Backrooms Movie Review: A Claustrophobic Horror

The setup is deceptively simple. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a quietly grieving father and furniture showroom manager, discovers a strange, pulsing doorway in the basement of the store after hours. Stepping through, he finds himself in an endless, maze-like expanse of yellow, damp-carpeted rooms, flickering fluorescent lights, and oppressive silence. The door vanishes behind him. As he tries to navigate this liminal purgatory, the film cross-cuts with the frantic search by his estranged wife Mary (Renate Reinsve) and their daughter Kat (Lukita Maxwell), who must confront their own fractured family history to find a way back to him. The narrative weaves between Clark’s harrowing survival in the Backrooms and the family’s desperate, reality-bending search on the outside, leading to a confrontation with the entity that seems to oversee this place - a tall, lanky figure known only as Pirate Clark (Robert Bobroczkyi).

Let’s get the most impressive element out of the way: the production design. Parsons and his team have built a physical, tactile version of the Backrooms that feels simultaneously mundane and hellish. The sets are vast, claustrophobic, and filled with a sickly yellow pallor that sticks to your skin. The sound design is masterful - the constant low hum of fluorescent lights, the wet slap of footsteps on mystery-stained carpet, the distant, unidentifiable scraping. It’s the kind of film that dares you to listen closely, and it rewards you with unease.

Ejiofor delivers a restrained, internal performance that avoids histrionics. His Clark is a man made small by an incomprehensible space, and his terror is a slow, creeping thing. The real scene-stealer, however, is Renate Reinsve as Mary. The Norwegian actress brings a raw, anxious edge to a character fighting not just for her husband, but against her own sense of helplessness. The scenes between her and Mark Duplass’s Phil - a sardonic, world-weary paranormal investigator - provide some of the film’s best tension. Duplass plays Phil with a weary cynicism that feels authentic, like a man who has seen too many tricks and has no patience for the sublime horror unfolding around him.

Where “Backrooms” stumbles is in its ambition to explain. For the first hour, the film is a masterclass in deferred payoff. We wander with Clark; we fear the dark, the distant echoes, the thing that might be watching. Then, inevitably, the script introduces lore. Naren Warne (Avan Jogia), a mysterious researcher, shows up to deliver exposition about “thresholds” and “liminal architects.” The third act devolves into a philosophical monologue about the nature of reality. This is a common curse for high-minded horror: the need to ground the abstract. The final confrontation with the gaunt, silent Pirate Clark is visually striking - Bobroczkyi’s unnaturally tall frame is genuinely freaky - but the resolution feels too tidy, too explained. The mystery, once prised open, loses some of its terrible weight.

Still, the journey is worth it. The film maintains a dreamlike momentum even when it stumbles into clunky dialogue. The performances are strong across the board, with Finn Bennett providing a few startling moments as a lost soul named Bobby who has been in the Backrooms for years. There is a sequence, about halfway through, where Clark turns a corner into an infinity of identical break rooms, each one occupied by a single, unmoving man in a suit. It is so simple, so perfectly uncanny, that it lingers long after the credits roll.

Pros

• Impeccable, suffocating atmosphere and production design that brings the Backrooms to life with tactile dread.
• Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve deliver deeply human performances that ground the surreal horror.
• The first two-thirds are a masterful exercise in slow-burn tension and psychological unease.
• Mark Duplass provides a welcome injection of dark humor without undercutting the stakes.
• The sound design is phenomenal - every hum, echo, and scrape is purposeful.

Cons

• The third act over-explains the lore, deflating much of the initial, formless dread.
• Some secondary characters (notably Avan Jogia’s researcher) feel more like exposition devices than real people.
• The pacing may be too deliberate for viewers expecting the faster, more immediate horror of Parsons’ short films.
• A few visual effects shots (particularly of the entity moving) lack the practical grit of the rest of the film.

“Backrooms” is an admirable, often brilliant attempt to translate an internet-born nightmare into a feature-length statement. It wears its influences - from “The Shining” to “Annihilation” - on its yellowing sleeve, but it has its own distinct pulse. If you can tolerate a third act that takes away some of your questions, what remains is a haunting, handsomely made film that understands that the most terrifying place is one that looks almost like home. Recommended for horror fans who prefer their scares served cold and slow.