There’s a new Kane Parsons Backrooms video out. It essentially functions as a set tour for the movie, which is great, because that’s what I really wanted to see after watching the YouTuber’s directorial debut.
Of the two YouTuber movies that came out this summer, Backrooms was the one that made me truly excited for the future of cinema. The way I put it to my friends was that Obsession was the movie with the perfect script, but Backrooms was the more visually adventurous. There are shots from the film that I’ll just never forget: the Christmas tree room, the eerie unreality of the blue sky, the camera descending down, down, down through the floor, tracing the same room as it gets distorted in its repetition.
The script has very real and obvious problems—I’m sure they didn’t mean to have Chiwetel Ejiofor play the rather racialized role of an alcoholic man with anger issues who stalks not one but two white women, but that’s what happens when you write a role as race neutral without thinking about what happens when you cast a black man in the part. Honestly, I would have watched a version of this film that just explored its set, showing off the incredible details of its construction.
Luckily for me, this new Backrooms video essentially serves that function. The video takes place in the section of the titular Backrooms that appear in the film. There’s some iconography from the film itself—a recognizable “Everything Must Go!” sign, some mannequins, a ship’s steering wheel—but most of the video consists of employees from the mysterious Async company visiting the same portion of the backrooms that the film takes place in. While Parsons’ series has its own involved mythology, you don’t really need to know it to enjoy the video. All you need is a desire to see this set one more time, from new angles.
The found footage style parts of Backrooms was by far my favorite parts of the film, so this little short is kind of a victory lap for me. I’m not entirely sure, but I also think I hear Mark Duplass, who played a scientist from the Async in the film, narrating part of the video. Duplass was one of the originators of the “mumblecore” cinema movement, and I thought his casting was a cute tribute from one wave of new, exciting voices in film to another, newer generation. But overall, this short is a slice of the things I loved about Parsons’s Backrooms—it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, leaving you wondering, “how the hell did they shoot that?”
Liz Ryerson
