As is only fair with a horror movie, I’m not going to give any plot spoilers. To some extent that’s quite easy: like a lot of A24‘s movies, I’m not sure the plot entirely makes sense. But you don’t go see their movies, including this one, for the plot as much for the feel of it, and for individual scenes, and those are both very good. The feel of it, as described below, is based on some Youtube shorts by the director, Kane Parsons, which were in turn based on an existing internet meme. In other words, this is the modern version of a campfire tale.
The Backrooms are an endless series of connected liminal spaces that exist where they should not be and contain misshapen versions of objects that the viewer has seen in real life. (There are several stop signs that read POTS, for example, and furniture half embedded in walls.) The ceiling is a never-ending expanse of acoustic tile and fluorescent lights; the walls mostly ugly yellow wallpaper, and the floors mostly ugly yellow linoleum or flat carpet. The layout makes no sense, with hallways branching off endlessly, and interconnected rooms. Later in the movie we see some spaces that are worse than nonsensical.
In one sense, this is the exact opposite of the classic horror-movie gothic setting. Dracula’s castle, for example, is typically presented as a rational design in an outdated gothic style that has a lot of dark corners where something might be hiding, and a lot of gargoyles that might be alive. Real gothic castles tend to feel creepy for those same reasons. (On a vacation in Denmark, I once visited a castle where you were welcome to wander around the oubliette in the cellar, but there were no lights there.) There is nothing less inherently creepy than an acoustic tile ceiling, but put that ceiling in a space that shouldn’t exist and makes no sense, and it stops feeling familiar. Rather than introducing us to a strange and creepy place, this movie takes places we’ve all been and makes them creepy by twisting them.
In case you missed the joke, one of the protagonists was trained as an architect.
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