Backrooms
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Backrooms is playing in theaters at the time of review. Rated R. Common Sense says 15+
After a therapist's patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she (Renate Reinsve) must venture into the unknown to save him (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
STORY: A-
We’re caught in a smothering, terrifying trap.
It’s a good plot, but this film leans heavily into its vibes. Wandering the backrooms feels like trying to lift a weighted blanket sewn with threads of angst, existential dread, and hopelessness.
When the tone is this intense and satisfying, you don’t need much more.
PEOPLE: A-
Ejiofor and Reinsve sell the despair.
Ejiofor’s eyes grow wider millimeter by millimeter as the movie creeps on. His stiff posture tilts further forward with every failure, as if he’s trying to get ahead of something he knows he can’t outrun.
Reinsve keeps a therapist’s cool demeanor until she can’t, forced by the terrors of the backrooms to do whatever she can to escape.
FILM NERD STUFF: A
The menacing atmosphere is no accident.
The aforementioned tone is achieved through frequent first-person POV shots, blurry VHS recordings, and pitch-perfect set design: a labyrinth comprised of absurd, decrepit office spaces hell-bent on holding you hostage.
ONE BIG LESSON: A
Finding complexity in the simple.
The film resists simple interpretation or singular conclusions. I can’t find just one lesson or revelation from this movie, so here are a bunch of thoughts:
Since I don’t spend significant time in the cultural spaces where the lore has flourished, everything I’ve learned about Backrooms has occurred within the last three days. Sometimes we miss out on the world if we don’t venture out past our comfortable spaces.
The backrooms are terrifying. So is real life. But while one of those places might be tempting to explore, only one of them is inhabitable.
Memories are no replacement for the real world.
Create, create, create: the means to create films are in everyone’s hands, so go and make stuff.
FINAL COMMENTS:
The original Scream gave us all a guide on how to survive a horror film, should we ever find ourselves in one. Those rules won’t help you a bit in the backrooms. If horror is a language, this film opens the door to a new, thrilling dialect. I found myself confused, challenged, and completely rapt as I watched.
Describing the sinister labyrinth of backrooms is like lying on the ground with your friends, staring at the clouds, and coming up with countless descriptions of what you see. Are the backrooms a collection of memories? A map of the collective unconscious? A physical manifestation of existential hopelessness in the face of uncaring capitalism? All these ideas are right, and none of them are right. That’s a quality of great art.
Elvis didn’t invent rock and roll, and The Sugarhill Gang didn’t invent hip-hop. Yet these artists are often named as inventors because they were the first to break through to mainstream audiences on a major scale. Kane Parsons didn’t invent liminal horror, but his $85 million(ish) opening weekend may cause us to look back decades from now and dub him its founder.
Not convinced this liminal-horror thing has legs? Remember that Scream 7 - a well-established and beloved franchise - debuted to $65 million just a few months ago, about 75% of Backrooms’s box office. That haul indicates more than a hot trend. It’s a stamp of approval on a genuine evolution of the form.
And once Scream figures these new rules out, you can bet Ghostface will find himself in a whole new world.