A furniture store owner with personal failures and unexplained electrical problems discovers irregular breakers in a circuit panel. After investigating the lower floor, he passes through a wall and enters an underground labyrinth known as the Backrooms. The spaces resemble vacant, nondescript office areas but feel distorted and art-installation-like. Rooms contain piles of furniture, shrunken doors, and random objects such as a stop sign and a cardboard cutout with a cassette player greeting in multiple languages. The environment stretches endlessly through uncanny dimensions and strange recesses, creating a fitfully unsettling nightmare that does not fully develop beyond its creepy premise.
"Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the not-exactly-proud owner of Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a sad and empty furniture store located in a 1990s strip mall. He has plenty of concerns - his failed architect aspirations, the end of his marriage, any customers at all - but unexplained electric troubles at the store also nag him. The lights keep flickering."
"When Clark inspects the circuit breaker, there are odd, irregular breakers at the bottom of the panel. Who put them there? What are they for? If there's one thing Backrooms gets spot on, it's the mysteries of the circuit breaker. One night, Clark goes looking in the store's lower floor when he unwittingly passes right through the wall, and into the Backrooms."
"Wonderland it is not. The seemingly never-ending chambers almost resemble vacant, nondescript office spaces. But they're stranger, like art installation versions of office space. There are piles of furniture, shrunken doors and disturbingly random things like a stop sign or a cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark later describes the rooms as though they were made "by a bunch of construction workers on acid.""
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