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Let me ask you a question. If you somehow managed to warp through a wall into a void where there is neither time nor space — just endless, yellow corridors — would you go exploring the seemingly infinite halls?

Now let me ask you another question. If you did go exploring said halls, heard demonic screams, ran back to the wall you entered through and managed to return to the real world, would you go back into the void again?

Enter Clark, a struggling furniture salesman. There’s a few things you need to know about him: he has a drinking problem, his wife left him, she’s kept the house and he lives in his furniture showroom — Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — which he advertises in a pirate costume.

All that to say, things aren’t really looking up for this guy.

That’s when, irritated by high electricity bills and voltage fluctuation, he decides to go down to the basement late one night to investigate. He sees a sliver of light shining through an otherwise solid wall — and when his hand manages to go through the wall itself, he leans in a bit too much and falls into the Backrooms.

Now, if you’re familiar with creepypastas (internet horror stories, not ominously placed lasagna), you already know what those are. But for the uninitiated, it’s a series of endless, empty corridors and rooms lit by fluorescent lights.

It’s supposed to feel just a bit uncanny to the casual observer, like an unlit hallway in a hospital that goes on a little too long or a mall after all the shops have closed, and it does. The film does a good job of capturing that unnerving feeling.

So, Clark enters the Backrooms, exits them and enters again, eventually making it his mission to try and map them out. He tells his therapist about this and wows to bring back proof when she — understandably — doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying.

Enlisting the help of his trusty crew from the store, the captain embarks on a quest to film the backrooms and prove he hasn’t completely lost his bearings. But Murphy’s Law eventually kicks in and Clark does indeed end up losing his bearings.

I’ll spare you the details of what happens afterwards to avoid giving away any spoilers, but the film suffers from an unfortunate habit of taking itself too seriously.

The film’s score did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to building the necessary tension. The initial scenes inside the Backrooms really wouldn’t have been as unsettling as they were if it weren’t for the music — and the hum of fluorescent lights — in the background.

The setting itself was also well designed. Members of the film crew actually got lost in the 30,000 square feet of set built for this movie. It was almost Nolanian in a way, actually recreating an impossible space instead of resorting to green screens and CGI.

But for a film based on an internet legend, the legend itself doesn’t appear to be the main plot point of the movie. Instead, it seemed to focus more on Clark’s declining mental state — and maybe the whole film can be read as a metaphor for mental health.

The film starts with some ‘found footage’ style action that isn’t adequately explained at any point and maybe it would have been wiser to have continued in that direction. We also don’t get an explanation for what the Backrooms are, how they came to be or why — all we know is that they are massive and ever-changing.

We are also given hints of there being a major threat lurking somewhere in the halls, a threat we never actually come face to face with during the film — I personally don’t believe the pirate was the big bad.

If you’re familiar with this genre of internet horror — especially director Kane Parsons’ prior work on YouTube — you know this concept had heaps of potential, potential it didn’t really live up to in its pursuit of some sort of deeper meaning.

The truth is, the plot of Backrooms feels like a 20-year-old’s film thesis, not a major international feature. The fact that Parsons turns 21 this week doesn’t excuse this, he’s done better.

Overall, the film was not what I had hoped it would be as a creepypasta reader of yesteryear. It wasn’t terrible, and I still see some of the scenes in my dreams a couple of days after having seen the film, so it clearly had an effect.

The same formula — tension, disturbing visuals and a deeper meaning — would’ve worked well for some other, more straightforward internet legends like the Russian Sleep Experiment, but something as lore-heavy as the Backrooms demanded something truer to the source material.