What Markiplier begat with Iron Lung let no meme-addled YouTuber-to-Movie-Mogul with a vaguely trust-fundy moniker tear asunder. Atop the box office sit features by Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, names that bring to mind halcyon annus 2005 when one Hunter Richards (a truly gastric-distress-inducing appellation) unleashed the atrocious relationship drama London, from which I still quote a frightfully-bewigged Jason Statham’s line “…sweating like a FUCKING rapist!” more often than is surely salutary.
The 20-years-young Parsons a.k.a. Pixels was born that very year, so I’m delighted that he missed out on Richards’s fittingly forgotten opus and instead built a mind-palace reference library that includes, per a Letterboxd BTS interview, two Portal games, Mr. Robot, One-Hour Photo, Paranoia Agent, and (the fuck?!?) Punishment Park. Are there echoes of the adamantly uncompromising Peter Watkins in the A24-allied Backrooms? Mayhaps if you feel like stretching into Slender Man. And now I’m imagining a lost hour or three of La Commune (Paris, 1871) taking place in the topsy-turvy liminal spaces that Parsons has manifested into a lucrative trademark… and possible gilded cage. (TBD on future hell wrought by IP.)
For now, we get a fully engaged Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve flirting with scare-flick trauma tropes in a movie that has numerous built-in byways allowing for easy escapes back to ambiguity and abstruseness. The deflating threats that are exposition and clarity (here personified by Mark Duplass’s company-man amalgam of Simon Oakland in Psycho and Michael York in Austin Powers) are fortunately always an unconscious egress away from enigma and conundrum.
Sure, Ejiofor’s down-and-out strip-mall furniture store owner drinks too much and has anger issues, while Reinsve’s phlegmatic therapist wraps her own fears, anxieties, and depressions in pop-therapeutic clichés that have helped land her on bestseller lists while keeping Bodhidharma entirely at bay. But they are, much like their terrifyingly Picassoed-cum-Lynchy counterparts in the labyrinthine, lemon-tinged, fluorescent-hummy backrooms, already copies of copies. The ’80s-to-’90s-suggestive real world of the film is a garbled threshold (clock that uncannily unsettling blue sky above) to an even more distorted netherworld that can be void, Valhalla or both depending on how you exist in it.
Patience (of a Wonder Showzen kind) is required. But rest assured there will be monsters that — in a memorable scene that reworks the freak-funhouse dinner climax of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through the nightmarish prism of a corporate stockholders summit — provide literal sustenance for the non compos menti among us. Backrooms itself is a hearty feast of sentient dust bunnies collated within and self-assuredly loosed from Parsons’s savantish psyche; hilarious that Osgood Perkins was among his “mentors” when student has so bullishly shown-up sensei.
Barker’s Obsession is an unrepentant troll — essentially Ari Aster’s Oleanna with the battle of the sexes sympathetically slanted, as it was in Mamet’s troglodytic conversation piece, toward an odious beta misogynist, here nicknamed, haw haw, Bear (Michael Johnston). The bitches-be-crazy! role is tenanted by Nikki (Inde Navarrette, going the full silk purse-sow’s ear route much like Mamet’s muse/straw-gal Debra Eisenstadt). She’s an initially cool-girl object of affection who seems more than willing to be on Bear’s arm if he could just get over his gosh-damned Gen-Z social anxiety. Instead, Bear requires hellishly divine intervention in the form of a make-one-wish trinket that, once used, turns Nikki into an oft-screeching banshee who loves to hide in shadows and sidle freakily backwards and sideways like a Linda Blair possessed.
The whole production is unwaveringly unpleasant and monotonous, cursed by that muddy digi-sheen that makes so many modern movies look like fingerprint-smudged ink blots, and with every gory boo! telegraphed fifty beats out. Would that some cogent ethos could be discerned in the Zoomer gloom-’n’-doom. Barker’s aims seem closer, apropos, to a carnival showman hawking his sub-par, second-hand goods to a gullible viewership more than willing to pony up for some fudged dread.