I never liked fluorescent lighting. Often aggressively bright, the hum of the once ubiquitous mercury-vapor tube always felt like threatened cheerfulness. It’s a forced smile stretched across a pained face. Wunderkind YouTuber and now bonafide big-screen director Kane Parsons would seem to agree. For his feature-film debut at A24, Backrooms, the 20-year-old content creator returns to a late 20th century setting and variety of corporate luminescence that he’s probably too young to remember firsthand. And it is undeniably eerie, if intermittently so.The labyrinthine hell of Backrooms’ title exists in a liminal space of endless corridors and winding atriums which appear to carry on into oblivion. Occupying a nether-realm that borders between Office Space and a magical realist Brazil, the titular purgatory offers up vacant mindscapes beneath that deceitful, fluorescent glow. As someone who until a few weeks ago was unfamiliar with Parsons’ YouTube series of the same name, it’s easy to see why Backrooms became a viral sensation. The unnerving blankness of the compositions suggest a queasy counterpoint to the pull toward nostalgia in so much modern media. What are the backrooms of the title if not the detritus of a decayed American culture from ye olden days that’s been left to rot?cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Yet the cold emptiness of Backrooms’ imagery, which was so compelling for YouTube subscribers in nine-minute, CG-enhanced bit sizes, becomes something of an albatross around the wholly live-action feature. Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik tease out a few intriguing ideas about what the backrooms could really be, but that’s all they are. Teases. When tasked with creating something that approaches a cohesive narrative—and a story that confirms tangible internal logic, if not necessarily clear-cut explanations, for the creepy imagery—Backrooms can only double down on a vague aloofness. The oppressive nature of this seems intentional. The exhaustion and faint tedium less so.The gist of how we end up in this realm is simple enough, however. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an unhappy, middle-aged divorcée living in the 1990s suburbs. About once a week he goes to therapy simply so someone other than an employee will listen to his complaints. Still, psychologist Mary (Renate Reinsve) seems to be putting in an effort to remain blandly reassuring as Clark continues to vent about his ex-wife.The rest of the week, Clark seems to live day and night at his warehouse furniture store, Cap’n Clark’s, which also happens to have a rat and circuit-breaker problem in the basement. It’s likewise on that sub-level that Clark discovers he can walk through a single spot in a wall. It proves to be a portal to… somewhere. The bad place. What’s curious is that after his initial shock upon this discovery, Clark seems to kind of like it down there. Even after being seemingly chased by the only other living soul in these cavernous hallways—a mysterious, unseen force—he cannot wait to lure staffers Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) into the backrooms. And like the YouTube series, they decide to bring a VHS camera with them for the trip.When viewed as a metaphor for the quirks, mysteries, and even monstrosities of a human subconscious, a hideous id, there is something potent about Clark’s descent down the rabbit hole of Backrooms. Like Alice, here is a fella who cannot help but dig deeper into skewed hallways of canted angles, forced perspectives, and grotesque interior design choices. One passageway narrows into little more than a coffin in a sequence that overtly echoes Lewis Carroll.And as couched in therapy-speak about the loops and tunnels of the human mind, courtesy of Norwegian treasure Reinsve, Backrooms more than once seems on the verge of discovering a thesis for what is ultimately one of the most polished exercises in a found footage haunted house I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately more often, Backrooms seems content to simply run in circles, mixing its metaphors and stumbling over what I’ve been assured is a complex, mysterious mythology in the web series.In its own odd way, the cumulative effect reminds me of more than one recent video game movie adaptation. It is so determined to preserve and recreate the lore and iconography of its source material that the narratives and characters become secondary and ultimately obligatory.This is not to say they’re poorly performed. Ejiofor has always been a somewhat underrated actor and brings a self-pitying neediness to Clark that’s understated but unmistakable. Reinsve, so dynamic in The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value, is given a less fully formed character, unfortunately. Mary seems to exist primarily to have an extra perspective to walk through the looking glass after Clark decides he likes it just fine down in Wonderland.The final movements of the film, in particular, which make the classic mistake of showing the impossible Lovecraftian monster and seemingly setting up a sequel or franchise, feel especially rote for a horror film released in the same month as Obsession and Hokum.Parsons shows a lot of promise in Backrooms, revealing a keen eye and ear for conjuring an oppressive atmosphere and visually arresting gloom. His first feature just feels strangely like an awkward attempt at IP-extension as opposed to a full feature; a concept that could have been a short. In fact, it already is several of them.Backrooms opens on Friday, May 29.The post Backrooms Review: A24 Expansion of YouTube Series Goes in Circles appeared first on Den of Geek.