One of the biggest weekends of the summer so far belongs to Backrooms, a horror movie from beloved indie studio A24 and 20-year-old YouTube wunderkind Kane Parsons. The movie is based on a series of online shorts, also directed by Parsons, which in turn are based on a so-called “creepypasta” idea, referring to horror legends, images, or other spooky materials circulated via the internet. The simple yet unsettling concept: There are spaces that exist in a kind of parallel dimension that imitate the forms and structures of our world, but are actually akin to memory-distorted photocopies, uncanny iterations of the banal and familiar. You know that dream you’ve had where you’re in your grandparent’s house, only it’s not actually what that house looks like? Or that one where you find a hidden extra room or floor or other new space in a familiar location? It’s basically that: the movie.
This presents plenty of storytelling challenges for Parsons, even with a small but tony cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and indie-horror vet Mark Duplass. He folds in some mythology from his YouTube series, specifically about Async, a company that is attempting to study and map the Backrooms, but attempts to ground the story in more accessibly human terms, following characters who accidentally discover this liminal space and get lost in it for different reasons. The ways that the Backrooms echo our own world, in addition to the film’s use of dream sequences, can make it difficult to discern what is happening where, especially when it comes to its eerie ending. So let’s dig into full spoiler mode and search these weird yellow rooms for some answers.
Backrooms Plot Summary:
The basic story of the film is pretty simple: In 1990, Clark (Ejiofor) is a furniture-store owner reeling from his various failures: a busted marriage, an architecture career that never took off, and a store that doesn’t seem to have many customers (and where he has also taken up residence, in an early cue to the dreamlike state he’ll soon enter). In the lower depths of his big-box-sized store, while investigating an electrical problem, he discovers a wall that he can walk through, into a world of seemingly endless, yellow-walled, drab but largely empty spaces. He successfully returns to the real world, where he eventually enlists two employees to help him explore the space. But something attacks them during their exploration, and the movie jumps ahead in time.
After receiving a bizarre answering-machine message, Clark’s therapist Mary (Reinsve) arrives at the store to look for him; she, too, enters the Backrooms and is menaced by a mysterious figure, who turns out to be Clark himself. He knocks her out and Mary wakes up bound to a chair, as a visibly disturbed Clark talks about this strange world, flanked by bizarre mutations of humans — Backroom copies, essentially. Clark and Mary do some talk therapy and role-play, and he sets her free, only to be attacked by his own Backrooms mutation copy. The creature appears to kill Clark, then pursues Mary through various strange spaces.
Backrooms Ending Explained: Where Is Mary and Does She Escape the Backrooms?
After Mary escapes the Clark Monster, she is captured by men in hazmat suits. It’s difficult to tell at first whether they’re actual people or unusually well-organized Backrooms copies, but soon she’s sitting in an interrogation room opposite Phil (Duplass), a scientist periodically glimpsed throughout the movie. He explains that his organization, Async, used to make MRI machines but following their discovery of the Backrooms they’ve pivoted to exploring and mapping this strange new territory.
Phil presses Mary with questions about what she’s seen there; she presses him about where she is, and what will be done with her. Neither side seems willing (or able?) to offer all of the information the other wants; Phil’s promises are vague and Mary seems to withhold at least a little of what she’s seen. She notes that it’s like trying to describe a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog, and then asking that person to draw it. The movie then cuts to other images from the Backrooms — including a mutated copy of Mary, sitting at what looks like an imitation of the room where she sits opposite Phil. Parsons cuts to black on this image; no mid-credits or post-credits scenes further clarify, though he has said that of course he would like to make a series of sequels.
So what’s going on here, exactly? The most literal reading of the scene is that Mary has been rescued from the Backrooms, but is now being held indefinitely in some other, undisclosed location where Async conducts its research. Her assumption seems to be that it’s outside of the Backrooms. But is it? Take note of a subtle shift in Phil’s language. He at first seems to refer to the Backrooms as something to the effect of “this place,” vaguely implying that they’re in a facility within the Backrooms. Mary, however, refers to the Backrooms as a place she was in, not one she is currently occupying — and Phil seems to take his cues from her, referring to it as a separate space from that point forward. But the interrogation room is so eerily bland, and stylistically similar in its minimalism, to a Backrooms space that it’s difficult to tell. There’s a strip of blue sky visible through some high, relatively narrow windows on the room’s wall, yet it’s so placid and unchanging that it looks a little phony.
The cut to Mary’s copy, in a Backrooms version of the room and table where we see her sitting, might be taken as a sign that she has, in fact, escaped the space, even if she’s now trapped by different forces in another, less supernatural florescent-lit hell. Also, she seems mildly agitated but not disoriented, the way she might be from an extended journey without realizing what was happening. But then again, the Backrooms are nothing if not infinite copies of copies; without a surer sign of the outside world, it’s hard to be sure that Mary has returned to that realm.
Of course, whether or not Mary remains trapped in the actual Backrooms may be immaterial. After all, assuming Phil is real (and the Backrooms mutations don’t seem capable of so closely imitating real people), she is probably out of immediate danger while also not allowed to return to her own world. This may be part of Parsons’ aim: Highlighting how these Backrooms-style spaces can be recreated in the real world, and how the liminal, supernatural weirdness of the Backrooms feeds off of the similarly uncanny spaces we leave abandoned, empty, or otherwise serving as a real-world void.
If it’s a little tricky to land on that interpretation, though, and easy enough to read this scene as yet another Backrooms-set scene, it’s because sometimes Backrooms seems a little more focused on the ambitious gameplay of its central conceit more than the psychology of its characters. Why would Async find value in holding Mary indefinitely? Why would Mary, in turn, withhold information about what little strange sights she saw in there, which seem consistent with what Async would have seen in their own research? What’s the actual central conflict that’s supposed to be coming to a head in that scene?
Some of this might be described as ambiguity, but given Parsons’ stated desire to make more Backrooms movies, it also feels like modern franchise-teasing. There’s an eerie, unsettled quality to the movie; there also seems to be a hope that the thematically appropriate ambiguities of the movie’s ending will give way to yet another larger universe.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. In addition to contributing at Decider, his work also appears regularly at The A.V. Club, The Guardian, and GQ, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
