There’s the void of potential, and then there’s the void of decay. Despite the former’s more meditative, expansive, and serene make-up, we continually find ourselves drawn to the latter’s more desolate and decaying spaces, because after all, a man had been there. It’s those very garbled, uncanny remnants of former human presence and hazy memory that Kane Parsons’ buzzy debut feature, Backrooms, meticulously invests in to craft the ultimate liminal horror.

Expanding upon his viral YouTube video series—based on the infamous internet creepypasta of the same name—Backrooms seamlessly immerses us in an alternate dimension of eerily empty, labyrinthine office spaces. As its confounding Escher loops, contorted sepia-toned architecture, and glitched-out furnishings slowly fold in on each other, Parsons’ film manifests as an abstract feast of sonic, visual, and production design that poignantly reckons with our collective alienation amid such wasteful, unchecked modernization and industrialization—when it isn’t hampered by an occasional propensity for safer, traditional scares.

Set in the early ‘90s, Backrooms centres on disgruntled furniture store owner and failed architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). As he shifts between long, lonely hours at his perpetually empty business and heated conversations about his broken marriage with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve)—who is also battling childhood demons—Clark has spent a lifetime going nowhere. That’s until he stumbles, or “no-clips,” through a hidden door to an alternate dimension defined by a surreal, seemingly endless maze of empty office spaces. 

Fascinated by his discovery, Clark quickly becomes obsessed and consumed by its oppressive, penetrating spaces. It’s a harrowing find that soon leads Mary to the same doomed halls in search of him and, ultimately, herself.

Armed with a slinking, confidently methodic lens, Backrooms remains at its most hypnotic and engrossing when its horrors are abstract, implicit, and internalized, forcing us to fill in the blanks of its all-consuming spatial voids. Often limiting us to fuzzy, uninterrupted VHS-style first-person sequences that breathlessly blur perspective and detail, Parsons confidently shapes moments of slow-burning dread that feed on our worst anxieties and fears.  As a result, what lays just outside the frame becomes an austere chasm of contemplation and imagination.

When its lens comes into focus, yucky yellows and bludgeoning beiges highlight impossibly devised floors and wildly random objects. Ranging anywhere from stop signs to creepy standees, this cavalcade of, what one protagonist labels “everyplace that ever was” renders Parsons’s film as an assaulting, atmospheric marvel that fosters sensory-pervading terrors that peel back layers of both physical and existential decay.

Coupled with a ghostly score that recalls Silent Hill with its distorted industrial drones and harsh electronic whizzes, it all gives way to an experience that’s as fascinated by its literal liminal spaces as well as the unforgiving mental ones we create for ourselves in a world where unfettered development of capital supersedes nourishment of the mind and soul.

Just as Backrooms settles into an uncanny, overwhelming vibe, its final act is undone by self-imposed guardrails. Abstract, interior fears and atmospheric thrills morph into familiar, personified monsters in a strained attempt to find some sense of narrative clarity.  Though such hiccups keep Parsons’ first outing from being a truly daring horror exercise, it’s an experience that marks the emergence of an exciting new voice in genre filmmaking.

Backrooms releases May 29th.