Enter into the Endless Office Space

So I don’t tend to watch a lot of different things on YouTube. I watch a lot of YouTube, mind you, as I usually have it on while I’m doing all kinds of stuff. Game playthroughs and movie reviews / discussions are the kind of content I can pay attention to fully, or just with half an ear as I do whatever I want. YouTube is great for that, and between those things, and the occasional times where I want to learn a bit of this or that (like movie or video game history), I can get all that on my feed and then move on whenever I want. It’s pretty simple.

But it also means that I don’t dig, and I don’t tend to watch a lot of what others are watching. That means that when it comes to Backrooms, a film based on a YouTube series created by Kane Parsons (itself based on an internet creepypasta called “The Backrooms”) I really didn’t have much of a clue about what was really going to be in the film. I knew it was based on a YouTube series, but I didn’t go out of my way to investigate it or see what that content was all about. I’m a movie reviewer, and if I’m going to see a movie I want to go into it pretty fresh. I didn’t even watch the trailer in this case, going for as pure an experience as I could.

The end result was that I got a movie that was interesting… but it also felt like there was something missing from the whole experience. It’s like the film was inching towards something really cool, some greater meaning for the story that was just on the cusp of reality by the time the film ends, but then it never actually achieves a real climax. There’s action, and maybe a pass at something that could be considered horror, but it never really feels like it comes together like it should. Maybe that’s because I didn’t watch the YouTube shorts and, thus, don’t have “the full story”, but if that’s the case, well, I think you can guess what I’m going to say: “if a movie can’t hold its own without supplemental materials to explain itself, then it’s not really a successful movie.”

The film does start interestingly enough. We’re introduced to Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of a struggling furniture store. He has dreams of being an architect, but he’s spent most of his life stuck in dead end jobs just to pay the bills, until somehow he settled at this store, unable to escape. He’s sad and depressed and a bit of an alcoholic, which also contributed to the end of his marriage. The only person he has to talk to is his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), but that doesn’t stop him from feeling trapped and alone.

And then he discovers a gateway into another world within his store. There’s a wall that isn’t really a wall, and when he pushes through he finds a dimension seemingly of infinite space, made up of endless office rooms that connect together, stretching on and on like the least interesting version of Narnia. He begins exploring the space, night after night, finding more and more rooms, passages that twist and bend around each other, all of which feel like versions of our world, just… slightly off. He wants to understand this place, so he tells Mary about it, but she doesn’t give him the validation he needs. So he goes into the backrooms… and then disappears, leaving Mary wondering where he’s gone and what happened. And then she enters the rooms as well…

From one perspective we can view the backrooms of Backrooms as a kind of extension of Clark. He’s the one that finds it and, in a way, it feeds his desires as an architect. He wants to map the space to understand it, to know why it’s built the way it is. We can also view it from his emotional perspective as the rooms are sad and depressing and are empty and devoid of life. All they have are relics and memories, lives lived better, which Clark wants but seemingly can’t have. The backrooms, for him, are like an extension of his own existential dread made manifest as sickly, yellow, office rooms.

That’s an interesting perspective, and it would work if the rooms only existed because of Clark. But that interpretation falls apart when we learn, right at the start of the film, that the rooms have existed for a long, long time, seemingly on their own, drawing in memories and history from everywhere and everywhen. Clark moved into them, and became part of them, but they aren’t really about Clark, no matter what he (or the story seems to think). It’s like two ideas meeting each other, seemingly saying, “yes, we are the same,” when they’re really not.

I think that’s where the film stumbles for me because it doesn’t do a good enough job drawing the right parallels in its story and then using those to reach a proper conclusion. This is in part because Clark is, functionally, our protagonist but within the bounds of his story it’s hard to say that he actually learns or grows. If this is a hero’s journey (and without spoiling anything major), Clark takes the journey into another world but he doesn’t seem to make the full connection and come out the other side properly.

From that angle, then, we could argue that Mary, who goes in after him, is really the hero of the story… except that she’s only a small part of it and she doesn’t really have much story around her. She lived with a hoarder, her mother, who was afraid of the world. She was saved by Child Protective Services, and then went on to make her own life as a therapist (a fairly famous one, too), but none of that really has a deeper connection to the backrooms. It feels like a story thread that’s raised but never completed, just left there to dangle, waiting for another act to bring it all together. Mary doesn’t have a complete hero’s journey any more than Clark does, and it leaves the film feeling incomplete.

Which is a pity because the world within the backrooms is very interesting. There’s a creepy, disturbing vibe to this other world, the endless world that seemingly absorbs a version of everything, and it makes you want to explore it more (much like Clark does). The film, though, never delves deep enough to pay off this world, nor its characters, so while the film is creepy in places (I wouldn’t call it horror, but it has a creepy, sci-fi vibe to it) it simply doesn’t feel complete by any measure.

And that may be because I didn’t follow the development of the YouTube shorts and I don’t know all the hidden backstory that has come along from that series. This may just be a movie geared towards the people that know all the lore and understand stuff I didn’t glean from the movie. But that just means this isn’t a complete movie. It doesn’t stand on its own, instead needing supplemental materials to carry the story. And maybe for those fans that do know all the background materials, those that have been following the “story” since its days as a creepypasta, this film provides all they’re looking for.

For me, though, it just doesn’t. Backrooms doesn’t have characters for me to latch onto or a story that feels complete in any real way. It’s a film based on vibes, and the vibes, while good, just aren’t enough for me. So while I didn’t hate the film, I just don’t see myself ever going back to it, either.