In “Backrooms,” a creepy meditative dada horror trip in the what-is-reality? tradition of “Eraserhead” and “Skinamarink,” the director Kane Parsons turns our fears into a funhouse that’s got a lot of walls but no bottom. The central character, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a divorced furniture-story owner who’s simmering with resentment over what a junk heap his life has turned out to be. Clark sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), and the two do a role-playing game in which they reenact Clark’s angry sob story of how his wife threw him out of the house. He’s now living in the store, which is called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire (he does TV ads for it in a pirate costume). It’s a big ugly place that sells cheap ugly furniture, and one day, when he’s trying to fix the store’s janky lighting, he’s drawn to a wall, then into the wall, which he passes right through.
On the other side of the wall is a vast empty room. It’s like a version of the store that’s been cleaned out, with musty carpeting, a ceiling dotted with rectangular fluorescent-light panels, and walls of faded urine-yellow. It’s connected to another room, and another, and another, and some of them contain stacked furniture or piles of laundry, and some are partitioned, with square holes that look like passageways. And the place just keeps going. Has Clark gone through a looking glass that’s going to lead him to a deliverance? Has he uncovered a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma? Or has he entered hell? Maybe all of the above.
