You are here. The middle of nowhere. Over there, a shabby building — a faded, failing furniture store called, for no evident reason, "Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire." There's a sale going on. Apparently everything must go.

That's what you see on the outside. On the inside of this store, as you'll soon learn, are the bowels of Hell.

"Backrooms" is a howling, masterfully made horror movie drawn from the disturbing "creepypasta" precincts of the internet. From one image in particular, actually: a view of an empty room, its walls and carpets rendered in an oppressive, cat-vomit yellow and bathed in sickly fluorescent light. Kane Parsons, the self-taught director and prime mover of "Backrooms" (he's also a writer and musician), latched onto this deadpan meme and turned it into a YouTube film series. A fandom gathered. Now Parsons's first "Backrooms" feature is playing at a theater near you. You might want to be careful.

The movie has a story of sorts, although it's unabashedly ambiguous. It begins with a man named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) — the Cap'n Clark of the furniture store — consulting with his psychotherapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Oscar-nominated Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve) about the state of his marriage, which is not good. His wife has thrown him out of their home. Now he's alone — although not, as he's quick to insist, lonely. (What might that mean?) Soon we learn that Dr. Kline is also an author and has written a book. It's called "The Window Within." We begin chewing that over.

Soon we see that Clark is now living in the furniture store — sleeping in the bedding department, lounging in a faux living room. We notice a faint gasping in the air and hear somebody whispering in French. (Who? Where?) Before long we realize that the store is incomprehensibly huge, with innumerable rooms (some with sloppily stacked piles of furniture, others with mini-deserts of drifting sand) and endless empty corridors. Although not always entirely empty — at a far reach along one of these passages, Clark can make out a mysterious dark figure. He begins walking toward it. Uh oh.

One doesn't want to give away too much of the alarming, hyper-spooky action in this movie. It would be difficult to do in any case. The picture exudes dread and deep unease. It's designed to scramble whatever sensibility you bring to it. From time to time there are eruptions of gruesome violence, which are of course welcome. New characters occasionally shuffle in, too, and naturally they're not the sort of entities you'd invite to any party in our present dimension. A natural response to all of this massed weirdness is a whimpering "What the hell?" And narrative clarity remains elusive throughout. By the time Mark Duplass turns up as some sort of ... well, I'm not entirely sure what ... and confides that "Nothing in recorded history has ever meant more than this," we finally know how much we don't know.

Photos courtesy of A24