I’m a little late on this one, mostly because I wanted to watch it twice.
I saw Backrooms opening weekend in a theater after what felt like an enormous amount of hype surrounding Kane Parsons and the world he had already built through his YouTube series. I walked out admiring a lot of what I had seen, but feeling like the movie itself never quite met the expectations surrounding it.
So I tried it again at home on Prime.
And I liked it more.
Not enough to completely change my original opinion, but enough to realize there was more going on here than I gave it credit for the first time.
For anyone who somehow missed the internet phenomenon, Backrooms comes from Parsons’ series of shorts built around the idea of endless liminal spaces: yellow walls, fluorescent lights, empty offices and rooms that seem familiar while being just wrong enough to make your skin crawl. Parsons began making the series as a teenager, and A24 ultimately handed him a feature with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass. He was only 20 when the movie was released.
That’s insane.
More importantly, the kid can direct.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the divorced owner of a struggling furniture store who discovers an impossible opening in the basement. His initial reaction to the Backrooms is probably my favorite stretch of the movie because Ejiofor sells exactly the right mixture of fear and curiosity.
He knows he should stay the hell away from it.
Of course he doesn’t.
That impulse feels very human to me. If you found a doorway in your basement leading to some impossible series of rooms that mathematically should not exist, there are two rational reactions: call somebody immediately or seal the thing behind concrete and move to another state.
Clark grabs a camera.
I get it.
Ejiofor is great at communicating the gradual shift from “What the hell is this?” to “I need to understand this,” and eventually to something much more unhealthy. Clark isn’t simply being stalked by the Backrooms. He becomes seduced by them.
The movie looks fantastic while he does it.
Cinematographer Jeremy Cox and production designer Danny Vermette give the Backrooms exactly the strange visual character they need. More than 30,000 square feet of physical Backrooms sets were reportedly constructed for the film, and apparently people actually got lost in them during production. That commitment shows.
The rooms don’t just repeat. They mutate.
You move through another floor and something is slightly different. A familiar space has been recreated incorrectly. Architecture seems to remember itself badly. The place feels less like a building than something trying to understand what a building is.
That’s where Backrooms works best for me.
The score by Parsons and Edo Van Breemen is also excellent. It understands that the fluorescent hum and emptiness are already doing part of the work, so when the music pushes forward it can make these enormous dead spaces feel even more oppressive.
Then there are the creatures.
The first real introduction to the humanoid things living down there is genuinely creepy. They look enough like people that your brain keeps trying to finish the job, and then something about the face or proportions tells you to stop looking.
That’s good horror.
Later, the movie explains that the Backrooms seem to recreate not just spaces but people, producing these malformed copies, or “Still Lifes,” based on incomplete impressions of the real thing.
I’m usually the guy complaining when a horror movie explains its monster too much, but I like the basic idea here. The Backrooms aren’t just a maze. They’re remembering us badly.
That’s creepy as hell.
Renate Reinsve plays Clark’s therapist, Mary Kline, and she continues the run she’s been on since The Worst Person in the World. Between this and Sentimental Value, Reinsve has become one of those actors whose presence immediately makes me more interested in whatever she’s doing. Here she has the difficult job of grounding material that becomes increasingly surreal, and she rarely resorts to big horror-movie reactions.
She looks scared like a person looks scared.
That matters.
The place where Backrooms still loses me somewhat, even on the second viewing, is the midpoint shift.
Clark has been our way into this world. He discovers it, becomes obsessed with it and starts unraveling inside it. Then the movie increasingly transfers its attention to Mary as she goes looking for him.
The first time I watched the movie, that shift bothered me a lot.
Clark was the character I was fascinated by, and suddenly the movie seemed determined to hand itself to somebody else.
On the second viewing, it works better.
Knowing where Clark is headed allows his disappearance from the center of the movie to feel less like the screenplay abandoning its protagonist and more like part of his deterioration. By the time Mary finds him again, he has gone completely around the bend.
And I mean completely.
Clark has essentially decided the Backrooms are preferable to his actual life. His marriage is gone. His business is failing. Outside, he feels like a failure. Inside this horrifying impossible maze, he has discovered something nobody else understands.
Suddenly he matters.
There’s something sad in that.
The screenplay by Will Soodik doesn’t always dig into it as deeply as I wanted, but Ejiofor does.
That’s part of my larger problem with Backrooms. There are great ideas everywhere in this thing, sometimes more interesting than the screenplay connecting them.
The concept of moving between floors and finding increasingly corrupted versions of reality is great. The idea that these spaces are built out of incomplete memories is great. Clark preferring this nightmare to his actual life is great.
Then the movie occasionally stops to make sure we understand the lore.
I don’t always need to.
The Backrooms were more frightening when I understood less.
That’s a difficult problem when adapting internet mythology. People who have watched all of Parsons’ videos are going to want the Async material, the rules and the connective tissue. People walking in cold need enough information to understand what they’re seeing.
I’m somewhere in the middle. I knew enough about the YouTube material going in to understand that eventually some corporation or government-adjacent group was probably going to show up.
Sure enough.
Hello, Async.
And hello, Mark Duplass.
Listen, I’ll watch Mark Duplass in almost anything.
He shows up late as Phil, a researcher connected to Async, the organization studying the Backrooms. The reveal expands the world considerably: these people know about the place, they’ve been researching it, and even they don’t really understand what they opened.
Part of me likes that.
Another part of me misses the basement.
There’s something much scarier about Clark accidentally finding this impossible thing behind his furniture store than there is about laboratories full of people with clipboards already trying to map it.
Mystery tends to shrink the second somebody starts wearing a hazmat suit.
Thankfully, the movie has Pirate Clark.
Holy hell.
As Clark’s own deteriorated copy emerges, we get this towering, vaguely Slender Man-looking nightmare dressed as the pirate mascot from Clark’s furniture-store commercials. It’s simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying, which is a very difficult line to walk.
And that thing is terrifying.
Pirate Clark is played by Robert Bobroczkyi, a 7-foot-7 former basketball player who also portrayed the Offspring in Alien: Romulus. A lot of what you’re seeing is an actual performer in costume, enhanced with effects rather than a completely digital creature.
That explains why it works.
There’s weight to him.
There’s something fundamentally wrong about watching a human body that tall move through a normal-sized space. You don’t need a computer to invent uncanny proportions when nature has already given you Robert Bobroczkyi.
When Pirate Clark starts chasing Mary, Backrooms becomes frightening in a much simpler way.
Run.
The sequence is weird, ugly and nightmarish in exactly the right ways. The furniture-store spaces being recreated incorrectly around Mary only make it better. Something familiar has become hostile, and this giant mangled pirate bastard will not stop coming.
Old Pirate Clark is committed.
I respect that.
The eventual Async reveal and ending are where my mixed feelings return. Mary escapes the immediate nightmare only to discover that the people studying it may not exactly be interested in letting her return to normal life. Phil explains just enough to expand the mythology while also admitting that Async doesn’t truly understand what it has found. The movie then closes on corrupted copies of Mary's memories and finally a distorted version of Mary herself.
It’s effective.
It also has the faint smell of “we would very much like to make Backrooms 2.”
I’m torn on that because I genuinely want to see more of this world, but I also think Backrooms would be stronger if it occasionally resisted the impulse to build mythology and simply let these rooms exist as something fundamentally unknowable.
Not every door needs to lead to lore.
Sometimes the door itself is enough.
That’s ultimately where I landed on the movie again.
It is beautifully shot. It has fantastic production design. The score is terrific. Ejiofor and Reinsve are excellent. The creature design ranges from unsettling to genuinely frightening, and Pirate Clark alone is probably going to stick in my head longer than entire horror movies I’ve watched this year.
Parsons clearly has an eye.
At 20 years old, making your feature debut on something this visually assured is ridiculous. Whatever problems I have with the movie, I’m extremely curious what he does next.
But Backrooms is also a movie where I regularly love what I’m looking at more than I love the screenplay carrying me through it.
The character shift is awkward. The mythology occasionally starts explaining a nightmare that was more powerful without explanation. The psychology is never quite as deep as the movie seems to believe it is, and several potentially fascinating ideas are introduced without being fully developed.
The second viewing helped.
I stopped fighting the midpoint shift as much. I appreciated Clark’s descent more. I noticed how deliberately the spaces evolve as the characters move deeper, and knowing where the movie was headed let me pay more attention to what Parsons was doing visually instead of waiting for the story to become the version I had imagined from all the hype.
Maybe that was my problem the first time.
Backrooms arrived carrying years of internet mythology, a young-director narrative, A24 expectations and a ridiculous amount of anticipation.
That’s a lot to ask any movie to carry down a fluorescent hallway.
Taken on its own, I think it’s a good horror movie with some great filmmaking buried inside an uneven screenplay.
And I’d recommend it almost entirely on the visuals, performances, atmosphere and those wonderfully fucked-up things wandering around down there.
I’ll probably buy the physical release.
Maybe watching it a third time will bump it another tenth.
For now:
6.3/10