Backrooms

★★⯪☆

Backrooms (2026)

Runtime: 110 minutes

MPAA: Rated R for language and some violent content/bloody images.

Liminal spaces are a fascinating thing to the human mind. These are ordinary environments - think of a hallway, room or even outdoor park - but strip it of humans, activity and context. Sometimes, it's nostalgic and cozy. Other times, it becomes eerie, even creepy. In 2002 at a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the new tenant was renovating the place and snapped a picture, showing a large and empty room with a yellow atmosphere. This was enough to spawn an internet meme called the Backrooms, a fictional location that consists of an endless maze of complex rooms, accessible by exiting reality. Eventually, lore was developed to the point where YouTuber Kane Parsons made a short film on it, later expanding into a 24-episode web series. He directs the film adaptation of Backrooms, distributed by A24.

In found-footage style, Backrooms opens with a first-person recording of a researcher wandering around the area, after being separated from the rest of his group. Navigating through dull yellow rooms, fluorescent lights, endless corridors and malformed objects, he eventually reaches a dead end and is fatally attacked by an entity. It's a pretty thrilling opening, one that later segments of the film will occasionally struggle to match. In the present day, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect running a failing furniture store, where he dresses up as a pirate in a desperate attempt to sell his products. He's also struggling with alcoholism and his failed marriage, something he's actively working on with his therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who herself is also coping with childhood trauma from her mother and demolition of her home.

After setting the stage and two journeys, the film becomes somewhat aimless before Clark discovers a glowing slit on the wall of the basement. He's somehow able to phase through the wall, entering the Backrooms. After some exploration, it eventually goes awry, and Clark narrowly escapes from the Backrooms and back to reality. But when he recruits his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to film even more undiscovered parts - one which involves a corridor that slopes downwards to a place full of garbage - Bobby gets fatally attacked, Kat does too shortly after, and Clark frantically runs through the endless place. Mary receives his cryptic message and enters the Backrooms herself, in utter disbelief, assuming that Clark was just bordering insanity.

This is where I get really conflicted about the entire film. When Backrooms restricts itself into first-person perspective and confines its characters into tighter, more claustrophobic places, it's intense. The lighting (or the lack thereof), score and sound mixing amplify the unknown, and up until the ending, there isn't any handholding or explaining. Merely exploring the place and its endless mysteries is chilling enough, and Parsons is more interested in building dread than cheap scares. The stellar production design, architectural quirkiness, off-kilter atmosphere and found-footage quality are arguably the best parts of the experience, despite occasional third-person shots that drain the tension and characters moving towards dark, dangerous places. I was screaming to myself, "Please leave, don't be stupid!"

Yet, while effective in its thrills, this comes at the expense of story and character progression. Clark and Mary are dealing with their personal demons. Every moment when Clark enters the Backrooms and explores the area or runs away from danger, his conflict and problems seem to grind to a halt, which makes a twist midway in all the more jarring. Mary gets a handful of flashbacks presented in dream sequences, but her trauma and internal struggles are never interrogated. Why stop here? It's such a rich conceptual setup, but ultimately feels disconnected from the Backrooms.

Despite the shaky buildup, a scene in the dining room improves significantly and tries to make amends to the disparate elements of horror and drama it raises. The Backrooms functions as a kind of misremembered reality, hence objects, furniture and even people are malformed. It's also, in another way, a mental prison, its endlessness being circular to mirror the trapped mind of a person. Clark decides that he wants to stay here, feeling like he connects to the place, and his narcissistic, blame-shifting attitude gets exposed when he tries re-enacting a role play to his twisted desires. While the sudden change in character is perplexing, the psychological change is invigorating, one of the rare moments where the film's horror and emotional core intersect.

It's interesting, a place of what is, was, or could be. Which makes it all the more disappointing that it mutates into something else. A manifestation of Clark appears, this time a taller and distorted version of himself in a pirate costume. It kills and actively chases people around. Other than that, what does this symbolise? The climax is nothing short of confounding, and we're hit with an exposition dump from researchers like the one from the opening sequence, who spell out the mystery of the place, but so many things are still left unanswered. It's difficult to express a singular, unified opinion on Backrooms, because while highly experimental and sporadically effective, in the process of attempting to convey the impossibility of the place, the film becomes itself: indescribable.