Backrooms, Kane Parsons' movie based on the internet lore, has entered a new liminal space, the threshold where critics have seen it but you have not. They love it, giving it an 87% score on Rotten Tomatoes and expectations of a $45m-$50m opening weekend. The movie, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass, opens Friday.
At The Daily Beast, Nick Schager points out that it's more David Lynch than regular horror: "A descent into an uncanny-valley netherworld that's both a warped reflection and deconstruction of the modern world."
Jamie Graham, for Empire, had the same thought, describing it as the "most out there, surreal, art-horror feature" since Eraserhead.
IGN's Lex Briscuso said it ably expanded Parsons' striking Backrooms short movies (which got him the A24 gig and budget): he "has without a doubt got the stuff, with instincts far beyond that of a budding 20-year-old artist."
IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio is less impressed, but also sees Parsons' talent and the value of a strong cast: "[the] attempts to anchor the "Backrooms" lore in psychological realism that would feel hokey without performances so psychically attuned to Parsons' vision."
Not everyone liked it. Angie Han at The Hollywood Reporter found "eeriness for its own sake" and an "underbaked" movie less frightening and more random as it goes on. Jake Coyle, for the AP, wrote that it "it can't bridge its very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark's mental state."
The location depicted in the photo that started it all has been found; it had been found all along.
