The Backrooms is an years-old internet creepypasta that first appeared on 4chan. An anonymous user first posted a photo of an eerie, dead empty yellow office in 2019, with a microfiction caption that sparked haunting intrigue.
The premise is this: If you're not careful, you could "no-clip" (phase through the floor or wall) into the Backrooms––an infinite office dimension of yellow halls and damp carpet where a creature, of some kind, lurks around every corner. Thus, an online mythos was spawned where anyone could contribute folklore and offer their own interpretation of the paranormal occurrence.
Backrooms, presented by A24, is based on Kane Parsons's (Kane Pixels on YouTube) take on the non-Euclidean setting. It all started with his web series titled The Backrooms. From the first video, he expanded his horror universe with many more cryptic found footage tapes. Parsons created an original corporation and his own "cosmosology" of the Backrooms.
It's unique enough from the original post, which the creator never claimed copyright for, and other community mythos projects that are under Creative Commons. This was good enough for A24 to step in and gain exclusive rights to distribute Parsons' film.
Backrooms brief recap and review: It doesn’t go deep enough
If you're a huge fan of Pixels' Backrooms universe, this sci-fi/horror movie isn't lore-heavy. I went in completely blind, but even I could tell the movie was light on detail, which I actually appreciate. The Backrooms, as a setting, is meant to feel empty, like something's missing. It's made of the liminal spaces and miscellaneous memories that slip into the back of our subconscious. Too much world-building would dilute this unique, haunting feeling.
Backrooms uses nostalgia in a way that not many movies do effectively. Characters Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mary (Renate Reinsve) navigate through endless, winding halls and nonsensical architecture that connect like vaguely connected thoughts. Like how you may think about work one moment, and then the pool the next, the Backrooms remembers things from our world. Badly. And it all looks like some place you've visited as a kid, teen, or some other time in your life. It echoes the movie's tagline: "You've been here before."
Clark discovers the Backrooms accidentally and could easily return to the normal world whenever he wanted. However, curiosity gets the better of him, and he goes deeper and deeper. A creature catches his trail and chases him through a random door. When you think he may have lost track of where he was in this insidious maze, he finds a landmark that he recognizes near the portal he entered through. The tension falls off a cliff.
Clark returns to the Backrooms with his two employees, played by Lukita Maxwell and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms actor Finn Bennett, to record footage and research. Of course, the expedition goes wrong, and the creature from before chases them through disconjointed rooms, and everyone loses track of each other. At this point, I expect, again, he's lost. How are they going to get back? But this is when Clark stops being the character we follow. The creature finds him, and the tension falls off a cliff again, cutting to a different scene.
I avoided watching the trailer at first because they usually spoil the best parts, especially for horror movies. All I knew was the general mythos of the Backrooms, which almost all its versions share. You could end up there and have a hard time getting out. After viewing the trailer, I still got the impression that feeling lost and escaping the Backrooms would play a bigger part. Unfortunately, the creature steals the flickering spotlight whenever it appears, and it becomes like any other chase scene, just with a liminal aesthetic backdrop.
The second half of the movie focuses on Mary's journey into the Backrooms, searching for her therapy patient Clark, who's gone missing. Like Clark, her curiosity pulls her deeper and deeper. She finds him, but his mind is not well. An altercation happens, where she's choked out, and wakes up tied to a chair. Clark forces Mary to reenact their therapy session, and Mary pretends to be Clark's wife, where they argue so Clark can feel satisfied he's right.
This is where the movie's theme gets spelled out, but it's executed wonderfully. Mary finds out Clark doesn't want to change, just like the Backrooms, which remembers things forever, even imperfectly.
From here, the creature appears again, fully seen. It chases Mary through several mind-bending rooms, so far that I'm still more worried about how she's going to escape rather than how she'll survive the creature. She thinks she's found the store's basement. She goes up the stairs and tries exiting the front door, but it's blocked by concrete. Mary's still in the Backrooms.
She has a confrontation with the creature, and escapes through a narrow hall where she bumps into men in hazmat suits. They spray her with knock-out gas and she wakes up in Async's headquarters. The tension, for me, falls off a cliff once again.
I'm left unsatisfied with how a scene is resolved. None of the characters are all that clever with how they navigate the Backrooms, figuring their way through. It's the perfect setting to show just how hopeless and terrifying it can feel to be walking, forever, through industrial architecture that copies itself in all directions. The movie feels too safe at times. The portal's always reliably open for Clark, and Mary got lucky bumping into Async personnel. It’s almost too convenient.
Even though there's disappointments, the acting from Ejiofor and Reinsve is realistic and impactful. I'll never forget their lines and reactions to the stranger horrors lurking in the Backrooms. Although I could I say I'd be freaking out more if I were in that place, their performances were believable. The mental health themes, though subtle, are also thoughtfully woven into Clark and Mary's character arcs and how they connect to Kane's take on the Backrooms. Even if Clark's character connected more to the Backrooms than Mary did.
Verdict
Incredibly, an obscure short story posted on a forum became an online folkloric mythos, and eventually a small-budget but competently made film. It had massive potential and managed to reach its audience, and probably exposed many to the Backrooms for the first time. Though I wished it had gone deeper into the maze-like horror, the liminal space visuals and strange special effects were a sight to behold as opposed to my computer screen.
Score: 7/10
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