According to online rumors, 20-year-old Kane Parsons couldn't possibly have made his gripping debut feature, "Behind the Scenes." Parsons, whose film is a feature-length adaptation of his eponymous YouTube horror series about liminal spaces, is simply too young, commentators claim. Despite creating a vast mythology for the series and an interest in online liminal space fascinations—photos of shops or buildings rendered eerie by their unnatural emptiness—Parsons must have ceded his place to a more experienced man on set. Never mind that Parsons mastered the animation program Blender as a teenager and released the first episode of "Behind the Scenes" at 16, followed by 23 more episodes (including a 45-minute episode). Someone so young couldn't possibly have the skills, much less know enough about life, to skillfully direct an intriguing studio film. Right?
Youth can easily be mistaken for inexperience. Many teenagers spend their days in school and their evenings on homework, mostly devoting their weekends to hobbies or attempts to find some respite from the grueling demands of school life. The average teenager has never left the country and has never experienced a heartache more acute than that first breakup, soon forgotten by a multitude of fleeting romances and serious relationships. Most Americans don't have the opportunity to see or understand much of the world until they find themselves in it, and even then, the transition is slow. Saving money requires a job, which in turn requires hours spent studying or working, often both simultaneously. In youth, knowledge comes quickly, but accumulates gradually—or at least that's how it was before the internet.
(A24) Chiwetel Ejiofor in "Behind the Scenes"«
Internet access slammed like a battering ram into the doors of information, unleashing dizzying volumes of data overnight. Physical encyclopedias and textbooks became practically useless. Anyone could learn anything about the past, present, and future, no matter what piqued their curiosity. Children born, say, after September 11th would be able to fully understand what that day was like and its complex global consequences, as if they were alive and conscious enough to understand the collective fear and confusion. Perhaps their perceptions would even be more accurate, free from distorted memories and representing an objective historical narrative. Compassion trumps empathy. Something like what you might get in a therapist's office.
It's no coincidence that therapy is a crucial plot element in Behind the Scenes. The film explores the theme of trauma, albeit somewhat straightforwardly. But unlike most modern trauma horror films, the character's suffering isn't the crux of the story, but rather its starting point. What follows is a complex exploration of our obsession with the past and our envy of those who see it more clearly than we do. Parsons is one such astute observer, able to take an internet phenomenon like borderlands and dissect it, examining what drives this strange attraction, and distilling his findings into a coherent, complex theory.
For Parsons, the appeal of the borderlands lies not in their aesthetic emptiness, but in the fact that these places, once vibrant, are now empty—a cleansing accelerated by technology and time, witnessed by countless people. We've become so captivated by this emptiness that we've unwittingly trapped ourselves within it, mourning a past that slipped away before we could say goodbye. In this sense, Backstage is a film that only a 20-year-old could have made, one whose life straddles the intersection of decades of monotony and the last few years of sweeping change.
How fitting that "Backstage" is set in the 1990s, when the internet first became widely available, ending the decline of analog technology and plunging humanity into a nostalgic stagnation we won't fully understand until we're trapped inside and looking out. The film opens with a gripping scene shot in a found-footage style reminiscent of Parsons' YouTube series. Armed with only a handheld video camera, a man navigates endless corridors and rooms adorned with soft lime-green wallpaper. The space, stretching as far as the eye can see, simultaneously feels like an office, an exhibition hall, a library, and a dilapidated home. Fluorescent lighting illuminates nearly every corner, but the few dark passages seem even more ominous when surrounded by the endless illumination. From his footsteps, we understand that the man is trying to escape something, searching for a place to hide. There is a pause, then a short, frightening moment and an abrupt transition to static.
Somewhere beyond this otherworldly world, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a budget furniture salesman, and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Rainswe), are finishing up another session. Clark is stuck in the cycle of excessive drinking, self-pity, and professional stagnation he's been in since his wife left him. "I want to try an exercise we did before," Mary suggests, and they begin role-playing. Together, they relive the night Clark's wife left, with Mary playing the role of his ex-wife. It works, but only to a point. Clark is close to a breakthrough, but he can't overcome his victimhood until their allotted time is up.
(A24) Renata Reinsve in "Backstage Rooms"«
When change happens quickly, as it did when Clark's wife ran away in the middle of the night, coping with it can be nearly impossible. Even the most balanced person is not immune to the discomfort caused by emotional shock. Sudden, unwanted events leave scars on our autonomy and shatter the illusion of independence; the question of what went wrong weighs heavily on our shoulders, another noose that lingers within us.
One night, shortly after a role-playing session with the good doctor, Clark notices a glimmer of light shining through the wall in the basement of his store's showroom. The veil between this world and the afterlife is so thin that Clark can literally pass through it, out of his shabby store and into the familiar yellow dimension from the film's opening scene. It's the first real departure from the lifeless cycle of his daily life since his wife grabbed the car keys and never looked back. Naturally, Clark can't resist exploring. Curiosity grows into obsession. In the vicious circle, Clark discovers a trapdoor disguised as an exit.
Want to experience more than just the latest trends in culture? The Swell features works of art that will last. Register here.
While the web series "Backstage" cleverly animated an eerie static image, transforming it into a three-dimensional liminal space, the film takes it a step further—or, more accurately, transcends 30,000 feet of real-world sets. The magnificent, realistic expanses of the "Backstage" set allow Parsons to follow his characters through endless spaces, the architecture of which gradually becomes stranger as they progress. For the viewer, the result is powerful, evoking the same fascination and horror that Clark feels as he explores this space. As he moves further and discovers the disjointed, warped remnants of his past in this lime-green oblivion, Clark makes a Faustian pact with the entities that inhabit Backstage. To call it purgatory would be to dismiss it as not Clark's ultimate goal. Hell isn't fire and brimstone, after all; it's wallpaper, beige carpet, and drop ceilings.
While Behind the Scenes and Parsons masterfully create an atmosphere of horror and build entire worlds, the same principle of complexity rarely applies to the film's characters. Both Clark and Mary struggle with personal trauma, but the specific moments of their stories are explored with less interest than Behind the Scenes itself. A certain logic is essential here, and mystery is key to the success of the Behind the Scenes series and its story. But this lightweight approach is disappointing in a film that otherwise deals frankly with how we live and the behavior patterns we engage in, often brutally. The main characters are sketches of real people—mere catalysts for thematic reflections, when they should be integral to the story. Their fates are not as interesting as their predicament. But then again, perhaps inevitability is tiresome. Death itself is only a part of life. The journey to it is usually far more compelling.
(A24/Asterios Moutsokapas) "Utility Rooms"«
Well, unless it's true. Is it even worth mourning a life spent constantly looking back instead of moving forward? What's the value of an existence dedicated to mourning what was and what might have been? We should all live in the present—no doubt we'd like to—freed from memories of a recent past where the future looked far more promising than it does today. The internet boom and the advent of trendy wearables and gadgets, presented in a rainbow of colors, now seem like a thing of the distant past. That was back when brands appealed to specific personality types. Now personality is a brand. Existence is a product. The internet is a marketplace. Life is online.
It's no wonder that someone like Parsons so skillfully captures and documents this terrible reality, where, after hundreds of years of existence in the physical world, we find ourselves in digital solitude. Born at the right time—old enough to witness the last moments of the social world, yet young enough to witness the birth of a new way of life—Parsons allows us to understand our preoccupation with how quickly time flies. He is old enough to be fascinated by the idea of liminality, because it represents the destruction of that facet of life that was once objectively true: community.
(A24) Chiwetel Ejiofor in "Behind the Scenes"«
Liminal spaces are stores with "Sold Out" signs in the windows; empty libraries; offices with rows of unused desks and underutilized space because many work from home or their work is automated. For those who have lived through this phenomenon, a fresh perspective from the outside is a real godsend. Even when "Backstage" falters, it's as if someone stumbled upon the cage we've been pacing in and pointed out that the bars were always just big enough to slip through. We simply didn't notice because we were constantly looking down, trying to find a way out.
The ultimate, existential question is whether the exit is truly an exit, or just a door leading to the next cell. Perhaps we've become so comfortable in this imperfect dwelling that any alternative seems more terrifying than staying put. There's comfort in sitting and languishing in our discontent. In the Backstage, where anxiety and discontent stretch for miles and maybe even further, we can be as dysfunctional as we want. We can sit and rot until we're transformed into a version of ourselves similar to the one in the old world, yet fundamentally different—quieter, angrier, dying. Somehow, it's easier to stay in a place you're sure will kill you than to return to the real world and actually try to improve, to do the work, to face everything you don't want to acknowledge; to speak up instead of letting your voice carry through the hallways, walls, and narrow passages. Turning our heads toward the future exacerbates the whiplash caused by rapid change. But the alternative, as the film "Behind the Scenes" wisely suggests, is to remain stuck in the past, allowing ourselves to mutate and distort our memories until we become nothing like ourselves.
The article "We're Trapped in a Backstage Hell" first appeared on Salon.com. .