat suit is wandering through a series of rooms that appear to be a vacant office or retail space, painted a sickly yellow and with proportions that feel off. Suddenly he is attacked. We see scientists studying the footage. The scene and tone then rapidly shift and we meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the proprietor of a failing discount furniture store coping with an equally failing marriage. He is in therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who has issues of her own as she recently witnessed the destruction of her childhood home and has been dealing with he fallout of her mentally ill mother. Through their conversation, we learn a bit about their flaws and failures.
Clark’s furniture store has a pirate mascot and he dresses up in a Treasure Island get up in order to film some cheap late night TV commercial footage with the assistance of his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett). Dealing with electrical technical difficulties, Clark discovers some odd switches in the fuse box and soon notices light coming from around a hidden door in the basement wall of his store. Walking through the wall here brings him into the maze of yellow rooms and fluorescent lighting we have already seen. He begins to explore and the deeper he goes, the more disorienting it becomes, as if MC Escher and the architects of the Winchester Mystery House got together to design an endless windowless strip mall. He enlists Kat and Bobby in his explorations, and they soon discover they are not alone in the liminal space of the backrooms. When Clark disappears, Mary suspects that there may be some truth to the fantastical stories she has been hearing from him, and she too goes to the store and discovers the entrance. We learn more and more about this creepy place full of improbable doors, walls, floors, and malformed furniture and accoutrements as the characters eyes are also opened.
The true star of Backrooms is the seemingly endless set of disturbing empty spaces, originally created as a digital environment by young Mr. Parsons and realized by production designer Danny Vermette and art director Alan Derksen. The set, some 30,000 square feet, occupied four sound stages and there are stories that cast and crew kept getting lost in its confusing twists and turns. As shot by cinematographer Jeremy Cox, the backrooms are disorienting, chilling, and altogether unnerving and will stay with you long after the film ends. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such masterful use of the horror of the ordinary.
Director Parsons shows an assured touch with the material, which had been cooking in his brain since adolescence. He knows how to make the most of his setting and appears to have a reasonable rapport with his actors, getting two decent performances out of the leads. Mr. Ejiofor, who is an old hand at film with credits ranging from Kinky Boots to Doctor Strange, is both sympathetic and repellent as the tortured Clark. Ms. Reinsve nearly matches him as the psychologist who can barely hold herself together. The supporting cast, most of whom have far less to do, are fine but no one really stands out. The film belongs to the two leads.
Mr. Parsons and his screenwriter Will Soodik understand the first principle of good film horror: don’t reveal too much. Let the audience fill in the gaps with their own imaginations. Much is left unexplained and the first three quarters of the film is full of things that happen just out of sight of the camera. Backrooms lets us down in the last act for two reasons. One, the physical manifestation of the dangerous unknown is quirky enough to be nearly comic rather than thrilling and two, we get into all of the tropes of the final sequence of final girl against the big bad. If they had gone a slightly different direction with the last fifteen minutes, the film would have been much stronger in my mind.
Still, there is much to admire here and once you have visited the backrooms, you are unlikely to forget them. Give it a look.
Damaged ID badge. Bad pirate imitations. Warped furniture. Gratuitous grumpy electrician. Construction noticeboard. Blood smears. Flickering fluorescent lights.
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
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