Film Reviews

May 29, 2026

I've a feeling we're going to see a lot more "Backrooms" movies, not to mention pale imitators. Its core concept opens up a plethora of psychologically delicious possibilities: an alternate, physics-defying, shuddersome dimension, doused in mystery and intrigue, where curious regulars are surveilled and hunted by creepy beings. It's no wonder the original web series on which this movie is based continues to be so popular on YouTube, because it's fun, stirs lore, and creates a sense of community, even though it's centered around ghastly and unwholesome ideas and imagery.

As a feature-length film, "Backrooms" has a lot going for it, not least its constant, disquieting tone. Director Kane Parsons, who also created the web series, thrusts us back to 1990 in Santa Clara, California, a time and place where strip malls are plentiful and infomercials and low-budget science fiction shows occupy people's minds when they can't sleep. This is also an era of wall-to-wall pastel carpets and big, cushy sofas with wooden frames. The movie has us asking, "What the heck was middle America thinking back then when it came to interior design?"

Nevertheless, all this creates fertile ground for the characters to navigate. Chief among these poor souls is furniture salesman—and erstwhile wannabe architect—Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), publicly known as "Pirate Clark," who owns and runs Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a large commercial warehouse that is all but devoid of customers. Clark is in a bad place, not least because he has a drinking problem; he's recently divorced; and he has a short fuse.

To Clark's credit, he does try to regulate his anger and addiction by seeing a therapist named Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who is not without her own trauma, which we see in flashbacks. And yet, Kline has managed to publish a self-help book that encourages woebegone individuals to take back control of their lives by "stepping through the window," which is advice Kline herself hasn't fully embraced.

The only other people in Clark's seemingly inconsequential existence are his dedicated employees. They're a couple, Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell), who not only serve as Clark's salespeople but also his videographers. In fact, video, particularly the found footage kind, will play a big role in this warped horror thriller.

As the title suggests, the main plot engine revolves around Clark discovering an ostensibly endless alternate plane of reality via an invisible door in the basement of his store. These "backrooms" are the real bread and butter of the movie, and just like butter, they have a faint yellowish hue, and they're effectively ugly and unsettling. With their low ceilings, fading patterned wallpaper, and fluorescent white lights, which incessantly hum and buzz, the rooms are grave and depressing. Think of the empty office buildings after the 2008 financial crisis or during the peak of the pandemic. And yet, the backrooms are also twistedly retro, as if they've been around for decades. We can practically touch the dust with our fingers and smell the mustiness in the air.

Production designer Danny Vermette, art director Alan Derksen, and set decorator Trevor Johnson, along with their respective teams, deserve a lot of praise for bringing the backrooms' labyrinthine halls, crawl spaces, steep ramps, and multiple platforms to life (or perhaps death is the better word). We want to turn away, but the movie insists on pulling us back in, not unlike the rope Clark ties to Bobby to ensure the latter doesn't get lost when he lowers him down a dark chute of some kind. Watching the characters absorb and explore this perplexing arena, with its inverted traffic signals, cardboard cutouts, lone Christmas tree, and mundane objects sticking out of the walls as if they were trapped in cement, is alone almost worth the price of admission because it's so mesmerizing.

Almost.

Before long, without giving too away too many details, Clark and the others discover they're not alone in these backrooms. What's more is that they're being spied on by people in an official capacity, which we learn as early as the opening scene and then later when we meet a mysterious scientist (Mark Duplass), complete with a white lab coat. However, it's not just other humans who are watching the protagonists.

The haunted house aspect of "Backrooms" is fun and exciting to a degree, but the more time the movie spends shedding its initial enigmatic aura and then setting itself on a mostly derivative horror movie course, the less interesting it becomes. Will Soodik's screenplay quietly substitutes its fresh psychological and character insights with time-tested slasher devices, and it's a shame, because had it stuck with the former, I could imagine "Backrooms" really taking its audience on a never-before-seen spin. As it is, it ends up as a simply adequate horror film instead of a confident and puzzling drama.

Don't get me wrong: Kane is clearly a born filmmaker—creative and enthusiastic—but I think it's important to recognize how much "Backrooms" borrows from others of its kind, because whether they're references, homages, or just straight-up copies, the derivations unfortunately dilute the movie of some of its effect. Some techniques ring so familiar it's as if Kane and his team made a checklist of all the major horror movie conventions employed over the past 50 years and went out of their way to include them here, probably because they know they're reliable when it comes to getting a rise out of the audience. To name just a few, there's the found footage aspect, which "Blair Witch" pioneered and "Paranormal Activity" brought to new heights; the underground monitoring of unsuspecting victims, which recalls "The Silence of the Lambs" and the "Saw" movies; and the vintage sets, which seem ported over from Stanley Kubrick's rendition of "The Shining."

This isn't to say Kane doesn't have original ideas—he does—but I think the likeness to other films suggests that "Backrooms" is perhaps not as innovative as we'd like to think it is. Then again, maybe we've just been overloaded recently by the idea of the workplace being a hub of existential crises, what with films like "Black Bag" and TV shows like "Severance" (interestingly, "Backrooms" the web series and "Severance" both debuted around the same time, so it's hard to say which property claimed the morbid office environment first).

Ultimately, "Backrooms" is baffling and creepy, but it slowly loses steam and it gets to a point where we start to roll our eyes at it. It forsakes its mystery and intelligence for what feels like routine violence and scare tactics. This serves the horror audience, sure, but why didn't the storytellers go all the way with exploring the psychology of its characters as they traversed the backrooms? Why did they just turn them into prey? Don't they know viewers like to be challenged instead of being dished the same old recipe? Perhaps future "Backrooms" installments will explore the deeper and more curious themes this inaugural film sets up, and I suppose we can look forward to that. For now, we have a movie that is moderately ambitious, memorably designed, and often unnerving, but it eventually indulges the audiences with too many tried-and-true horror tropes and comeuppances instead of leaving a real lasting impact.