In Backrooms, the latest horror film from production company A24, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark – a failed architect who accidentally slips out of reality. He ends up trapped in an endless labyrinth of yellow-tinted rooms, humming fluorescent lights and eerie, disembodied sounds – the “Backrooms”.
The film is an adaptation of a popular internet horror concept and urban legend, about an impossibly large, alternate-reality maze of claustrophobic spaces with architecture that appears uncannily familiar but menacingly alien.
Yet the film also plays upon a deeper source of modern anxiety: the experience of trying to survive in an economy that fails to deliver on our vision for the future.
Movie audiences will (hopefully) never find themselves trapped in a nauseatingly jaundiced and never-ending labyrinth. But they may recognise Clark’s experience of living among failed promises, diminishing aspirations, precarity, social isolation and the growing fear of becoming obsolete.
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Inside the Backrooms: the internet horror world built by its users
Many may also appreciate – if not fully empathise with – Clark’s creeping resentment, sense of entitlement and vitriolic blaming of others for his loneliness and stagnation. The film’s most profound insight emerges through the suggestion that the real nightmare began long before Clark entered the Backrooms.
Trapped before the Backrooms
Clark finds himself ever more adrift from the life he expected to lead. Instead of designing skyscrapers, he runs a struggling discount furniture store at a strip mall. His business is in terminal decline. Customers are scarce, bills are mounting and, unable to afford anything better, Clark sleeps on one of the display beds at his store, waking up to resume work ad nauseam. His life appears to become ever more closed and contracted.
For decades, education, hard work and ambition were upheld as routes to stable careers, a sense of purpose and upward mobility. Increasingly, however, scores of people find themselves highly qualified but underemployed, unable to afford accommodation and locked out of the professions they trained for.
Clark’s tragedy reflects a social experience described by the social theorist Steve Redhead as “claustropolitanism”. It’s the feeling of being “locked citizens” – hostage to circumstances that cannot be changed, dreams that are thwarted before they can be pursued and futures that appear even worse than the present.
Putting aside personal ambitions to take jobs that offer little fulfilment, and enduring difficult working conditions simply to make a living, are increasingly familiar realities in today’s crowded, high-pressure economy. For Redhead, such experiences are symptomatic of “a contemporary cultural condition where we are starting to feel ‘foreclosed’, almost claustrophobic, wanting to stop the planet so we can get off”.
Cut off from stable social ties, Clark’s growing resentment over his limited economic mobility further holds him back and creates tension between him and the people around him.
When exploring the mysterious Backrooms, Clark ropes his low-wage store employees into a dangerous situation, treating them as largely expendable. He resents his estranged wife’s desire to leave work in pursuit of higher education, a grievance that reveals a malignant sense of entitlement. He uses his therapist (Renate Reinsve), who is dealing with her own difficulties, as an emotional punching bag.
This reflects a significant feature of the claustropolitan experience. In today’s heightened state of economic insecurity, social atomisation and perceived loss of options, where everyday life is marked by existential uncertainty and a diminished sense of control, frustration is often redirected away from structural causes and projected onto vulnerable groups.
The biggest threat to Clark becomes his misplaced anger that attempts to devour anyone who tries to help him. As the world itself feels like it is closing in on him, Clark is revealed as both a victim and participant in this nightmare.
The real horror of the Backrooms
The Backrooms, as a concept, offers an important means of thinking about personal and economic anxieties as a tangible environment – anxieties that are reflected not only through enclosure, but by an irregular experience of movement and stasis. In the film, nobody stops moving through nightmarish monotony, yet nobody seems to really get anywhere either.
Characters drift with varying degrees of desperation through an endlessly expanding maze of corridors under the repetitive drone of overhead fluorescent lights. But they never find anything better. There is a primal urge to run away from it all but – just as all options are found to be foreclosed in a claustropolitan economy – all exits are blocked.
The Backrooms film, perhaps even more than the internet legend it’s based on, offers a cautionary reflection on what it feels like to move through a society hemmed in by insecurity, limited opportunities and shrinking possibilities. Its ultimate message is that perhaps the most frightening labyrinth is the one we already inhabit.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.