Here’s a thriller that Maurice Escher could have production designed, with Salvador Dalí decorating the sets and Stanley Kubrick behind the camera directing.

Not that Youtube phenom turned horror filmmaker Kane Parsons is the new Kubrick. But in turning his “Backrooms” found footage horror video series into a feature film, he and his production designer Danny Vermette (“Longlegs”) and art director Alan Derksen summon up not just cinematic horror imagery of the past, but of the most disturbing painters in the canon.

A visual essay in the sinister possibilities of a minimalist unknown becomes something deeper with nightmarish echoes of Heironymous Bosch and Dalí pasted on a yellow on yellow settings that could have been inspired by Mondrian.

This summer’s “Blair Witch Project” horror phenomenon is about a stressed, divorced furniture store owner who stumbles into an alternate reality by stepping through the walls of the basement of his bland ’90s surburban warehouse store.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, bringing the “real”) never seems to have any customers, which only adds to the bitter edge his drinking has taken on.

“Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” is a badly-named “cheap particle board” furniture warehouse store which Clark tries to advertise with DIY commercials of himself dressed as a furniture pirate. The whole “pirate” or “sultan” branding doesn’t work and even his young dead-end employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) get that they don’t “get it.”

It’s only with his therapist (Renate Reinsve of “Sentimental Value” and “The Worst Person in the World”) that Clark gets into the reasons for his anger. He lost his house in a divorce to his perpetual law-student wife.

“I hurt people,” he confesses. “It’s just the way I”m wired.”

Role-playing the “big fight” that ended his marriage doesn’t help, and we wonder if published author Dr. Mary has a clue about how to get Clark “forging a new path” to better mental health.

The dude’s sleeping in his furniture store, after all. He’s got almost nowhere to go but up. But will he?

Something about this yellow wallppaper and yellowish carpet milieu of vast rooms, empty sections, cubicles with no one in them, wonky wiring and PA and CCTV systems gives him and us as viewers the creeps.

Poking around in the basement has him poking a wall because he hears something, and then freaking out when his arm and indeed his entire body go right through it.

Horror films that cast really good actors are the ones that manage the proper level of “This can’t be happening” shock and awe at what transpires. Clark absorbs the shock. Then he “explores” this beyond-the-basement-wall realm — mysterious piles of what looks like furniture, but “make no sense” as chairs or desks or what have you.

Half-buried manikin parts protrude, Dalí style, out of the floor. An advertising standee with a pirate on it chirps away greetings in a parade of languages. Walls recede into some pointed forced perspective and shafts and tunnels present themselves to Clark, who knows there’s someone or something in there with him. It’s just that he can’t help but come back.

Trying to explain to his therapist this “New York Subway System…massive” maze of rooms and corridors gets him nowhere. And rounding up his two employees to join him for this “expedition” to video what they find seems a mistake. It always is.

“Backrooms” is primarily a triumph of horrific tone, with a handful of grim and gruesome shocks to sate viewers who like their horror violent and bloody.

The look and the psychological mystery at the heart of it feed into the chill that sets in early and rarely leaves your mind. Horror conventions such as a character being snatched out of the frame and “Slenderman” like figures — and a dwarf — are tucked into this “Everything Everywhere All at Once” universe of an underworld.

The finale is entirely too conventional and pat to fit the general weirdness of all that’s preceded it. And as we ponder the puzzle what connects these people to that place — literal or mental — we have to consider what indie cinema icon Mark Duplass might be playing and what Reinsve is getting at as we see and hear her struggle to emote or even hit the right word emphasis in sentences in English.

But Ejiofor is the casting coup here, an actor who buys in and makes us join him as he utters even the most exhausted lines in horror — “Look, I know this sounds crazy.” Because it is. Until it starts to make sense, almost in spite of all the over-explaining that dominates the closing scenes.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass.

Credits: Directed by Kane Parsons, scripted by Will Soodik, based on the Kane Parsons video series. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:50

• PRESSURE
• Starring:  Brendan Fraser, Andrew Scott and Kerry Condon
• Directed by:  Anthony Maras
• Rated:  R
• Running time:  1 hr 40 mins
• Focus Features

Our score:  3.5 out of 5

On the most recent episode of our “Back in the Day” podcast the crew and I took a look at some of the greatest war movies ever made.  In doing my research I learned that there have been more then 5,000 feature films dealing with World War II alone.  5,000!!  Some of them are regarded as some of the best films ever made (The Best Years of Our Lives, Patton, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) while others I’d never seen.  As Memorial Day rolls along this year we are treated to another one:  Pressure.

The film opens on the aftermath of what can only be called a horrible tragedy.  Overlooking the carnage, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Fraser) can only curse.

Jump ahead six months where we meet British meteorologist James Stagg (Scott).  Awaiting the birth of his child, he is summoned to meet with Eisenhower and his staff to forecast the weather conditions that will be taking place during an operation they are calling “D-Day.”  Stagg continually butts heads with Colonel Krick (Chris Messina), whose method of predicting future weather from past events is not a practice Stagg embraces.  The two continually clash, much to the chagrin of an increasingly agitated Eisenhower.  Doing her best to keep the peace is Lieutenant Kay Summersby (Condon), Eisenhower’s aide and buffer.  It’s not an easy job.

Well presented with an outstanding attention to detail, Pressure could be looked at as the prequel to Saving Private Ryan, which opens with the invasion of Normandy, while this film looks at the events leading up to that day.  The cast is strong, with Fraser at his best when going head to head with British General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), whose “gung – ho” attitude robs Ike the wrong way.  It doesn’t help that “Monty” keeps referencing that, unlike others, he has battlefield experience.  He also throws “Exercise Tiger,” easily Eisenhower’s worse military chapter, out when it suits him.  (NOTE:  For those unaware, Exercise Tiger was basically a practice run for D-Day, with young soldiers taking place in a military exercise.  However, due to poor communications, live ammunition was used and nearly 1,000 soldiers and seamen were killed.)

The film has it’s dramatic moments but it’s also anti-climactic because, while they continually stress that the invasion will take place on June 5^th, anyone with any knowledge of history knows D-Day was June 6^th.  So when Ike asks if everything is good for June 5^th, you want to shake your head and tell him “no, sir.”

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the film.  I did.  When I was born, Eisenhower was president – JFK would be elected two months later.  And it was a genuine treat to be sitting in the theatre with some of Eisenhower’s great grandchildren.  It lent a nice historical aspect to the screening.

On a scale of zero fo five, Pressure receives ★★★  ½

Some are calling the controversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s recent outfit choices babydoll-dress-gate, Olivia Rodrigo calls it “weird.”

The dress debacle kicked up in early May when Rodrigo released the music video for “Drop Dead,” in which she runs through the Palace of Versailles wearing a pink-and-blue ruffled babydoll set while singing about the intensity of a crush. Then on May 8, she wore a cottage-core pink-and-white floral babydoll dress with knee-high Dr. Martens during a live performance in Barcelona.

Rodrigo was drawing from subversive feminist and punk fashion of yore, but internet critics were quick to slam the “deja vu” singer, saying the ensemble was sexualizing child-like imagery. In an hour-and-a-half interview with the New York Times Popcast that dropped on Thursday, Rodrigo staunchly defended the dress and called the criticism disturbing.

“I have worn outfits that are maybe revealing on stage, like I’ve been on stage in a sparkly bra and little shorts — which is my right — that’s fun,” she said. “I felt cool and comfortable in that, and that wasn’t inappropriate, but me fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be, like, childlike was inappropriate, and I think it shows how we really normalize pedophilia in our culture.”

Rodrigo further decried the criticism as rhetoric that girls are fed from a young age, “which is ‘don’t wear that, because then a man is going to sexualize your body, and it’s your fault’ — it’s so weird.”

Rodrigo said she didn’t think she looked “sexy” in the babydoll dress; she was going for a cool look à la Kathleen Hannah or like Courtney Love, musicians whom the pop star said are her heroes. Love appeared to defend Rodrigo on social media by resharing posts defending the singer-songwriter in since-expired Instagram stories.

“I just think if we start dressing in a way that’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t want some f— freak to think that I am sexy like a baby’ or some crazy thing like that, I think it’s losing the plot a little bit,” she said. “I’m very protective of younger women and girls, and I don’t ever want them to be fed that rhetoric. You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention.”

Rodrigo’s third studio album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love,” which features hit singles “Drop Dead” and “The Cure,” will be released June 12.