Backrooms' ending explained by director Kane Parsons

The A24 horror movie Backrooms ends in a place that seems designed to leave viewers talking. Exactly what happens at the movie’s most crucial moment takes a little symbolic unpacking. Why does it play out the way it does? Polygon asked director Kane Parsons for his interpretation.

“I am a little averse to explaining the events in the work I do,” Parsons says. “I swear I don't want that to seem like a cop-out. It's just, my audience loves to defer to my word over their own interpretations. I want to be careful — anything I say will be taken so seriously.”

Still, Parsons was willing to hint at some useful things to know in interpreting Backrooms’ ending, particularly about what happens to the protagonist, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Read on at your own peril.

[Ed. note: End spoilers for Backrooms follow from here.]

How does Backrooms end? Who lives and who dies?

In Backrooms, Clark, a failed architect and struggling furniture-store owner, discovers a portal into a liminal space consisting of seemingly endless surreal rooms and other spaces, including entire distorted neighborhoods. He sees and hears evidence of something malevolent living in this space — he hears it roaring and smashing things, and it eventually kills Bobby (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Finn Bennett), a young man he brings into the space to shoot video proving its existence.

When Clark disappears, his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) investigates, following him into the otherworldly space. He finds her and takes her captive, tying her to a chair in a room deep underground. It turns out that the monster is a distorted, elongated version of himself, dressed in a version of the pirate costume he wears in advertisements for his furniture store. Clark claims he’s at peace with this creature, which Parsons refers to as “Pirate Clark.” Clark is similarly at peace with his own destructive nature, which he feels has made it possible for him to live comfortably in this other world. (He doesn’t call it the Backrooms, but we will just for simplicity.)

Mary isn’t having it. She calls him out as deluded, self-destructive, and abusive, incapable of accepting his own failings or seeing the world from anyone else’s perspective. He insists she’s wrong — but when he hugs Pirate Clark to express his embrace of the Backrooms, his doppelgänger sinks its teeth into Clark and kills him. Mary gets free of her chair and flees, with Pirate Clark in pursuit. She makes her way back into the real world, where an organization studying the Backrooms gasses and captures Pirate Clark and holds Mary captive for interrogation.

Backrooms ending expained: Why does Pirate Clark kill Clark?

Parsons describes the moment when Pirate Clark kills Clark as the moment viewers should consider “the engine of the film,” — the moment that tells us what’s really going on between Clark and the eerie space he’s tried to adopt as his home.

“Clark is in this echo chamber of sorts,” Parsons says. “This place is very much becoming a feedback loop of his interior world, vomited out onto the walls, and expressed as something that feels like it's doing something for him. It's appealing to some longstanding desire or hole he's had in himself for so long. It feels like it's being filled. But I don't think it's a version of healing or peace that is truthful to the experience of the nervous system. I think it's definitely a diluted state of being that he's been forced into by atomized life prior to this, prior to finding the Backrooms. It's just been turned up.”

Parsons describes Pirate Clark as “an extension of the logic that makes this place.” While the monstrous creature is a real-world person “misremembered” by the Backrooms in the same way all the twisted versions of Clark’s furniture-store showrooms and other real-world spaces are “misremembered” chunks of reality, Pirate Clark is also reflecting Clark in real time.

“They're fundamentally of the same principle,” Parsons says. “The reason you have all these rooms is the same reason you have, sometimes, these misremembered people.”

Who controls the Backrooms?

At the same time, Parsons emphasizes that Clark’s desires are affecting the Backrooms, so his experience isn’t universal — and his understanding of what’s going on may be delusional or self-serving, rather than reflecting objective truths about the otherworldly space.

“The way he describes it is just Clark's best guess,” Parsons says. “I think it's very much showing that, for all the understanding he seems to state about this place — when he does return to this connection with Mary, with this therapist, this point of contact with the outside world, which he seemingly has been willing to get away from, and is claiming he does not need to be bound to anymore — allowing himself to realize he's been deluding himself in some way, or realizing he has not found the peace he was searching for, breaks the stability of this little roleplay life he's been in.”

That said, Parsons jokes that Pirate Clark biting into Clark might reflect something entirely different in Clark’s mental state.

“It very well could be that Clark was just feeling especially hungry that day, and there's no particular reason to [Pirate Clark’s attack],” he says. “I think narratively, it does not read that way. But there's just no way to know, because we don't get a monologue from Pirate Clark.”

Either way you read the ending, it seems like Pirate Clark isn’t a static reflection that the Backrooms generated from Clark in a single period in time — he’s actively changing to reflect Clark, mirroring aspects of the original from moment to moment. What does that tell us about the nature of the Backrooms?

“I can't comment on that, unfortunately,” Parsons says. “That's something I got to protect for the future.” He is, after all, hoping to make a whole series of Backrooms-related techno-thriller movies, and he has to save some secrets for the sequel.

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Backrooms is in theaters now.