Backrooms Spoiler-free Review

Directed by Kane Parsons and produced by A24, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass in a new liminal horror film based on the YouTube videos by Parsons that were adapted from a Creepypasta posted in 2019. Like the Backrooms itself, the film is a maze of disconnected ideas stitched together into something that is fascinating one moment and frustrating the next.

At its best, Backrooms is genuinely terrifying. The film becomes most effective when it strips itself down to pure found footage horror. People wandering through these strange liminal spaces, trapped in endless yellow corridors and decaying rooms while something stalks them from the edges of the frame. Those sequences phenomenal. The 90s aesthetic is also fantastic, and the found footage elements are truly the most creepy parts of the film. There is an unnerving texture to the entire film that captures the uncanny feeling that made the original internet phenomenon so compelling in the first place.

The cinematography is also excellent. The film has a distinct visual language in and outside of the found footage scenes. When I noticed that Osgood Perkins was attached as a producer, certain creative choices suddenly made a lot more sense. Some of that influence works in the film’s favour, others not so much.

The atmosphere, visual compositions and surreal aesthetic ideas are incredibly strong. Other elements feel less successful. The flashbacks and heavier thematic material layered over what should have been straightforward horror end up muddying the experience instead of deepening it.

Performance-wise, both Ejiofor and Reinsve deliver powerhouse work. Even when the script loses focus, they remain emotionally grounded enough to keep scenes engaging. But unfortunately, this is where many of the positives end.

The biggest issue with Backrooms is that it never fully decides what kind of film it wants to be. It shifts awkwardly between liminal horror, psychological horror, monster movie and abstract existential drama without ever properly committing to any of them. Entire characters are introduced with the potential to become compelling points of view, only for the film to quickly abandon them and move somewhere else entirely. It creates this fragmented viewing experience where the story constantly feels like it is resetting itself instead of progressing.

Ironically, my review is starting to sound repetitive because Backrooms (the film) itself becomes repetitive.

Which you’ll find either really great, or really annoying (depending on your taste), considering repetition is literally baked into the concept of the Backrooms. The film keeps circling the same themes and ideas without adding much new to them, hammering its central message over and over during the opening act until subtext becomes text, repeatedly. It gives parts of the screenplay an immature quality, as though the film doesn’t trust the audience to engage with ambiguity.

Without getting into spoilers, the entire section involving Duplass’ character feels bizarrely disconnected from the rest of the story. It feels like material from a completely different film stitched into this one.

Backrooms didn’t disappoint me because it failed to become the film I personally wanted. It disappointed me because it never seemed entirely sure what film it wanted to be.

Rating: 5.5/10

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