In 2019, a photo posted on the message board 4chan gave rise to the creepy concept of the Backrooms — an endless maze of what appeared to be abandoned corporate offices, with beige carpets, yellow walls and fluorescent lights. The idea of being doomed to wander this mundane liminal space proved popular enough to inspire a horror meme and a web series, directed by a teenager named Kane Parsons.
Now, Parsons is 20, and his new Backrooms feature is the No. 1 movie at the box office; with more than $100 million in domestic ticket sales so far, it's already made back its budget and then some. It's an elegantly disorienting movie, with a number of riddles that, at least initially, it wisely avoids answering.
Backrooms is set in 1990, in the suburbs of Santa Clara Valley, Calif. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a middle-aged alcoholic with a failing furniture-store business. One night, in the basement of his store, he somehow walks through a wall and finds himself in the Backrooms. He wanders the space for hours, and his mad curiosity stokes ours, too. Who built this ugly labyrinth, and why? And what is the strange, hulking creature he hears and sometimes sees?
Clark returns to the Backrooms day after day, obsessively mapping out the different levels and marveling at the sometimes eccentric design choices and furnishings; some of the chairs and shelves might have come from his store. At one point, he convinces his work assistant and her boyfriend to join him and film the place with a camcorder — at which point the movie briefly becomes a spooky found-footage thriller in the style of that innovative '90s horror classic, The Blair Witch Project.
Clark also talks about the Backrooms to his therapist, Mary — a wonderful Renate Reinsve — who becomes an important secondary character. At one point, we hear Mary articulate some of the movie's themes a little too bluntly: "We all have our loops, our habits," she says, "behaviors that keep us walking in circles."
Clark's new playground, in other words, is a kind of prison — a metaphor for how we get stuck in traps of our own making. But that's just one of many psychological readings that can be projected onto the Backrooms. For some viewers, they will evoke the thrill and the terror of extreme isolation. For others, they'll remind them of the pandemic, when office buildings everywhere stood empty.
These are fascinating ideas, but it's when Parsons begins trying to nail them down that his movie becomes a smaller, more conventional thing than it was at the start. Backrooms is full of mysteries within mysteries; it would have been better to leave more of them unsolved.
Even so, at its best, Backrooms can be unnervingly effective. It also isn't the only horror movie that has defied expectations this summer. Since its May 15 release, the ultra-low-budget supernatural thriller Obsession has grossed more than $120 million domestically, making it one of the year's most profitable films.
On the surface, Obsession is a less conceptually ambitious piece of work than Backrooms, but it's also, I think, the better and more genuinely subversive movie. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a reserved young music-store employee who's smitten with his friend and co-worker Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. When he buys a novelty item at a crystal shop that claims to grant its owner a single wish, Bear half-heartedly wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world.
From there, the 26-year-old writer-director Curry Barker spins a story that's basically "The Monkey's Paw" meets Fatal Attraction. Nikki and Bear become a couple, to the bewilderment of their friends and co-workers. Before long, Nikki's magically induced feelings for Bear begin to manifest in increasingly disturbing, shocking ways, from extreme clinginess to jealous, even homicidal fury.
Obsession is thus the latest riff on the old adage to be careful what you wish for, but what gives it its peculiar power is that it presents Nikki, not Bear, as the story's true victim. Bear's wish is a supreme violation of her emotional, spiritual and physical autonomy, and Navarrette's astonishing performance dramatizes an internal clash between two Nikkis. She doesn't just go off the rails; we see her, at every step, struggling to stay on the rails.
By the time Barker drops a direct reference to The Exorcist, it's already clear that Obsession is a demonic-possession movie. It uses the prism of genre to speak to issues of consent, male loneliness and how even a guy as seemingly kind and sensitive as Bear can become a woman's worst nightmare.
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