Backrooms

 

“We run carelessly toward the abyss, after placing something in front of us to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”
 — Blaise Pascal 

More than a horror film, Backrooms by Kane Parsons appears as an audiovisual treatise on contemporary perceptual exhaustion. A cinema of mental infrastructure, where terror does not arise from the presence of the monster but from the radical absence of any authenticity of experience. Horror does not erupt: it sediments. It slowly accumulates in the geometric repetition of spaces, in the neon light that anesthetizes all emotion, in the constant hum of empty environments that seem to survive human beings as archaeological remains of a civilization already extinct. 

The most unsettling insight of the film lies in the recurring phrase: “neural pathways of least resistance.” It is not merely a pseudo-scientific concept; it is the very definition of the contemporary human condition. We live by following automatic trajectories, economizing thought, avoiding inner conflict, unconsciously choosing surface over depth. We become furniture, fixtures, the décor of existence: functional objects moving through spaces without truly inhabiting them. The Backrooms, then, are not another world, but the ultimate form of our own. A universe built from the mechanical repetition of habits, from the progressive renunciation of self-awareness, from the transformation of life into protocol. 

The labyrinthine structure of the film thus acquires a powerful psychoanalytic dimension. Each room seems like a fossilized synapse, a childhood trauma transformed into architecture. Parsons suggests that the human mind does not truly evolve: it circles endlessly around the same original emotional nuclei, the same voids, the same repressed wounds. Childhood is never overcome; it merely changes scenery. And the spatial loop of the Backrooms becomes the mental loop in which everyone continues to live without realizing it. 

It is here that the film encounters the risk evoked by Friedrich Nietzsche: 

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” 

The Nietzschean phrase silently permeates the entire film. Because Backrooms does not suggest that salvation lies in absolute introspection. On the contrary: looking too deeply within oneself can be just as destructive as avoiding oneself entirely. If superficiality produces alienation, excessive self-awareness generates paralysis. The Backrooms are precisely this unsolvable paradox: those who flee depth remain trapped in automatism; those who fall too far into the abyss risk dissolving into their own interiority. 

There is therefore no real way out. And this is arguably the most radical aspect of the film. Parsons rejects the consolatory structure of classical horror cinema. There is no liberation, no final lesson. The space itself seems to ontologically deny the possibility of exit. The Backrooms are not a place to escape from: they are the hidden form of contemporary consciousness. 

From an aesthetic standpoint, the film is strikingly sophisticated. Its claustrophobic dimension dominates every frame through masterful use of depth of field, imperfect symmetries, and artificial lighting. The cinematography never seeks beauty in the traditional sense; rather, it constructs a sensation of anguish, ontological fatigue, and silent oppression. The environments seem suspended outside of time, as if they were poorly rendered memories or bureaucratic dreams generated by a depressed artificial intelligence. 

And yet, within this visual originality, unmistakable déjà-vu elements inevitably emerge. It is impossible not to sense the echo of Jörgen Lööf’s short film See Me, especially in its construction of an ambiguous mental space where perception gradually fractures until it becomes unreliable. Similarly, certain intuitions recall Lars von Trier’s extraordinary infernal descent in The House That Jack Built: the idea of architecture as a pathological projection of the mind, the journey as psychic collapse, the transformation of space into a concrete manifestation of obsession. 

But Parsons nonetheless manages to achieve something new: he takes the digital aesthetics of memes, creepypastas, video games, and Internet “liminal spaces” and converts them into an authentically existential cinematic language. There is no postmodern irony. No playful nostalgia. Rather, there is the perception that the contemporary world has lost its symbolic center and continues to produce only corridors, interstices, fissures, voids, offices, rooms, and simulations of life. 

In the end, Backrooms leaves behind a rare sensation: that of having observed not a film, but a visual materialization of the contemporary collective unconscious. An unconscious made of digital solitude, automatic repetition, unresolved trauma, and spaces without exit. A labyrinth in which we continue to move every day convinced that we are living, while perhaps we are merely following, once again, the neural pathway of least resistance. 

“If we were to dare an architecture according to the mode of our souls, our model would have to be the labyrinth.”
 — Friedrich Nietzsche