lmStarring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass  

Directed by Kane Parsons

A24 – in Cinemas now

The stressed manager of a failing furniture store chances upon a portal into a labyrinthine alternative reality, and embarks on a quest to uncover the meaning of his discovery.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that movies about men in a state of mental crisis getting lost in nightmarish metaphorical labyrinths are like buses. You don’t see one for ages and then two come along at once. Just a couple of months ago, I very much enjoyed Genki Kawamura’s looping Tokyo subway drama Exit 8, so it’s a treat to report that Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is an even better and far more substantial iteration of the genre.

I’m unfamiliar with the source material – Parsons’s own Backrooms web series (which in turn takes inspiration from an assortment of other internet content, video games, cult TV series and movies) – but no prior knowledge is necessary. Parsons builds the world that store manager Clark (the ever reliable Chiwetel Ejiofor) encounters, with a deft directorial hand. Indeed, it’s the economy of his vision that makes it so powerful – endless corridors, all anodyne yellow wallpaper and polystyrene ceiling tiles – the seeming uniformity becoming only incrementally more strange as Clark’s odyssey progresses, and the Magritte-like incongruities of the domestic juxtapositions become ever more eccentric. It’s the blandness of the surrealism – piles of chairs and dirty laundry not quite behaving as they ought to – that makes this particular labyrinth so unsettling.

But can we trust Clark’s POV? He is seeing a somewhat chilly therapist (Renate Reinsve) and she’s dubious too. After all, Clark is a failed architect, while she has her own traumas associated with enclosed spaces to deal with. So is she in any way equipped to unpeel the truth behind Clark’s claims?

At the three-quarter mark, I’ll admit to doubting whether Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik could achieve any kind of satisfactory resolution, and it’s a close run thing, but on balance they get away with it, positing unsettling notions about perception and memory, and their role in our understanding of reality itself.

Less successful is the shift in the movie’s central character focus, as it moves into its final act, but it’s no less absorbing for all that.

Verdict: ‘Immersive’ is an overused critical buzzword, but it’s fair comment in relation to Backrooms whose imaginative world sticks to you long after you’ve left the cinema. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com