[Dispatch=Correspondent Jeong Tae-yoon] "If you are not careful, you will fall from the cracks of reality into the Backrooms, a world of the unknown."

On May 14, 2019, a horror story was posted on an American mystery forum. A space with yellow walls and fluorescent lights turned on, and a warning message. The key point is that once trapped, there is no way out.

Internet horror stories usually fade away. However, the film "The Backrooms" (directed by Kane Parsons) seized one of them and pulled it onto the screen. It expanded the Backrooms urban legend not as a mere setting, but as a state of being.

This unfamiliarity becomes the film's most important question. Why do we enter that space? The world responded to how the film transformed a simple horror story into an existential question.

In just six days of release, it surpassed 100 million dollars in global cumulative box office, recording A24's largest opening since the studio's founding. Domestically, it surpassed one million viewers in 21 days of release. This marks a record for foreign horror films in seven years.

At the center of this is director Kane Parsons, born in 2005. At age 16, he uploaded a nine-minute fake documentary video to YouTube. It was a video that visualized the internet urban legend Backrooms using found footage and VHS filters.

Director Kane Parsons taught himself Blender (3D graphics) and After Effects without formal film education, giving three-dimensional form to the urban legend. The worldbuilding guide alone spans 70 pages.

He spent a long time directly building this space with Blender. The completed Backrooms became so familiar he could draw it with his eyes closed. The world constructed this way becomes concrete through one character's story in the film.

The strange space of the Backrooms is brought to the screen. It unfolds through the story of Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Marie (played by Renate Reinsve) confronting inexplicable occurrences.

The protagonist "Clark" is a furniture store owner. A man who dreamed of becoming an architect but ended up in a pirate costume filming advertisements. He slips through a gap in the basement of the store and enters the Backrooms.

He explores the space he accidentally discovers and even brings store employees along for a full-fledged expedition. The film does not simply show a story. It pushes the audience into the Backrooms.

In particular, it actively utilizes the perspective of a character holding a camera. Rather than observing the situation from a third-party position, viewers encounter the space through a perspective nearly identical to the character's own eyes. This approaches experiential horror.

A structure without exits, repeating corridors, furniture stacked in strange formations. The subtly misaligned spatial sense pressures not just the character but the viewer's senses as well.

It does not merely adapt the urban legend onto the screen. Rather than following familiar genre conventions, it twists and stitches them together. From drama to thriller to creature feature. The narrative unfolds fluidly as it boldly shifts genres.

Clark initially reads as a kind of survivor. However, the film subverts that expectation. He is no longer an entity making choices, but appears as a game piece placed within the Backrooms. Yet what if this space was his all along?

"If you asked someone who doesn't know a dog to draw a dog, what would happen?"

This operates as a metaphor that runs through the entire film. The Backrooms awkwardly recreates what no one knows exactly, through each person's own memory and perception.

Only toward the end does the identity of this space become clear. The exit is not visible, the space repeats, and it takes familiar forms, but something is off. This place is closer to a psychological state.

What Clark most wanted to hear in the film is clear. "You can stay here as you are. You don't have to change"—this whisper. This is not mere comfort. It is the temptation that you need not confront your wounds, need not return to reality.

Ultimately, the Backrooms is a space created by the desire to escape. The moment Clark chooses to settle, he becomes trapped in that world. The Backrooms is not the result of failing to escape, but the price of choosing to stay.

This space is not an entirely new world. It holds the character by awkwardly duplicating memory and masquerading as familiarity. The creatures that appear in the latter half are not external beings either. They are ultimately fragments of unresolved emotions and avoided memories—in other words, oneself.

The use of Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve stands out as well. Ejiofor won the British Academy Award for Best Actor in "12 Years a Slave." Reinsve won the Best Actress award at the 74th Cannes Film Festival for "The Worst Person in the World."

Director Kane Parsons chose a method of naturally integrating the two actors into the world. Rather than showcasing their presence, he let the space pressure them. Reinsve said, "I gained trust because Kane deeply felt that fear himself."

Of course, there are shortcomings. The symbols the film plants—birds, windows—are intriguing, but they border more on suggestion than explanation. It is true that while leaving lingering impressions, it also creates an impression of incompleteness.

Nevertheless, the questions this film poses are clear. "The Backrooms" is not simply a film adaptation of a new urban legend. It is a story about how we confront emotions we have turned away from. The moment we want to escape, the desire to stop, the temptation that you need not change.

The film compresses all of it into one space. And it asks: Is entering that place an accident or a choice?

"A 2005-Born Director's Clever Use of Urban Legend" (The Backrooms ★★★☆)

<Photo Source=ByPoem Studio>