Backrooms Review: A Flawed But Striking Horror Adaptation

Backrooms arrives with an unusual amount of pressure. It has to turn one of the internet’s most recognizable horror concepts into a full-length movie while proving that Kane Parsons, the young filmmaker who built his reputation on YouTube, can make the jump to a major A24 production. For the most part, he proves he can.

Parsons brings a confident eye for atmosphere and suspense, transforming the familiar creepypasta into a visually striking nightmare. Backrooms understands that its greatest weapon is the sickening feeling of being trapped somewhere familiar enough to recognize but wrong enough to fear. The problem is that the film does not always know how to build a compelling story around that nightmare.

The Setting Does Most of the Heavy Lifting

The Backrooms itself is the movie's real star. Danny Vermette's claustrophobic production design and Jeremy Cox's cinematography turn a bland office showroom into a gorgeous, deeply unsettling maze. Endless corridors and artificial spaces stretch into a bizarro wonderland where every room feels disconnected from reality. Parsons knows how to photograph emptiness.

A yellow hallway should not be terrifying, yet Backrooms repeatedly makes ordinary architecture feel hostile. The spaces seem to follow their own logic, creating the sense that the characters have entered a world designed to look familiar without ever allowing them to feel safe. This is where the film is at its most effective.

Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor Elevate the Material

The performances are another major strength. Renate Reinsve gives a quietly devastating and absorbing performance in her first horror role. She brings emotional weight to scenes that could have easily depended entirely on atmosphere, and her restraint makes the character feel more human.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is equally compelling, his character begins in a state of melancholic psychological dislocation before gradually spiraling into fevered mania. Ejiofor handles that transformation with real intensity.

Both actors, however, feel somewhat underused. The film gives them enough material to show what they can do but not always enough to make their characters as memorable as the world surrounding them.

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The Story Moves Too Slowly

The screenplay and pacing are Backrooms' biggest weaknesses. Slow horror is not automatically bad! In fact, Parsons' approach needs patience because the movie depends on tension, silence and uncertainty, but the plot frequently drags without adding enough new emotional or narrative weight.

There are stretches where the story seems stuck. That leaves two talented actors stranded inside a narrative that does not always know where to take them. The atmosphere remains strong, but atmosphere alone cannot carry every scene. A tighter script could have made this much more powerful.

Explaining the Mystery Is a Mistake

Backrooms also becomes less effective when it tries to explain too much. The original concept works because of its cosmic mystery. You are lost in a place that should not exist. You do not understand how it works, who created it, or whether escape is even possible, and that uncertainty is the horror.

When the film tries to anchor parts of the lore in psychological realism, some of that mystique disappears. The mystery becomes smaller because it is being translated into something more understandable. Personally, I found the movie far more satisfying when it trusted the audience to stay lost.

The best scenes embrace the open-ended nature of the Backrooms and refuse to spoon-feed answers. They allow the maze to remain strange, unknowable, and bigger than the characters trying to understand it.

Kane Parsons Deserves Credit, But the Praise Has Gone Too Far

The conversation around Parsons himself has become almost as distracting as the movie. I am particularly annoyed by critics who focus on his youth as though being 20 somehow makes his success suspicious. The harsh criticism from The Times, for example, feels unfair when it places industry-wide gender disparities on the shoulders of a young filmmaker who built a massive YouTube following through his own work.

At the same time, the opposite reaction is also frustrating. We need to stop treating every young filmmaker as a "wonder" simply because they were given a major opportunity early. Talent deserves recognition, but so does context.

Handing a 20-year-old a $10 million budget to make what is ultimately a ropey, substandard horror film raises understandable questions when highly talented female directors are often forced to wait until their 30s for comparable opportunities. Both things can be true: Parsons earned his chance, and the industry should give more filmmakers the same chance.

My Personal Opinion

The pacing drags, the story occasionally loses focus, and the film weakens when it tries to explain what should remain mysterious. Still, Backrooms is difficult to dismiss. The movie is flawed, but its ability to turn empty rooms into something genuinely interesting proves that Parsons has brought more than an internet horror gimmick to the big screen.