A scruffy, perplexed-looking middle-aged man who tells his psychiatrist that he is not withdrawing from alcohol watches his hand disappear through a solid wall in the furniture store at which he works. He is seen in bed in the roof-space above the sales floor, and recording television commercials costumed as a one-legged pirate, but he spends most of his time exploring the yellow-coloured labyrinth that he finds when he slides his whole body across the wall. He “blips” into the hidden room and back again at will. His behaviour puzzles his doctor, his employee, and the cinematic audience.
“Backrooms” (A24), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is shot in the style of an online video, upon which it is based, with camerawork so unsteady that the audience strives to orientate. Mary, the psychiatrist, played by Renate Reinsve, has recorded an audiobook. “The neural pathway of least resistance…the path you made is the one that kept you safe when you were a child. And now as an adult you are still stuck right where you started—alone.” Her patient, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, sits on her couch. “I hurt people,” he says. “I don’t want to. It’s just the way I’m wired.” “Are you interested in forging a new path,” she says, “and see where that leads?” “The acting thing?” he replies. “I feel stupid doing that.” In any event they begin a role-play which is recapitulated later in the film. “She kicked me out of my own house. It is my house,” he says. “I am the one paying for it.” At the end of the exercise he says, “I didn’t mean to, you know, get angry or lose my temper.” “I know,” Mary says. “Feel what you feel and learn to identify a new path. Your reaction was actually quite normal.”
The next morning he tapes a commercial: “…bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms aplenty,” he says. “Kick your feet back and enjoy an empire of your own. Drop your anchors and come on down to Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire!” Bobby, the cameraman, spots a continuity flaw: “Are you, like, a pirate or a sultan?” he asks. Electrical problems multiply. Kat, his assistant manager, joins Cap’n Clark and an electrician in the basement. “The rat’s back,” she says. “But the power’s on?” Cap’n Clark asks. “I thought we killed the rat,” she says. “We killed A rat,” he replies. The audiobook plays: “…to watch your life unfold from behind a locked window. The window isn’t locked, the latch was never broken. Are you ready to step through…take back control of your life? The life you want to have…and free to choose a path of your own design.”
Lighting has deep meaning. The furniture store contains many lights which burn all day. In his nook, Cap’n Clark coats a dining-room table with standing lamps. The store and the hidden backroom are lit by fluorescent lights—some are old-style long, oblong strips and some are of the squarer kind that are housed behind large ceiling tiles in office buildings. When Cap’n Clark blips his hand through the wall, the sound engineers add the particular noise associated with older fluorescent strips as they flicker. The backroom stretches in all directions. The walls merge with the floor and ceiling and there are no skirting boards. It is all the same colour. There are squares cut out of the floor, square gaps in the walls, open doorways, chairs in ones and twos—some of the correct proportion and others like a Cubist abstract—a pile of discarded furniture which has been superglued together, a pouffe, a radio that sounds like an airport public-address system, a “STOP” sign, dead seagulls, piles of soiled laundry, and that underground swimming pool. (The Playhouse has one too.)
Cap’n Clark is late for therapy. “Shall we just use the time we have?” Mary asks. “I look like shit,” he says. “Are you intoxicated right now? she asks. “Why you say it like that?” he says, before asking whether she has ever forcibly admitted a patient into an institution. “If I believe that the person is a danger to themselves or others, or if they are gravely disabled,” she says. “I found something in the store,” he says. “What?” “A place,” he says, “I found a place,” and pulls out the schematic he has drawn. “It’s, like, the store just continues. I figure they’re using mirrors. You keep going and you realise that none of it makes sense. Why you looking at me like that? For a psychiatrist you got a terrible poker face.” It sounds “fantastical but not dangerous,” Mary says. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” she goes on, “but you did tell me yourself that you haven’t had a drink since Friday.”
Mr Ejiofor and Ms Reinsve are top-drawer actors and both come across as tiptoeing. (For one reason or another Mr Ejiofor isn’t pictured on the film’s poster.) Some of the dialog consists of grunts and exhales. “Just…uh…oh…yuh…ok…uuuggggghhhh…what the…” Bobby says as he is lowered into a laundry chute. And Kat’s screams are muffled, rather than slasher-film style. Nothing is what we expect, the film seems to be saying. A sub-plot contrives Mary’s career choice: she has an agoraphobic mother. “What were you thinking? I never ever ever said you could go outside. It’s no good. They’re all over the place.” Later Mary visits her mother in a cruel-looking institution. The mysterious-maze first half of “Backrooms” is the better; Hollywood tends to solve its narrative-development challenges by a descent into strong violence (as here). It’s a pity.
Cap’n Clark enrols Bobby and Kat on the breathless hunt for clues. Kat is full of foreboding. “Tell me what is going on,” she says. But Bobby is excited. “Kat,” he says, “it’s good. You gotta come see this!” “Where are we?” he asks Cap’n Clark. “That’s what we’re trying to find out!” the captain says.
Adam Poole
1st June 2026
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