In Backrooms, the latest horror film from production company A24, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark – a failed architect who accidentally slips out of reality. He ends up trapped in an endless labyrinth of yellow-tinted rooms, humming fluorescent lights and eerie, disembodied sounds – the “Backrooms”.

The film is an adaptation of a popular internet horror concept and urban legend, about an impossibly large, alternate-reality maze of claustrophobic spaces with architecture that appears uncannily familiar but menacingly alien.

Yet the film also plays upon a deeper source of modern anxiety: the experience of trying to survive in an economy that fails to deliver on our vision for the future.

Movie audiences will (hopefully) never find themselves trapped in a nauseatingly jaundiced and never-ending labyrinth. But they may recognise Clark’s experience of living among failed promises, diminishing aspirations, precarity, social isolation and the growing fear of becoming obsolete.

Read more: Inside the Backrooms: the internet horror world built by its users

Many may also appreciate – if not fully empathise with – Clark’s creeping resentment, sense of entitlement and vitriolic blaming of others for his loneliness and stagnation. The film’s most profound insight........

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