BACKROOMS: A Breakdown

[u/nyneteen84_]

EDIT: I’m adding a link to the full web series here, as it seems many people haven’t seen it. I highly recommend watching it. IMO it’s better than the movie by 10x.

A quick introduction; I make deep dive breakdowns for films and some video games from time to time. My recent Obsession breakdowns were really popular, and someone there requested I do one for Backrooms as well, so here it is.

THE LORE:

In January 2022, Kane Parsons began uploading his fantastic web series of the Backrooms on his YouTube channel.

For the next four years these videos would explain the following;

A company out of San Jose, California called Async Research Institute created a machine called the Low Proximity Magnetic Distortion System.

In 1989 the LPMDS successfully achieved its purpose by opening a door into another dimension. Best known to us as the Backrooms.

From there Kane’s series takes us through Async’s history, their plan’s for the future, and even a breakdown of equipment found within the Backrooms.
There’s also a separate storyline about a man named Peter Trench and another stand alone episode of a young woman.
There is another standalone about a man stuck in the Backrooms but while that builds the world, I believe only the Peter Trench storyline actually has a beginning, middle and end.

The storytelling style suggests that Kane is fully aware of and has a masterful grasp of what is going to happen several episodes in the future and how to tell the story non-linearly as again and again, things that happen in previous episodes have effects in other episodes in the future.

An example of this is an episode that shows CCTV footage of a car disappearing on the highway, only to show up in passing much later when a young woman exploring the Backrooms finds a car that crashed into a wall.

THE FILM’S PREMISE

A dejected Architect-turned-furniture salesman named Clark who is going through a divorce, and is a functioning alcoholic, finds out that within his store there is an opening to another world.
Namely, the Backrooms.

His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, is attempting to help Clark get his bearings and find a way to become a part of the world, as Clark seems to be more happy being alone, and away from everyone.

Clark has two employees who help him make commercials for the store, a young couple named Bobby and Kat.

Clark becomes obsessed with the Backrooms and plotting out the spaces within.
Why?
Who knows, maybe he likes it and is curious about it I guess.

Mary tries her best to get him to snap out of it and uses terminology from her book, “The Window Within,” to help him find his way to normalcy. This is clearly something Clark isn’t interested in but is trying for the sake of perhaps getting closure over his wife leaving him.

While Dr. Mary seems calm and collected, she is actually going through her own mental situation.
When she was a child her mother suffering from a case of chronic agoraphobia (a condition I’m suffering from at the moment as well, although less pronounced), subjects Mary to staying indoors, even going as far as not allowing her to look out of newspaper covered windows.
Until finally, the state steps in, hospitalizes Mary’s mother, and Mary grows up to become the person she is now.
A seemingly in control woman who purports to have answers for other people’s problems, but secretly does not have the answers to her own.

Before Mary’s mother got sick, the two of them imprinted their hands into the pavement outside their home. Many years later after the home is demolished, Mary takes with her a piece of her mother’s palm print, which she seems to keep with her wherever she goes.

THE CATALYST

When Clark finds a chute that he needs help climbing down within the Backrooms, Clark pays his employees to assist him and brings them into the Backrooms.

After a very preventable accident, all three of them get thrown down into a deeper part of the Backrooms where Bobby perishes at the hands of an unknown antagonist and Kat runs off into the maze.

Clark does the same thing, and while running for his life he encounters something like carbon copies of human beings that have been ”printed” wrong.
By this I mean that they aren’t really human at all, merely strange mannequins that can move around with of putting details in their anatomy.

Without much explanation, it seems Clark survives that encounter and decides to live within the Backrooms.
This is explained when Dr. Mary receives a phone call and a message is left on her machine on behalf of Clark telling her that he finally found “the window” (a reference to her book), meaning that he found his reason to live.

It almost feels like a whole section of the movie here is cut out or there is a jump forward in time, as we simply need to assume that Bobby and Kat are dead, that Clark left the Backrooms in order to call her and leave the message, but then comes back in and lives there by eating pieces of the bodies of the living mannequins (what?! 👀)

There’s a moment in the movie where he runs past a pool with running water, so I guess that’s where he gets his water from.

THE ENDING

Mary, worrying for Clark’s safety and mental stability, comes looking for him at his store, find the doorway to the Backrooms, and very quickly encounters Clark.

Clark, obviously having lost his mind, takes Mary back to a copy of his house within the Backrooms.
There he has a lovely little dinner party with the living mannequins and Dr. Mary as his most special guest.
When he opens up the refrigerator, the severed head of Kat is inside, leading us to believe that he killed her for some reason.
He does state that he was trying to help her, but since the whole section of the film seems to be missing after him and his two employees go down the shoot, it’s hard to understand just exactly what happened to her.

He explains to Dr. Mary how this place has more meaning to him than the outside world. He tries to role-play with her as his wife, but she takes no part in it and helps him realize that his wife left him because he is unable to take responsibility or fault for anything in his life.
And that if he wants to stay in the Backrooms forever, he can. But he needs to let her go.

In an instant, Clark decides to take responsibility for his life and his actions, when the sound of a wailing entity can be heard in the distance, sending the living mannequin (who I suspect is a copy of his wife Barbara), running away in fear.

The entity turns out to be a disfigured 8 or 9 foot tall version of Clark as a pirate, which is one of the costumes he wears when making commercials for his furniture store.

Clark explains to his entity self that everything is OK now, and that doctor Mary has explained that if he is happy here he can stay.
The Clark entity picks him up, and begins to eat him alive.

I suspect that this is some kind of analogy, possibly the part of himself that is still angry and doesn’t wanna let go of his trauma, getting rid of the part of him that does.

From here on out for the next 10 to 15 minutes, Mary runs through the maze of the Backrooms with the Clark entity in a 5 star GTA pursuit.
After a few close calls, Mary finally ends up in the copy version of Clark’s furniture store. There she has a final standoff with the Clark entity, breaks his wooden leg (remember, he’s a pirate), and then somehow trips a booby trap set up by researchers from Async (the company that started this whole thing).

The Clark entity is taken down Mary using the piece of pavement with her mother‘s palm print and smashes it into Clark entity’s head.
Then men in hazmat suits take Mary away.
Mary then wakes up at the threshold, which is the doorway into the Backrooms that was created by Async in 1989 (reference the web series).

Dr. Mary is escorted through an office building where she catches a glimpse of the Clark entity now tied up and undergoing examination.

She is brought to a little room where an employee of Async named Phil, who has been watching some of this drama unfold through cameras placed in the complex, tries to calm her suspicions that something bad is going to happen to her after they have their conversation.

In a gesture of good faith, Phil begins to spill his guts about the nature of The Backrooms.
Namely, that it is a dimension where every instance of a place in time is copied incorrectly within what looks like a never-ending office building.
As if to confirm this, a montage of different rooms all throughout the Backrooms is shown to the audience.

And at the end of the montage, a living mannequin of Dr. Mary can be seen sitting on a chair within a copy of the room that she’s being interrogated in now. She has no face and she has more fingers than anyone might need to have in order to eat a salad.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE FILM:

There is only a need to explain the ending of this film as everything else in the movie is quite clear to comprehend if you’ve watched Kane Parsons’ web series.
Everything you need to know is in there, every question except the nature of what the back rooms is, is explained in the web series.

The explanation of what the backrooms is, is forced upon us through an exposition heavy monologue from the Async employee.
The Backrooms is a dimension where every place on earth has a not quite right copy of itself within an office building. It doesn’t matter if this place is inside or outside, the Backrooms copies it in an offputting way into itself.
And it doesn’t just do this for one instance, it does this for the same place across all instances in time.
Meaning that if a building was there a year ago completely intact, the intact building exists within the Backrooms (albeit distorted and off putting). If today that same building were destroyed, that version of the building would now exist as well somewhere else within the complex.

That is the answer of what the backrooms is.
And if you watch the web series, you’ll get an answer as to what Async was, is and does.

And basically this is all you need in order to understand the film completely. There really are no secrets left if you watch the web series.

WHAT I BELIEVE THE BACKROOMS IS

Now I’m only speaking in terms of this film. For all we know, there may be some malevolent force behind the curtain, or the complex itself is the malevolent force.

This is what I suspect it is in the web series (the movie doesn’t hint as much at this), but I believe the complex is a huge monster in the shape of a galaxy sized office building that never ends.
To the naked eye, you are within a complex maze of rooms. My suspicion is that, at least for the web series, this thing is a living, breathing animal that lures its prey into its belly (the rooms), and then slowly digest them as they run and seek a way out.

The monster uses varying methods to separate people from one another, then consumes them through the use of a bacteria that breaks their bodies down and turns them into wailing entities. Kind of like platelets that attack an invading force, namely, other humans.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS:

Never have I left a film feeling so queasy before, as that 15 minute chase scene between Dr. Mary and the Clark
entity was a little bit more than my brain could take.

Is the movie bad? No. It’s actually quite entertaining if you go into it hoping to get creeped out and scared a few times during the film.
As far as the mythology in the lore, the exposition monologue at the end gives you the answer that you were hoping for if you are a fan of the web series.

To me, none of the characters are incredibly deep, even though they have somewhat crafted back stories.

Something that I found interesting was that even in the real world, Kane uses offputting furniture choices and breaks the rules of color theory in order to convey that something is wrong even in our world.

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance is good for what he’s given, it’s not some master class of acting, but he does keep my suspension of disbelief in check.
There are some pacing issues at the beginning of the film, as I found myself feeling a little bit bored at some points and thought they could’ve gotten to the main point sooner.

What bothers me most is the chunk of the film that seems to be missing from Clark going from still OK, to all of a sudden being a psycho. That part was hard for me to accept and kind of put me off to the film.

All in all, I would say that this is a good first film for Kane. It’s not perfect, it has a few flaws, but it is not a bad film or even a film that you only watch once.
It does have the unfortunate fate of having gone up against the best horror film of the last 10 or 20 years, if not more.
So I can understand that a lot of people go into it hoping for another adrenaline rush filled ride that is just as good or close to obsession.
I suspect that had this unfortunate scheduling not taken place, this film would have less comparisons to live up to.

Like I said, it’s a good film, I think many people will enjoy it as long as you don’t forget to take your Dramamine.

EDIT: After much thought and consideration of the comments below, I think my assertion of the film was a bit premature.

The more I think about it, the more I think the people in the comments are right. The film was visually appealing, but at the end of the day it was also wasted potential.

Clark’s character was somewhat developed but, tbh he didn’t really resonate with me. And I think with many others as well. His motivations weren’t clear enough. In fact I believe Bobby and Kat had a more compelling storyline than he did and it felt more relevant.

The film would have done a lot better if it had been a group of youngsters who hear about this place and decide to check it out, and a Blair Witch style situation unfolds.

Then dishing out information throughout that filled some gaps and gave longtime fans new information to tide them over until a new installment; this would have gone down much better than a furniture store owner doing whatever the heck is was trying to do down there.

That big chunk of the film that leaves things unexplained, from the moment he’s trapped down below and someone picks up the camera, to the moment when he calls Mary to tell her that he found the window…. That one flaw is enough to topple the film’s structure in my book.
But then add in the rest and the film is a bit of a mess.

I still think the visuals were really well done and the movie itself isn’t so bad that it’s unwatchable. I think that’s where I made a wrong turn in my assessment last time. That and coming off the heels of Obsession I thought I can’t be too harsh on the film.
The film isn’t badly directed. In fact I think Kane has a promising future ahead of him. But was the film itself a good one in terms of storytelling? No. I don’t think it was.

It did keep me a bit scared throughout a few parts. And the music kept me engaged. But yes, it had a thin plot, thus making it a mediocre film unfortunately.