Movie Review : Backrooms (2026)
I have learned never to fuck with the internet. Because if you do, it will step up and creep you the hell out. Liminal spaces have been a part of modernity long before the advent of Windows 95, but online communities with time and creativity to spare have turned them into an aesthetic. Without context, they’ve become mysterious, unresolved and bound only by the possibilities your mind can conjure. A movie like Backrooms was not only inevitable, but it could only have been a product of the internet.
Co-written and directed by twenty years old YouTuber Kane Parsons, Backrooms explores new and fun ways to create dread even though it sometimes feels like it’s missing its own point.
Backrooms tells the story of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect with a drinking pronblem who lives inside his own furniture store after getting kicked out by his wife. One night, as his sense of reality starts dimming, Clark finds a secret passageway through a wall in the store's basement. What he finds on the other side, is a functionless, seemingly infinite place that only vaguely mirrors reality and that place wants Clark (and everyone else who dares stepping in) to itself.
You Can’t Go Home Again
I'm probably the last movie critic on Earth to review Backrooms and this allows me the privilege to claim that it's good, but not as good as it's been hyped up to be. Liminal horror is original and interesting, but it's not meant to be conventionally scary. The unseen entity prowling the backrooms as Clark, his employees and his therapist (Renate Reinsve) explore undercuts the contemplative dread you're supposed to feel as Clark is confronted to this funhouse mirror representation of his life.
Kicked out by his wife, Clark lives in an approximative representation of a home inside his store. As he's settled into a life without a meaningful center to him, he's holding on to a version of himself he doesn't have the courage to move on from. The backrooms are unsettling because they are a representation of Clark's dislocated life and dislocated sense of self. He's clearly the bad guy because he's trying to coerce people into holding on this fading memory of himself, but I'm not sure the movie completely agrees.
The backrooms don't need to be explained. They don’t need a team of scientists investigating them. Some ideas require to remain half-allegorical in order to work best. Clark is a spectacularly well constructed character suffering an extreme form of a quite common and relatable distress, but he doesn’t even have the place he deserves in his own movie. What makes Clark scary is the way his melancholy has become weaponized. He can’t go home again, but a past he never lived is launching an assault on reality.
Now that's as disquieting as it gets, but Backrooms explores this idea quite timidly as if Kane Parsons was afraid we wouldn't understand. I'm OK with a movie having lore, but it has to earn it.
The Burden of Memory
Now you'll excuse me the Mikael Akerfeldt-inspired subtitle, but another aspect of Backrooms worth mentioning is the relationship between memory and space. The backrooms are inherently Clark’s. They are physical manifestations of memories corrupted by his booze-soaked ego and melancholy. Clark remembers only fragments of his former self (the ones he chooses to remember) and finds comfort in them. That’s why it their meaninglessness in the void-like emptiness of the backrooms feels so wrong.
A bunch of furniture piled up in the middle of a place that seemingly doesn't exist doesn't serve any function in the world. It's just an idiosyncratic memento meant to elicit a specific feeling and having this memento physically represented blocks that feeling because it confronts Clark to who he really is. In a sense, the backrooms are that like that old alcoholic friend who peaked in high school resurfacing in your life and making you believe that you might’ve peaked when you were the class clown in tenth grade.
That’s a quite adult thing to feel and maybe that's what eluded 20 years old Kane Parsons, but if you know, you know.
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Backrooms is a good movie, but the power of its premise and its visual appeal will outlive its screenplay. As an old school liminal space enjoyers, I tend to find them more comforting than scary myself and Backrooms prodded at this feeling in a way that feels appropriately wrong. Although the two movies were lumped together for reasons that little to do with what they’re about, it's not quite up to par with Curry Barker's Obsession. This shouldn't feel disappointing, but somehow it does.
7.5/10
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