A Therapist’s Review of “Backrooms”

In Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, a wall in the basement of a furniture store becomes a portal into the main character Clark’s unconscious. As Clark enters into it, we are confronted with what his mind has repressed. He stumbles on an endless maze of rooms to nowhere and is progressively drawn deeper and deeper into his worst nightmare.

More than anyone else, therapists know our minds have good reason for keeping certain traumatic memories out of conscious awareness as we go about our daily lives—they’re simply too disturbing to hold. If the repression is undone, so are we. And in this sci-fi horror film, Parsons—who at 20-years-old is the youngest filmmaker ever to open a box office film at number one—takes us into exactly this territory: the unconscious not as something vague or theoretical, but as a force that can destroy us.

Clark is played with soulful conviction by Chiwetel Ejiofor and appears to be depressed about his failed career as an architect and his recent failed relationship. When the portal entices him in, a labyrinth of jaundiced corridors, stairwells, and rooms replicate themselves infinitely around him. After several therapy sessions where an increasingly distraught Clark hides his discovery and then stops showing up for therapy entirely, his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline—played by Renate Reinsve with hauntingly contrived intelligence—follows him into this netherworld.

What Parsons has built on the other side of the showroom portal is a spatial rendering of the unconscious—the floor plan of a life half-lived. It’s haunting and disquieting. As I watched the movie, I was taken back to a moment 40 years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, when I entered—yes, entered—Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés” (it’s a room). Peepholes drilled into an old barn door drew me across a dim antechamber toward what lay on the other side: a mangled nude woman sprawled in a stream, clutching a lit gas lamp. My professor considered Duchamp’s tableau a visceral rendering of our human temptation to glimpse the horror of our own unconscious, and this resonated with me. What hit me as I squinted through those peepholes wasn’t what I saw; it was what I felt: repulsion, curiosity, allure, grief.

Watching Parsons’ movie arouses similar feelings as it dramatizes the reality that what we bury rarely stays completely buried. Clark isn’t simply lost in a building; he’s attacked by his own unrealized potential, ambushed by his moribund dreams. His therapist refuses to reassure him or soften the truth of his predicament. Instead, she informs him that the dismal state of his life is indeed the product of his own poor choices and maladaptive coping strategies. This honesty, in the economy of Clark’s unconscious, is punishable by a fate worse than death: he forces Dr. Kline to enact a twisted and humiliating role-play that echoes one of their previous therapy sessions. Although Dr. Kline ultimately flees and escapes the monster, she ends up condemned not by fire and brimstone but by something more sinister—a shadowy research corporation that controls the backrooms.

As a therapist, I can easily imagine Clark’s journey having gone differently. He reminds me of some of my clients in Santa Monica who arrive in treatment carrying some version of his split. They have financial goals, but they don’t have emotional ones. Many are younger software engineers who earn ten times the national average; however, the rest of their lives suffer as they’re compelled to spend 12–14 hours a day in front of their computers, leaving little time for meaning, purpose, or meaningful relationships. Like Clark, their souls are yearning for more, but they’re wearing golden handcuffs. They’ve persevered in their careers in ways that appear practical while feeling less and less like themselves. Depression often grows to fill this schism.

Clark’s depression carries a flavor of chronic resignation, and the film captures that condition with remarkable psychological clarity. The monster in the film is self-betrayal incarnate. It arises in the subconscious because Clark has let his dreams and hopes die. What he’s let go of comes back as a menace. What he’s silenced comes back as a roar. There’s an idea, attributed to Freud, that whatever is repressed returns thricefold. For Clark, his self-betrayal returns closer to tenfold. The film’s labyrinthine corridors, stairwells, and rooms represent that internal condition. The spaces seem generated by a psyche crushed under the weight of its own ideals. Drinking blunts his grief, shame, and desire while the signals that might have informed him that his life was going off course are muted. Clark has been unable to create his future while remaining anaesthetized and sealed inside his past.

Watching Backrooms, I found myself wondering what I would do if Clark were my patient. I’d want to reconnect him with the dreams and ideals he’d given up on, to help him struggle to find language for the cost of his sacrifices in the hopes that he might realize the difference between earning a living and designing a fulfilling life. I’d want to reignite Clark’s passion for architecture in small, concrete ways: a drawing class. A museum visit. An architecture tour. Time spent leafing through old portfolios. The goal wouldn’t be a dramatic reinvention. It would be to help him find a path back to agency so he could reawaken the part of himself that still knows how to imagine.

Our work as therapists in such cases isn’t just to help clients speak their truth, mourn losses, reduce drinking and numbing, and recover contact with vitalizing work. It’s to help them relate from a more genuine place. Someone who hides from himself often hides from others with equal skill. The work of therapy would be to help him become available to contact, honesty, mutuality, and possibly even love again—to show up without disguise, and discover that connection depends on presence, not performance.

Part of the psychological power of Backrooms lies in the way it treats unrealized potential as a psychic force. Clark’s abandoned architecture, his sales persona, his drinking, his despair, and his damaged capacity for love all belong to the same story. He’s lived inside a long series of self-betrayals. To market his furniture store, for example, Clark once dressed up as a pirate; that inauthentic version of him incarnates as a monster, bent on making him pay the price for his inauthenticity.

For Clark, healing is foreclosed by self-deception and lack of accountability. With our clients, the path to reconnecting with their desires begins when they stop trading their soul for comfort, and consider what it might look like to seek fulfillment in work, show up authentically, and love others in their lives genuinely and imperfectly.

There’s a quote of unknown origin about hell that fits this film: on your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. Backrooms makes this encounter visceral. The film presents the unconscious not as something we have, but as something that inhabits us and can ultimately destroy us if we regularly ignore its invitation toward growth and wholeness.

I was entranced by Parsons’s comprehensive vision and the psychological portrait he offered. The film posits that nobody can help you but yourself—that the monster appears when we get caught in our losses in ways that lead to nihilism rather than action. If great art exists to hold up a mirror to our unconscious—and incite us to live fully while there’s still time—then Backrooms, like Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, is a masterpiece.