“The more times it remembers something, the less it does.”
The backrooms aren’t just a place; they’re a semi-sentient entity with the ability to create distorted copies of the objects and people who enter them. Each iteration is further removed from the original, creating an uncanny-valley effect in which you recognize what you’re looking at but also know that something about it is fundamentally wrong. Even if you struggle to articulate just what that is, you can feel it in your bones.
This is bad news for everyone but Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an emotionally stunted fortysomething filled with anger and resentment. He hates that he’s a trained architect stuck selling couches at a discount furniture store, is furious that his ex-wife left him (and, he frequently reminds us, kicked him out of the house he paid for), and really hates filming commercials in character as the eponymous pirate mascot of Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire. These complaints are surely nothing new to his therapist (Renate Reinsve), hence why she makes him roleplay the final argument he had with his wife — she wants him to finally understand a perspective other than his own, which he proves unwilling or unable to do.
“All these rooms,” Clark tells Mary during his first session after happening upon the backrooms, “this place builds them — actually, more like it remembers them. And the more times it remembers something, the less it does.” The backrooms are a literal and figurative maze that may or may not have a center. They’re also a physical manifestation of Plato’s Theory of Forms, which posits that the physical world we inhabit and perceive is merely a lesser, imperfect version of a higher reality: that of forms, which exists beyond time and space and contains the true ideals on which everything in our world is based. Because our world is constantly changing, however, it’s unreliable and impermanent. The world of forms, meanwhile, is unchanging and perfect.
One of the most well-known examples used to illustrate the Theory of Forms is also one of the simplest: a circle. All of us can imagine a perfect circle, but few of us can draw one; even if we could, according to Plato, it would still be less perfect than the ideal form of a circle, which can only be grasped intellectually. In trying to explain the backrooms to Mary, Clark uses similar terms: “It’s like describing a dog to someone who’s never seen a dog and then asking them to draw it.” If you agree with Plato, even the objects, people, and ideas the backrooms replicate are themselves imperfect — which somehow makes those replicas even more of a perversion.
After receiving a disturbing voicemail from Clark stating that he won’t be returning, Mary goes on an ill-advised welfare check that leads her to the backrooms. Once there, she learns something more troubling than the possibility that he’s gotten lost without a trail of breadcrumbs to guide him home: the reality that he doesn’t want to be found. For most, the backrooms are a mental and physical prison; for Clark, they’re a haven where he doesn’t have to work on himself, doesn’t have to grow as a person, and, best of all, doesn’t have to leave. “It’s okay,” he tells his malformed copy after being placated by Mary, whom he’s tied up and forced to tell him what he wants to hear, “she says we don’t have to change.” But being in the backrooms does change you, albeit in different ways.
You recognize what you’re looking at but also know that something about it is fundamentally wrong.
It’s probably pretty clear by now that I love Backrooms, not least because the eponymous setting reminds me of one of my favorite movies: Solaris, which is named for a semi-sentient ocean planet with the ability to project flesh-and-blood manifestations of its visitors’ deepest fears and desires. (In both Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 original and Steven Soderbergh’s underrated remake, that’s the lead character’s dead wife.) I also love the ending, in which — spoiler alert — the backrooms create a distorted, multi-faced copy of Mary, which we see sitting silently in the haunting final shot. But I love my initial interpretation even more than what I’ve since come to understand actually happens.
What I’d like to think happens is that, as in Solaris, Mary never leaves the backrooms at all — she only thinks she does. Instead, she’s forced to remain within its infinite confines in a sort of dormant state, mentally replaying her interrogation on an endless loop while her physical form devolves into the “still life” we see gazing into nothingness as the movie ends. Does that set up a sequel as well as the canon version of the ending, which leaves Mary’s whereabouts and wellbeing deliberately ambiguous? No. Is it even more disturbing in the way it suggests that, like the byzantine architecture of the backrooms, whatever stories take place within this labyrinth are infinitely repeatable and potentially unending? I think so. The more times I remember the actual ending, in fact, the less I think it’s the ideal form of it.
