About a decade ago, an anonymous 4chan user posted a photo of an empty yellow room lit by fluorescents. The dingy, vaguely corporate room is accompanied by the lifeless hum of drop ceiling lights. It resembles what the waiting room of a dentist’s office would look like 30 years ago, but it’s vacant. Somehow, it feels haunted; a purgatory of sorts, but also something that feels entirely man-made. It’s incredibly mundane, but it only comes to you in your dreams.

Kane Parsons’ quiet and creepingly surreal “Backrooms” channels this space, plunging viewers into an alternate realm that’s filled with seemingly negligible items. Carpeted floors, futons, swimming pool tiles, piles of laundry, and cardboard cutouts all inhabit this place. The backrooms poses itself as a repository of everything random, gorged with memories that have slowly and menacingly warped into something else.

Parsons didn’t come up with the idea of the backrooms, but he has a longstanding relationship with the source material through his 2022 Youtube web series of the same name. He built out a mythology for this internet phenomenon, relying on fuzzy found footage and ‘90’s kitsch to hone in his horror aesthetic. This vibe continues on a much larger and much more ambitious scale in the film.

An analog found-footage cold open set in 1990 gives an unsettling start before the film introduces Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner operating on alcohol, rage and regret. Clark regularly sees therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) to help him find a way out of his self-made mental prison. Just as she coaches him to recognize the repeating patterns so that he can create a new path for himself, his furniture store basement presents him with the opportunity to do exactly that.

Late one night, Clark discovers he can slip through the basement walls, leading him to an expansive extension to the store he never knew existed. The further he explores the realm, the more peculiar and uneasy things get.

“Backrooms” often doubles as a metaphor for the labyrinth we call the human mind. All throughout the film, characters converse over their looping behavioral patterns before they ultimately find themselves stuck in an eerie cosmic purgatory. And much like the mind, the backrooms present endless possibilities, forgotten and distorted memories — all within a surreal setting that has no borders or tether to our physical reality.

The most impressive part about Kane Parsons’ debut is how efficiently he mines tension and rattles nerves from empty rooms all armored in yellow wallpaper. Every moment in the backrooms feels off, but like Clark, viewers are left curious how each room distorts into nightmarish uses of uncanny valley.

The backrooms have no real easy explanation. This type of existential and liminal space horror operates at its highest level when the plot is vague. However, the third act, written by Will Soodik, clashes hard with Parsons’ overarching cryptic vision and is not visceral enough to stand toe-to-toe with the unnerving build-up. The confusing ending leaves the obvious still on the table: there’s still more to the backrooms that needs to be explored.

And still I can’t help but enjoy the ambiguity of it all. “Backrooms” is simultaneously complex and sparse, but it never feels repetitive. Although set in the ‘90s, it effectively captures the modern anxieties and isolation in a way that so frequently makes your heart beat a little quicker. Even if the journey slowly loses steam due to its cryptic ending, the fire never burns out, and we’re left with a disturbing visual representation of the human psyche.

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