One thing to do if it is your birthday and you are feeling old and melancholy, as I was on Sunday, is to go see a movie made by a recent child and think to yourself, Okay, so some of my life experience has actually been worth it. The instant-smash-hit horror movie Backrooms provides just such an opportunity: its maker, Kane Parsons, is currently 20 years old, so he was in his teens when he sold the project to A24 and shot the thing in Vancouver. That is, in its way, impressive. Good for him for getting to work on time and finishing a movie. I haven’t done that, and I could be his father! Past that, though, Backrooms is an embarrassment of youthful pretension. 

The film is based on deep internet lore, a sort of cult philosophy (or something) about so-called liminal spaces that exist beyond the scrim of the visible world. The aesthetic of these imagined places is one of frightening banality: fluorescent lights, prosaic decor, an unending maze of suburban office park drabness. Gone is the spooky old manor house atop a hill, replaced with the creeping dread of corporate homogeny, fading as that might be in these work-from-home days of ours. It’s a chilling riff on the loneliness that animates most horror, a grim suggestion that even the most basic and bland of human-made environments can be loci of sinister off-ness. 

Parsons, who was born the year I graduated from college, sets his film in the heyday of such drop-ceiling architecture: 1990. He creates two listless and unhappy people to mope around in what is, for him, a distant past. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a discount furniture store by day and drinks away his marital problems by night. Mary (Renate Reinsve) is his therapist, haunted by memories of a difficult childhood that she nonetheless clings to as a kind of talisman of identity. They are both people who might sense something unspoken but looming in the fabric of things, an alternate life (better or not) just past what they can perceive. 

It’s a persuasive suggestion, that the banality of American, mall-sprawl, middle-aged existence might be escaped through a portal into a surreal realm of warped imagination and memory. Dangerous, sure. But something! 

The trouble is, Parsons is too young to have any perspective on what Clark and Mary might actually be searching for. Clark’s problems are generic to the point of absurdity; Parsons seems to understand that sometimes money and work are stressful for grownups, and so he has this grownup say that money and work are stressful. Parsons might as well walk into frame and recite, “Webster’s Dictionary defines adulthood as…” Mary gets a little more nuance, but her motivations and backstory are kept at such a remove that they barely register. It’s all so wan and simple and un-engaging, these sketches of problems that Parsons has only heard about.

Plenty of young writers have written well above their age quite convincingly. But Parsons is not such a talent (yet). All he really does is take heaps of internet imagery (including some of his own) and render it on screen. The production design of the film is an achievement. That part, Parsons has nailed. But when he has to imbue all that construction with plot and meaning, he betrays a lack of empathy and imagination. Mind you, I’d have mostly the same problems with the movie if it was directed by someone 20 years Parsons’s senior. But knowing the youth of the filmmaker adds an extra element of frustration; this pipsqueak is gonna try to tell me about the flattening and deadening weight of adulthood, on my 43rd birthday?? 

It’s not hard to see why the film has been so successful. It entices the curiosity of both those who know about the backrooms lore and those who don’t. Its stylish visuals can be collaged into a nice trailer. And obviously Renate Reinsve is the biggest movie star on the planet. But I’d hate if all this sudden money does what it most likely will, which is convince Parsons and the team of older people who no doubt surround him—and profit off of his output—that he is fully baked, ready to take on anything as the new Ari Aster or, perhaps more precisely, the young white Jordan Peele. In reality, he is far from any of that; at present he is but a purveyor of soulless vibes. (I’d argue that Peele has also relied too heavily on grabby mood in his last two feature films, but there is at least something pervasively interesting about all the misfire of Us and Nope.)

The ending of Backrooms answers pretty much zero of Parsons’s maybe unanswerable questions, an ambiguity that I guess some people are finding artful but I think belies Parsons’s inability to think beyond first impressions. We needn’t be served a tidy explanation for everything, but some sense that the themes Parsons clumsily beats around have something to do with the scary things he shows us might be nice. Instead Backrooms just trails off, throwing its hands up and saying, “I don’t know, it’s just weird stuff.” The closing scene is, unintentionally or not, a fuck you to anyone who leaned forward in their seat, earnestly trying to parse significance out of Parsons’s parade of ominous pictures. Oh, you thought this all was leading somewhere? Well, too bad, this is instead just a solemn, morose version of trolling. 

I will admit that it comforted me a little, to sit in the dark on my very middle-aged birthday and watch this ultimately harmless piece of adolescent hubris. Being precocious and young is not all it takes in this world, it turns out! The hustling hustles better when there’s a little growth and wisdom behind it. I certainly don’t wish ill on Parsons’s career, but I do hope that he’ll do a bit more outlining and revision before his next time at bat. 

Of course, it’s possible that I shouldn’t feel cheered about my age at all. Maybe there are plenty of people under 30 out there who are picking up everything Parsons is laying down, and I’m just too out of touch to recognize any of it. Maybe I have aged out of basic comprehension of widely understood pop culture references. But I’m choosing to believe that, nah, this boy emperor is not quite as clad as some are saying, and that Backrooms is just another example of marketable flash being prized over anything like depth. That’s a pretty depressing reflection of a lot of things right now, but at least I have one less would-be wunderkind to worry about.