Backrooms: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 0.0/10

Backrooms arrives with a genuinely unsettling premise—a doorway to nowhere buried in a furniture showroom—but Kane Parsons squanders it with bloated runtime and characters who make decisions that actively sabotage the tension. The film wants to be Annihilation meets The Twilight Zone, yet it lands somewhere between a YouTube creepypasta adaptation and a first-year film student’s thesis project.

Backrooms: The plot (no spoilers)

Backrooms opens with the discovery of an impossible doorway in the basement of a furniture showroom, and the film doesn’t waste time dragging us into the void beyond it. A small team descends into what appears to be an infinite, soulless corridor of offices and storage rooms—the kind of liminal space that’s been haunting internet horror communities for years. The premise is genuinely eerie: a place that shouldn’t exist, following rules we don’t understand, populated by something we can’t quite see.

The film burns through its setup in the first twenty minutes, leaving seventy minutes of running time to explore consequences we’re not sure we believe in yet. The movie commits to its cosmic horror ambitions, but it gets tangled in exposition that contradicts itself and characters who wander around delivering information dumps instead of surviving. Parsons wants us terrified, but instead we’re mostly frustrated watching people ignore every survival instinct they’ve supposedly got.

Acting & direction

Renate Reinsve carries this thing on sheer force of will, refusing to play the “panicked woman” role even when the script begs her to descend into hysteria, which gives her scenes genuine weight. Chiwetel Ejiofor brings quiet intelligence to every frame, but he’s working against material that uses him as a exposition machine rather than a character—his “I’ve seen this before” backstory is hinted at constantly but never properly mined. Mark Duplass and Finn Bennett do their best with a supporting cast that mostly exists to ask questions and die, which is frustrating when you can feel the actors searching for something deeper beneath the surface.

Parsons frames the Backrooms with genuinely unsettling wide shots of endless hallways and fluorescent-lit decay, and his cinematography captures that particular dread of architectural meaninglessness that makes your skin crawl. But the editing pacing is glacial in moments that demand urgency and rushes through scenes that needed breathing room—the score, meanwhile, exists mostly to tell us when we’re supposed to be scared rather than letting silence do the heavy lifting. The film needed either fifteen minutes cut or thirty added to flesh out the logic of what’s happening and why we should care beyond shock value.

The strengths

• The visual design of the Backrooms themselves is genuinely unsettling, capturing that specific internet-born dread of liminal spaces in a way that most mainstream horror completely botches.
• Renate Reinsve’s refusal to become a victim in distress keeps the film grounded when everything else wants to dissolve into melodrama.
• The central concept works—a place designed to trap you through its own meaninglessness taps into real, modern anxieties about institutional emptiness and soulless design.

The weaknesses

• The screenplay treats mystery as an excuse to withhold information rather than as a genuine puzzle, leaving us watching characters stumble through a plot we’re not invited to understand alongside them.
• The runtime balloons with scenes of people standing in hallways discussing things they already know, which murders momentum every time the film manages to build some tension.
• The film’s ending contradicts its own internal logic so completely that you’ll want to rewind it just to confirm you didn’t miss something, and you won’t have, because nothing makes coherent sense.

Who should watch it

Backrooms appeals specifically to viewers who’ve spent time in the depths of creepypasta forums and found-footage YouTube rabbit holes, who understand the specific aesthetic the film is reaching for and can forgive technical execution problems in service of atmosphere. If you loved The Backrooms internet lore and want to see it adapted with a real budget, this exists for you, though it might frustrate you more than satisfy you. Skip it if you need your sci-fi horror to maintain internal consistency or if you’ve moved beyond the “scary hallways” phase of your horror appreciation.

Final verdict

Backrooms is a genuinely interesting failure—it has vision, atmosphere, and a cast trying desperately to elevate thin material, but it collapses under the weight of its own pretension and a screenplay that mistakes vagueness for profundity. Kane Parsons has made something that proves the internet’s creepypasta lore doesn’t automatically translate to cinema, no matter how effectively you photograph empty rooms. If you’re curious enough to ignore the zero on TMDB and see what’s actually here, go in knowing you’re watching an ambitious swing that misses by a wide margin—but at least it’s trying to reach somewhere interesting instead of phoning in another generic haunted house movie.

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