Backrooms came out in the UK on the 28th of May, and I've been to the cinema to see it three times now.

I'm a huge fan of Kane Parsons' work. My friend Ell first introduced me to his Backrooms series on YouTube back in 2023 and The Oldest View is one of my favourite pieces of online horror*. Despite this, I was extremely wary when I heard Parsons had a deal to create an actual movie. He was 17, and I've seen what can happen with films based on online culture. Five Nights at Freddy's was more preoccupied with lore than telling a story (sorry, I'm in my 30's and don't know who Golden Freddy is) and Iron Lung was a commendable passion project but in dire need of someone to give Markiplier some hard edits.

I needn't have worried. Backrooms has solidified itself as one of my all-time favourite horror films. I love horror that is foreboding, unsettling, and subtle, or has some really juicy metaphorical meat. I was actually unsure how much I enjoyed it on my first viewing and came away with a reluctant ⅘ star rating. I went back with Ell and another friend for a second viewing and decided I loved it. Today I went back for a third and final viewing—alone—and while Backrooms is by no means perfect, I think there's still a lot of really interesting things to talk about. What's literally happening in the film—two struggling people finding their way into an unknown and endless maze that seems to imperfectly replicate reality—does not need to line up with its metaphors. I know a good portion of Backrooms fans were disappointed that Backrooms didn't delve deeper into Async or the other floors, but I don't care about any of that. I care about themes, I care about execution, and I care about the Backrooms as a metaphorical reflection of Clark's psyche.

Clark is in a rut. A failed architect who has found himself running a shitty furniture shop selling shitty furniture, living a shitty and lonely life after being kicked out by his partner Barbara (from his house, he'll have you know), Clark finds his way to the Backrooms one night and quickly becomes obsessed with its labyrinthine halls.

Clark tells his therapist Mary that the Backrooms “remembers" reality. Whether that remembering happens by the Backrooms themselves independently, or whether it is influenced by the presence of people who happen upon the Backrooms is unclear. In my opinion, the film almost seems to suggest the Backrooms “pre-"remembers. The film's opening takes place on 19th June 1990 and follows an Async employee panicking and ultimately succumbing to the film's monster. The employee races through a series of hallways that, unbeknownst to us just yet, feature distorted elements of Clark's furniture shop: the “No Credit, No Problem" signs, the ship wheels, even the tasteless beach and palm tree mural behind the cash desk. The monster, a distorted version of the shop's mascot Captain Clark, kills him. Ten days later, on 29th June, Clark enters the Backrooms for the first time.

There is an underlying sense of inevitability throughout much of Backrooms. Clark confesses to Mary that he can't help his angry outbursts, that it's just the way he's wired. His anger isn't something he can help, but something that is going to play out no matter the instigator and no matter the consequences. Even when Clark brings his employees Kat and Bobby into the Backrooms, it feels like they are doomed to die; Bobby finds his own tshirt among the remains of Captain Clark's moments before he dies. When Barbara's mis-remembered double staggers towards Clark, she is holding her hand to her scalp, as though recreating the last moment of their argument (did he strike her?) or perhaps pre-remembering Clark scalping her later in the film. The Backrooms remember, yes, but it sometimes feels like they remember something that hasn't happened yet, and reflect that inevitability back onto the people who are unlucky enough to find their way inside.

It's tragic and a little ironic, then, that Clark as the Backrooms remembers him is as his larger-than-life sales persona, Captain Clark. Backrooms-Clark distilled is down to little more than a mascot, as there is no one left in his life to remember him as a person. Instead, thanks to his TV adverts, the thing people know him to be is Captain Clark. Clark is surrounded by steering wheels at the beginning of the film, almost mockingly so, while he tallies up bills and helplessly continues to drift without direction. A pirate captain should be able to steer, but of course Clark can't do that. He's stuck moving in one direction. This route was inevitable. He's helpless to change things. It's just the way he's wired.

But… is it tragic? Clark can choose to change at any point, can choose to face his flaws head-on and accept that he isn't merely the victim but perhaps the driving force behind his failures. To be cheesy about it, Clark is perfectly capable of being the captain of his own life. He knows how to get out of the Backrooms. There is no locked door, no magically disappearing portal. The doorway remains and he is free to come and go. He chooses the Backrooms, which is an easy decision, because he was the architect of this version of reality. In a clumsy mural (the most mainstream and tropey element the film has to offer, in my opinion, and one we really could have done without), Clark has childishly scrawled that his own hand signed the papers.

Instead of engaging with the real people in his life, Clark has chosen to return to this stagnant, distorted worldview, where he is safe and unchallenged. He feels like he can't move on so he finds comfort in the apparent inevitability of stagnation that the Backrooms shows him. The still life of his wife Barbara does not respond or react to him; he chuckles as he tells Mary that, despite trying the roleplay challenge with Backrooms-Barbara, it never goes anywhere. This is Barbara in her ideal form: uncombative and unquestioning of his control. Why would he want to leave that behind for a reality where she fought back? Even so, Backrooms-Barbara reflects Clark's perception of his wife; her face is multi-angled, turning away from Clark. Even when standing still, she continually rejects him.

It is also interesting that the audio Async uses to lure Captain Clark is comprised of the Greetings to the Universe, one of the Golden Records sent out into space on the Voyager probes. Captain Clark seems drawn to audio, but destroys the cutouts upon which the speakers are mounted. When Mary finally manages to get away from Backrooms-Clark at the end of the film, Backrooms-Clark desperately lunges after her, wailing as he tries to reach her. Try as Clark might, he is unable to truly connect with anyone, both inside and without the Backrooms. The Backrooms remembers Kat and Bobby's missing posters, but there are no such posters for Clark. There is no one who cares to remember him as he really was.

The moment Mary tells him that he can remain stagnant if he wants, that he doesn't need to change if he doesn't want to, is the moment the Backrooms turns on Clark. We can only assume that Captain Clark hasn't attacked Clark up until now; we don't see the aftermath of their first meeting, but Clark's survival leads us to assume that there is some sort of amicability between them. Now that Clark has chosen to allow himself to linger in the past, however, Captain Clark sinks its teeth into him. His past literally consumes him.

Clark is not alone in obsessing over the past. We don't see a single flashback of Clark's argument with his wife, only the distorted, misremembered, and reconstructed roleplay conversations he has with Mary, but we get multiple glimpses at the ghost that haunts Mary herself. She was raised by a mentally ill mother who is heavily implied to have schizophrenia. Our introduction to Mary sees her watching the demolition of her childhood home, and despite her complicated relationship with her mother she finds herself saving a small lump of cement from the driveway where she and her mother made impressions of their hands. An impression is itself a distorted memory, isn't it? It's the memory of the hand that made it, but not an exact replica of the hand. Mary is just as alone as Clark—though we see her attend a party, she is separated from her friends or acquaintances somehow, unable to truly connect while she still harbours the trauma of her upbringing. In Mary's case, however, she is able to break free. She uses the symbol of her past to save herself from Captain Clark (she knocks him silly with it) and make her escape.

It's unclear if Mary's escape is truly an escape. Although she is rescued by Async, the end of the film sees her held in their care with no indication of when or even if she'll be let go. The film's window motif comes to a head in the final scene, when Mary—who is always surrounded by curtained, blinded, or shuttered windows, who hesitates before stepping over a threshold, who can only look through a window if it is barred or covered in some way—is finally given access to a clear window with blue skies beyond. And yet, the windows are high, out of reach, and the clouds are eerily still. When Phil, the Async employee interviewing her, asks how she got to the Backrooms, he asks how she made her way “here". Maybe there is no escape. Maybe destruction at the hands of one's past is inevitable. Maybe, no matter how hard we try, the walls we build around our trauma and the loops we use to cope are inescapable. Maybe this was always going to happen.

Maybe this already happened.

Maybe it's just the way we're wired.