The terror of this year’s Backrooms lies in the architecture of the film’s sets as we are ushered into a corporate nightmare that seamlessly begins to invade the private spaces of our homes as the movie plays out. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is a man that will be familiar to most of us: someone stuck between the person they hoped they would be and the person they have actually become. He is either actually an architect by education or has always wanted to be one (it isn’t clear which is the case), but instead finds himself divorced, kicked out of a house he is paying for, an alcoholic, and the owner of a pirate-themed furniture store in a strip mall. One night he discovers a portal in the basement of his store that leads to an endless maze of acoustic lay-in tile, fluorescent lights, random pony walls, arches that either contain an opening or not, and random stacks of furniture. The general ambiance of this endless maze of a “non-place” is a sickly yellow light that pervades the whole space. Nothing really makes sense structurally. It would be like entering into the Winchester Mansion if only updated in the ’90s, nine-to-five, corporate aesthetic.
As Clark becomes obsessed with this labyrinthine office space and attempts to learn more about it, his therapist, Mary Kline (played by Renate Reinsve), seeks to find out if her client is losing touch with reality after an abrupt session where he gives her “proof” of what he has discovered: a hand-drawn map of the parts of the space he has explored thus far. When she comes to the store to find out what Clark was talking about and finds the portal to the backrooms, their pasts and memories collide in violent and horrifically absurd ways.
A24, the studio that put the film out, is, for better or worse, known for championing horror fare that places grief and trauma at the forefront as the main movers of plot and character motivations. It is not uncommon for their slate of horror films to unearth the subtext and make its decayed corpse roam the land of blinking, neon text. For a society that is increasingly steeped in the language of therapeutic culture, A24 seems to target their horror for those who derive their diagnoses from TikTok or Instagram influencers. As someone who regularly sees a therapist and has a therapist as a wife, Backrooms’ play at therapeutic text is mostly muddled in popularized self-help advice and generic terminology that sounds like the real thing. The creature reveal as a manifestation of Clarke’s internal state is about as ham-fisted as it could be, even if the creature design itself is refreshingly delightful in a DIY sort of way.
However, during a Texas Chainsaw Massacre–tinged scene, we are given something that defies all of the therapeutic sound bites that came before it. Clark confronts Mary about whether or not he is to blame for his plight, and she answers him honestly: the reason for his divorce is his “whining” and that he never places the blame squarely on himself. It is in this moment when — as Flannery O’Connor might put it — Mary has a metaphorical gun put to her head that she delivers the truth sans therapeutic trappings.
While this is likely not what A24 or Kane Parsons intended for the takeaway, there does seem to be a reading of the film where the labyrinthine backrooms represent the endless corridors, dead ends, and fake doors of modern therapeutic culture. Freya India notes the extent to which therapeutic culture has become an end in itself, and her description finds interesting connections with the architectural imagery of Backrooms:
I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads (emphases my own).
Being stuck in your own head (what used to be called, with cruel fondness, navel-gazing) has the same captivity principles as the backrooms: the spaces and architecture are familiar to us but weirdly askew in ways that we do not begin to know how to process. The more we return to the internal workings of our mind and the longer periods of time we stay in there, the more apt we are to forget where the exit is or why we needed to leave anyway. The identities and categories we create for ourselves derive from our minds, and if we give ourselves over to them long enough, the rest of our being follows suit. When therapy becomes ideology — the lens through which we experience all things — we end up embracing the creatures of our worst natures stalking the halls of our backrooms, and they end up consuming us.
All this is not to say therapy is ineffectual or bad, but it too can succumb to the same failures as any ideology: it becomes a vicious cycle of confirmation bias where no external input is allowed to interrupt. So when Mary Kline bluntly diagnoses Clark’s failed marriage in the moment, she is interrupting Clark’s obsession with his own interiority. She ceases to be a therapist and becomes a prophet, freeing him from his own delusions. The problem: by that point, he is too far gone. He is too comfortable in the skewed architecture of his mind where he feels some semblance of control, when he feels none in the world outside of the backrooms.
Therapy can help, but the truth shall set you free.
