Kane Parsons’s Backrooms became A24’s biggest opening ever by turning fluorescent corridors and drop ceilings into pure dread. But decades earlier, Estonian director Kaljo Kiisk had already built a sterile institutional non-place of his own: an asylum in a nameless country, occupied by the Nazis, hunted through by a Gestapo officer who slowly loses his mind. We explore how Madness (1969) used the horror of clinical whiteness, psychiatric authority, and cyclical return to smuggle a critique of totalitarianism past the Soviet censors, and why, half a century before the Backrooms, it was already asking the question both films share: whose reality is this?

This exclusive video essay is based on an essay written by Joshua Polanksi and published on the Klassiki Journal.

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