The owner of a furniture store finds a gateway to another dimension in 2026's Backrooms. Based on a 4chan meme from several years ago, this is a fun, creepy daydream. Sure, it's derivative, but it's derivative in the way of an urban legend, like something that grew up in communal, half-digested impressions of Through the Looking Glass, Being John Malkovich, and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the furniture store owner. He may have been influenced by Walter White. Ejiofor comes off as a little too bourgeois to be an average furniture store owner and we learn at one point he had ambitions to be an architect that were derailed by his ex-wife's need for him to be a breadwinner. I wish the film had done a better job making his commercial cheesier in the way of a real world furniture store commercial.
This movie was produced by James Wan and one of my frequent complaints about Wan's films is the noticeably cheap production design. But in this case, the bare, anonymous walls were actually appropriate for the Backrooms dimension. Still, I wish his actual shop had looked more cluttered and lived in, especially since we see that Clark kind of lives there.
It is fun seeing him and, later, his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), running through the halls of the other dimension and seeing weirdly placed furniture and then distorted dream people. It reminded me strongly of dream sequences on Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially "Phantasms", the one where Data eats Counselor Troi like a cake.
Like the corridors of the Enterprise in that episode, it's suggested that the corridors of the Backrooms is really a reflection of Clark's mind.
The film's monster is pretty cool and played by Robert Bobroczkyi, the 7'7" actor from Romania who gives the creature a wonderfully odd shape.
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