Backsession – aptly dubbed ‘Barbenheimer for sickos’ is officially upon us. After Curry Barker’s excellent Obsession, Kane Parsons’ liminal horror film Backrooms is out in theatres. Inspired by a 4chan creepypasta that spawned the young director’s viral series of YouTube shorts, the film, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, is not an easy watch. It makes the most terrifying use of seemingly isolated, eerie office spaces. If you’re reading this after watching the film and wondering what the hell happened, here’s a full breakdown of Backrooms ending, along with possible interpretations.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
What happens at the end of the Backrooms?
Towards the end of the film, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), about entering a mysterious place in his store’s basement. To convince her of the truth, he does what any horror film character would do – investigate the phenomenon instead of staying away. Joined by his assistant manager, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her partner Bobby (Finn Bennett), they set out with a camera to get proof. Inside, they find a maze of rooms with mysterious furniture, piles of clothes and blood. Bobby gets dragged away by an unseen entity while Kat loses her way, leaving Clark alone with whatever is lurking in there. Soon, Mary’s curiosity brings her into the basement, where she finds the entry point into the Backrooms.
Inside the Backrooms, Mary is relieved to find Clark before he attacks her and ties her to a chair in a kitchen space. At the table, there’s a man with distorted features and a woman by the counter. Clark reveals that the Backrooms are “everything that ever was,” and that it is a version of reality. It’s a universe where humans and places exist, but they seem to be created from a hazy memory. The people around them aren’t spirits but ‘Still Life’ entities. Clark makes Mary enact the moment he separated from his wife, but their conversation is interrupted when a large, grotesque version of Clark dressed as a pirate barges into the room. When our protagonist tries to reason with him, he picks him up and begins to eat him.
After a horrifying chase, Mary escapes from pirate Clark but runs right into men in hazmat suits who release a gas that renders her unconscious. In the final scene of the film, Mary wakes up in a room with a scientist/researcher (Mark Duplass) who claims that his MRI machine manufacturing company is investigating the strange phenomenon of the Backrooms. We then see a distorted version of Mary sitting alone in a room before the credits roll. The ending has been intentionally left open and has sparked many fan theories.
What are the Backrooms really?
The film uses the Backrooms as a physical manifestation of the minds and memories of those who enter. It’s a universe that expands endlessly in the basement of the furniture store. For those who haven’t caught up on the lore, Backrooms originated on 4chan in 2019 as an urban legend about a maze-like dimension. A user on the forum allegedly posted an image of an empty corporate-ish place with yellow walls and old carpets. The post also claimed that one can enter the dimension by successfully no-clipping – gaming lingo for the act of slipping through reality fast enough to phase through a solid object, like the wall in the furniture store in the film. Parsons, having created a whole YouTube series around it, has his own theories that the film operates within. Here, the Backrooms assembles scenes from a person’s mind and constructs its own version. The best example is a version of Clark that shows up to kill the original. He looks like the pirate mascot for the furniture store we saw earlier in the film. The Backrooms are essentially a conscious, ever-changing dimension.
What happens to Clark?
Clark dies in the end. When we first meet Clark, he largely lives in the furniture store he manages, and from his re-enactment exercise with Mary during a therapy session, you can tell he blames his divorce and failures on those around him instead of taking accountability. When he discovers the portal into a mysterious dimension, he becomes obsessed with exploring it. He seems to like it there since it’s familiar and safe and doesn’t require him to change his ways. Here, he can sit in his version of events and avoid the outside world that requires him to change and grow from his past experiences. Later, he makes Mary enact his final conversation with his ex-wife. The confrontation ends when Pirate Clark barges in and kills him.
Is Mary still trapped in the Backrooms?
Mary’s fate is ambiguous. She is probably still in the Backrooms, or at least she’s a part of it now. Backrooms ends with a montage of versions of Mary’s childhood home before showing us a warped Still Life of her seated alone in a room. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on during the interrogation with Async, which means the place created her Still Life from its faulty memories. Through flashbacks, we’re told that Mary was raised in an abusive home. Her mother refused to leave their soon-to-be-demolished home and raised Mary in isolation, cut off from the world. She was institutionalised, and the home was demolished to build condos on the site. The Backrooms turns trauma and past experiences into a tangible prison-like space, and Mary experienced it first-hand. She may or may not escape, but the place has clearly absorbed her traumas.
What does the Backrooms ending mean?
Backrooms tackles some heavy themes. Central to the plot is how entrapped one feels in one’s own past traumas. The space mirrors the insides of the characters’ minds, creating twisted versions of their memories. Clark and Mary, in different ways, find themselves grappling with unresolved issues. The former crumbles when forced to confront his narcissism and the fact that he is the problem. The latter, despite spending years as a practising therapist, has her own baggage stemming from her childhood and her inability to open the window within which is ironically what her self-help book is called. The stagnation creates endless loops that manifest physically in the Backrooms.
Does the Backrooms have a post-credits scene?
No, the film doesn’t have a mid-credits or post-credits scene. After the open ending, the film concludes once the credits roll. You can exit the theatres, and you won’t miss any additional scenes or indications of a sequel.
Backrooms is currently in theatres.
Hero and featured image: A24
Note : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
