Against all odds, Backrooms has turned into one of the most surprising horror phenomena of recent years, conquering audiences and box office and demonstrating that even a project born from an apparently niche imagination can become a cinematic event of great appeal. But as often happens with works that make mystery and symbolism their strength, the ending left several questions.
In the final part of the story, Mary finally manages to track Clark down inside the Backrooms, the infinite labyrinth that in the original web series is also called “the Complex”. The search, however, quickly takes a disturbing turn. Clark immobilizes her, ties her up and leads her into a room inhabited by three creatures belonging to the category of the so-called Still Lifes, beings with a human appearance but deeply deformed, devoid of any reassuring appearance.
Clark explains that the Backrooms represent, in essence, every place that has ever existed. It is not simply another dimension or a parallel universe, but a sort of archive of collective memory, a space in which places, environments and fragments of the real world are preserved even when they are forgotten by people. Each existing space has a counterpart within the Complex, which can take the form of a simple room, a building or even entire urban areas. With the passage of time, however, the memory of these places fades and, along with it, their peculiarities also vanish, until only anonymous corridors and yellowish walls are left, which have now become the very symbol of the Backrooms.
To help Mary understand this logic, Clark shows her the workings of Still Lifes, where each of these creatures is connected to a real person, but their appearance represents how that individual is remembered within the Complex. Their distorted shapes are therefore not random, but the result of incomplete, fragmented and deteriorated memories by time. These beings do not seem to possess consciousness, do not feel pain, and do not show any real self-awareness. They exist simply as passive manifestations of memory, yet their role is far from harmless.
Some seem to have developed a form of greater autonomy than the others, as is the case of the so-called Captain Clark, an altered version of Clark himself, played by Robert Bobroczkyi. When he sees Mary, the creature reacts with a surprisingly human rage and even goes so far as to turn his aggression against the real Clark. Subsequently, Captain Clark devours him, the film stages a powerful metaphor: that of a man consumed by his mistakes, unable to really face the weight of the past and destined to be overwhelmed by it. Clark had found an escape from reality in the Backrooms, but that same escape ends up turning into his sentence.
For Mary, however, the situation initially takes on the contours of a simple struggle for survival. Hunted by Captain Clark through ever-changing scenarios of the Complex, she is forced to confront not only physical danger but also the ghosts of her own personal history. The decisive clash takes place inside the reconstruction of the furniture store that belonged to Clark, where Mary manages to hit the creature using an object she has been carrying with her for years: the imprint of a hand imprinted in the concrete of her old house.
It is precisely this detail that reveals one of the deepest aspects of the character’s narrative arc. As a child, Mary grew up with a mother who was plagued by severe psychological problems, obsessed with the fear of losing her home due to an urban redevelopment project. The fear had become so all-encompassing that it turned the house into a prison, preventing her daughter from even looking out the window, but the situation had degenerated until the woman was admitted to a psychiatric facility and the film suggests that Mary has always lived with a deep sense of guilt linked to that event. The footprint in the cement represents the last happy memory shared with her mother and, not surprisingly, it will be that symbol of the past that will allow her to save herself.
The conclusion, however, does not offer a real liberation, since after being recovered by researchers from Async, the organization that studies the phenomenon of Backrooms, Mary finds herself deprived of her freedom again. She is held in a facility with the justification of being protected and assisted, a situation that inevitably recalls the fate that befell her mother years earlier.
During the transfer inside the Async headquarters, Mary observes the monster Clark now captured and subjected to analysis, as well as coming across numerous elements already glimpsed during the film and remained so far without explanation. At this point Phil, a researcher played by Mark Duplass, enters the scene, engaged in mapping the Backrooms. The character presents himself with a cordial and reassuring manner, trying to establish a sincere dialogue with Mary, but the context suggests that something much more ambiguous may be hiding behind his good intentions.
Fundamental questions remain open about the true functioning of the Complex, the real intentions of Async and why some entities seem to develop an autonomous consciousness, but we will most likely see these questions addressed in a possible sequel to Backrooms.
