‘I Found a Place’: How Backrooms Captures the Horror of Sinister Architecture The latest A24 thriller, Backrooms, plunges viewers into an unsettling journey through liminal spaces, transforming mundane architecture into a source of existential dread. The film follows Clark, a furniture store owner and architect played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stumbles upon a mysterious portal to a labyrinthine realm of endless fluorescent-lit rooms. His attempts to explain this phenomenon to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), become a chilling exploration of the psychological toll of navigating an unknowable, bureaucratic void. Directed by Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old filmmaker and youngest to collaborate with A24, Backrooms evolved from a series of YouTube shorts created using free 3D software like Blender and Adobe After Effects. These shorts, which first gained traction in 2019, introduced the concept of “backrooms”—a fictionalized expansion of the dead malls that became internet folklore in the early 2000s. The first image to popularize liminal spaces was a 2003 photo of a renovated furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where the emptiness of a shuttered big-box retail space evoked a sense of disorientation. As these physical spaces decayed, they became symbolic of the alienation of modern life, existing in a state of liminality between the real and the imagined. The film’s central setting, the backrooms, is a vast, repetitive expanse of identical rooms with drop ceilings, yellow-tinged lighting, and walls adorned with corporate-style wallpaper. These spaces, which defy logic and geography, mirror the bureaucratic sterility of modern institutions.#a24 #chiwetel_ejiofor #renate_reinsve #backrooms #kane_parsons
