I went into Backrooms with an open mind. Like a lot of people, I knew the movie was based on a popular internet horror concept, but I wasn’t really familiar with the YouTube phenomenon that inspired it.
After the project was announced and seeing that A24 was backing it, I watched one of the videos and wasn’t overly impressed. But I was curious to see how filmmaker Kane Parsons would turn an endlessly looping nightmare of yellow hallways into a feature-length story.
Unfortunately, once the credits rolled, I found myself wondering if that concept was ever meant to be stretched into a full movie at all.
The biggest issue for me is that Backrooms simply isn’t very engaging. The movie spends so much time wandering through its eerie maze of empty rooms that it starts to feel like it’s running on a treadmill.
The atmosphere is clearly the main attraction, and I understand why some viewers might find the endless corridors and distorted architecture unsettling. The problem is that atmosphere alone can only carry a movie so far.
After a while, I felt like I was watching the same scene play out repeatedly with a slightly different mess to deal with. Instead of building suspense, the repetition drained the energy out of the experience.
The story didn’t help either. The screenplay from Will Soodik and Roberto Patino attempts to reach for emotional depth through its damaged characters and psychological themes, but none of it landed for me.
There are hints that the Backrooms are meant to reflect inner trauma, regret, and personal failure, yet the film never develops those ideas in a satisfying way. It keeps pointing toward bigger meanings without ever giving those ideas enough weight to matter.
By the end, I wasn’t thinking about what the movie had to say. I was mostly trying to figure out what it was actually trying to be, and wondering why it’s been getting such good reviews because it’s a pretty weak film with no real substance.
This is supposed to be a horror movie built around an unsettling premise, but I didn’t feel any fear, tension, or excitement. The film throws in strange imagery, bizarre creatures, and moments clearly designed to shock the audience, but I was so disconnected from what was happening that none of it had much impact.
When a horror movie asks viewers to invest in mystery, there has to be something pulling them forward. Here, I felt like I was wandering through the same endless hallways as the characters, except I was checking my watch all along the way.
What makes the disappointment sting a little more is the talent involved. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia all give committed performances.
Nobody looks like they’re sleepwalking through the material. They bring as much credibility as possible to the story and do their best to ground the strange events unfolding around them.
Sadly, strong performances can only do so much when the narrative underneath them feels thin and unfocused. I never connected with the characters enough to care where their journey was heading.
I also couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a first feature from a young filmmaker still figuring things out. That isn’t meant as a cheap shot at Parsons. Getting a movie of this scale made at such a young age is an impressive accomplishment and undoubtedly a dream come true.
I respect the ambition and the willingness to experiment. There are flashes of creativity throughout Backrooms, and I can see why fans of the original internet lore might appreciate the dedication to recreating that world. For me, though, it felt like the mythology and visual concepts were prioritized while the storytelling became an afterthought.
At the end of the day, Backrooms just wasn’t my kind of horror movie. I kept waiting for something that would grab me, surprise me, frighten me, or leave me thinking afterward, and none of that ever happened.
The movie spends so much time suggesting significance that it eventually starts feeling strangely empty and boring. If you’re a longtime fan of the Backrooms mythology and the YouTube videos that inspired it, there’s a good chance you’ll get more out of this than I did.
As someone coming in from the outside, I found it slow, confusing, and ultimately forgettable. For all of its strange imagery and ambitious ideas, Backrooms is a movie built around a fascinating concept, but it never finds a story interesting enough to make that concept truly matter.
