Review: 'Backrooms' is a warped suspense thriller with strong performances, visual thrills, and not enough room for explanations

The mind-bending suspense thriller “Backrooms” has a deliciously warped premise — a mystery space on the fringes of what we naively call reality — and tries to apply it to a few psychological themes, including loneliness and survivor’s guilt. 

If director Kane Parsons doesn’t quite succeed in melding all of those ideas together, give him a ton of credit for taking some big swings in this visually arresting movie.

The setting is a nondescript furniture store in an ordinary strip mall in an unremarkable American suburb, circa 1990. The owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is in bad shape — recently divorced and kicked out of his house, he’s living in the store, which would only inconvenience the customers if he had any. The only people he talks to are his assistant manager, Kat (Lucite Maxwell), her video making boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), and his therapist, Dr. Mary Klein (Renate Reinsve). 

Clark is trying to figure out why the lights keep flickering in the store. When he’s exploring the basement showroom, he sees light trickling in from what appears to be a crack in the wall. Within that wall, Clark discovers a portal that goes to … well, another room like the one he was in, with the same beige walls and carpeting. And beyond that, more rooms, along with other things that defy explanation.

At least when Clark tries to explain it all to Mary, the explanations make no sense. Only when Mary, whose road to psychiatry started when dealing with her unbalanced mom (Krista Kosonen), ventures into the store does she see for herself. 

Parsons, a 21-year-old filmmaker who started experimenting with these scenarios in a series of YouTube shorts, deploys a script by Will Soodik to create fascinating scenes that dig under the mundane suburban surface to find unsettling things beneath. Seldom has an empty hallway seem so packed with menace.

In front of those beige walls, Ejiofor and Reinsve give electric performances. Ejiofor distills the American male feeling of feeling hard done that life hasn’t worked out like he thought it would. And Reinsve, the Norwegian star of “Sentimental Value,” gives one of the smartest and most nuanced versions of the horror “final girl” trope I’ve ever seen.

“Backrooms” has moments that frequently surprise, which makes it a pity that Parsons, unsurprisingly, can’t stick the landing. I won’t say much about the ending, except to say it involves a character played by Mark Duplass — and that his scene should either have been five minutes longer or cut entirely. The movie needed either less explanation or more, not the half-baked coda it delivers.

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‘Backrooms’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some violent content/bloody images. Running time: 110 minutes.