Mark Kermode

He does look and sound like Gareth Southgate, doesn't he?

No, no, I think it's a great film.

I've just had a note from Heather.

Dear England, the first two episodes are on iPlayer.

The series will continue this Sunday at 9pm on BBC One, then on iPlayer after broadcast.

So Backrooms, which is the very promising and deeply unsettling feature debut from Kane Parsons, a young YouTuber at either 20 or 21.

He is, quote, A24's youngest feature director.

I mean, scary.

He created the Backrooms web series, which was this kind of creepy, do you know what this thing creepypasta is?

So it's like viral horror.

It's like a popular term for viral horror, memes, legends, that sort of thing.

So in the web series, there's a research institute that is exploring these anomalous back rooms that were first discovered in the 1980s, into which people keep getting dragged.

The feature, which is the...

the thing we're talking about now is written by Will Sudeik follows two central characters the first is Chiwetel Ejiofor's Clark who runs a furniture store with a weird sort of piratical theme we see him doing local TV adverts dressed as a pirate saying aha you know all the furniture here is a steal and all that sort of stuff his life is in chaos um

His relationship has fallen apart.

He gets angry with his therapist, Mary, played by Renata Reinsfeld, who's the person from Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value, brilliant actor.

So the store, the furniture store, is in some form of decline.

At night, the electrics play up, the lights flash, there are power outages.

Weirder still, on the circuit breaker, on the fuse board, there is a switch that doesn't seem to be attached to anything at all.

And one evening...