TL;DR: A man falls into a hidden maze under his workplace and slowly loses his grip on what’s real, with the film leaning more on mood and spaces than explanations - it’s worth watching for the set design and growing psychological tension, but some scenes do over-explain things that were stronger left alone.
A Job, a Basement, and a Very Bad Decision Waiting to Happen
There’s something funny, in a slightly miserable way, about a man running a failing furniture store and living inside it like it’s a temporary solution that accidentally became permanent, but that’s where Clark ends up in Backroom, and the film wastes no time making his life look like a slow collapse that nobody bothered to stop.
He is not in a great place socially, professionally, or emotionally, and the world around him reflects that without needing to announce it, where the store itself is dull in a very specific way, the kind of dull that makes you wonder how anyone survives working there without developing some sort of permanent eye twitch.
But then the basement shows up, and this isn't a normal basement that stores broken chairs and forgotten paperwork, it opens into something that clearly should not exist, which turns into a full maze of connected rooms that behave like they were designed by someone who gave up halfway through and never came back to fix it.
The maze is the film, simply put, with the idea that space itself can be unsettling when it stops behaving normally, featuring rooms that repeat, corridors loop in ways that don’t line up, and everything has this slightly wrong arrangement that makes simple movement feel unreliable, where nothing is exaggerated in a traditional horror way, but the combinations themselves do all the damage - a chair in the wrong corner is not scary on its own, but when every room gets one detail that does not sit right, it builds up in a way that starts messing with how you read the space.
There’s also a long stretch where Clark just keeps moving through it, but it doesn't deliver or give any answers though, as the film is asking you, as the viewer, to just sit with repetition and confusion, which sounds like it should get annoying, and at times it does, but there’s also a strange pull to it, like watching someone walk deeper into a problem they could have avoided ten minutes earlier if they just turned around.
Clark, as a character, is angry, worn down, and not especially great at dealing with anything that requires patience, and Chiwetel Ejiofor plays him with this constant edge, like he’s one bad moment away from snapping at a wall for existing, while Renate Reinsve, who plays Mary, his therapist, runs parallel to him, like two people circling each other’s problems without really solving anything, and while their conversations are meant to ground things, they also highlight how little control either of them really has over what is happening, with no progress or breakthroughs, just fragments of understanding that never fully land in place, which keeps the human side of the story intact, even when the environment is doing increasingly strange things around them.
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When Explanations Show Up
My main issue I had with Backrooms, was when the film seem to pause itself to explain things that worked better when they were left alone, as not everything in a place like this needs a clear explanation, and some of the dialogue ends up doing that slightly frustrating job of over-defining something that was already uncomfortable in its vagueness.
A few scenes lean too hard into characters talking through what might be happening, as if saying it out loud will make it more solid, but it has the opposite effect, because the mystery shrinks a bit every time someone tries to frame it too neatly.
It is not a constant issue, but when it happens, the momentum does dip, and where the strongest parts of the film rely on uncertainty, if you reduce that uncertainty, it just ends up working against what the film does best, and that's when very little is happening on the surface - Clark walking through empty rooms, standing still for too long, or moving through spaces that repeat just enough to make him hesitate, those scenes carry more weight than anything involving direct confrontation.
There’s a particular sequence where the environment shifts in small, almost slightly lazy ways, and that is where the film hits its strongest rhythm, where nothing screams for attention, nothing tries to force a reaction, it just lets the discomfort build from repetition and stillness, and that restraint is where the film shows its real confidence, because it does not constantly try to escalate like some directors would have done, it just keeps adjusting the same idea until it becomes harder to ignore.
The Technical Side Is Uneven, but Not in a Way That Breaks It
This might be me being a bit fussy, but we do get moments where the filmmaking does feel a bit plain, especially in how some scenes are framed, as a lot of the time, the camera just sits in standard positions and lets things play out without much visual invention, and while that simplicity does work in some parts, especially when the focus is on the space itself, but in other moments it makes the film feel like it is holding back when it could lean harder into its own ideas, where the pacing also drifts at times as a result of this happening, with some sections taking a bit longer than necessary to get to their point, so the repetition starts to feel more like stretching runtime rather than building the tension.
With that said, the strongest impression left behind after watching Backrooms is not directly tied to explanation or plot resolution, because it is the sense of moving through a place that does not respect logic, while watching someone slowly adjust to that reality in ways that are not exactly healthy.
There are rough edges, especially when the film talks too much about what it should probably leave alone, but the central idea holds strong - a man keeps walking further into a space that refuses to behave, and the film trusts that simple pressure more than anything else, and trusts the audience to hopefully do the same.
Final Thoughts
Backrooms delivers some strong, unsettling psychological horror overall, and while Kane Parsons might only be 20, he has used his YouTube experience to deliver a very confident debut, and no doubt Backrooms is going to do big numbers, just like another film by a YouTuber now turned big time director, Curry Barker's Obsession, no doubt these are exciting times in the horror genre, and I am all for it.