Backrooms Review: A Gripping Found-Footage Horror

The setup is deliciously simple. A strange doorway appears in the basement of a suburban furniture showroom in Ohio. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the store’s weary manager, stumbles through it with two employees - the pragmatic Mary (Renate Reinsve) and the jittery Bobby (Finn Bennett) - and they find themselves inside the Backrooms: a sprawling, monochrome labyrinth of identical rooms, damp carpet, and buzzing lights. They are not alone. Lanky, predatory entities known as “Hounds” stalk the halls, and scattered among the ruins are cryptic notes left by previous explorers. The quartet picks up a survivalist named Phil (Mark Duplass) and a teenage runaway, Kat (Lukita Maxwell), before encountering Naren Warne (Avan Jogia), a man who has been trapped for years and claims to understand the Backrooms’ rules. The story follows their slow, fractious journey toward an exit that may not exist.

Parsons’ greatest strength remains his eye for composition. The Backrooms here are a magnificent achievement in production design - every frame is a sea of beige and sickly yellow, shot with a cold flatness that makes even the most mundane chair or water cooler feel malevolent. The film’s first forty minutes are pure, patient terror. Parsons understands that the horror of the Backrooms is boredom pushed to psychosis; he lets scenes breathe, holding on empty hallways until the viewer’s own mind starts to fill in the monsters. When the Hounds finally appear - gaunt, impossibly tall figures that move with a shuddering, stop-motion grace - they are truly horrifying.

The problems start when the film decides to become a lore-dump. Avan Jogia’s Naren Warne arrives like a walking Wikipedia article, spouting pseudo-mathematical theories about “non-Euclidean coordinates” and “memory layers.” The dialogue in these scenes is leaden. At one point, Ejiofor’s Clark says, with utter seriousness, “This space isn’t empty - it’s full of the echoes of people who forgot they were real.” It’s a line that would work better as a whispered threat than a declarative speech, and the delivery deflates the mystery.

The casting is a fascinating mismatch. Ejiofor brings a Shakespearean gravity that is often at odds with the B-movie material; he looks like he’s acting in a different, more profound film. Reinsve, the Norwegian star of The Worst Person in the World, is far more successful, playing Mary as a woman of quiet, desperate competence. Duplass, a reliable indie presence, phones in a grizzled survivalist schtick that feels borrowed from a lesser thriller. The real scene-stealer is Robert Bobroczkyi as “Pirate Clark” - a doppelgänger of Ejiofor’s character, warped into a seven-foot-nine-inch horror. His performance is entirely physical, a series of lurching, bird-like movements that are the film’s single most disturbing image.

The runtime of 111 minutes is both too long and too short. Too long because the middle act sags under repetitive walking-and-talking. Too short because the ending is a frustrating non-resolution - a “it was all a dream” variant that feels like a cop-out. The film’s TMDb rating of 7.09/10 feels about right: a solid, ambitious, but deeply flawed work that earns points for trying something sincere in a genre overrun with jump-scares.

Pros

• Unforgettable, oppressive production design that defines a new visual language for liminal horror.
• Robert Bobroczkyi’s physically terrifying performance as Pirate Clark is worth the ticket price alone.
• Renate Reinsve anchors the emotional core with a subtle, worn-down humanity.
• The first hour is a masterclass in slow-burn dread and spatial disorientation.

Cons

• A third act buried under clumsy, over-explained mythology that kills the mystery.
• Chiwetel Ejiofor is miscast; his gravitas clashes with the film’s scrappy, indie horror texture.
• Several characters (Bobby, Kat) exist only to provide fodder or exposition, with no arc.
• The ending is a vague, unsatisfying non-sequitur that undermines the journey.

Backrooms is a film of stark contrasts. It delivers some of the most arresting images of environmental horror since The Shining and occasionally achieves a trancelike state of pure unease. But it is also a movie that does not trust its own best instincts. Every time the silence and emptiness start to burrow into your brain, someone starts talking about interdimensional physics or family trauma. The result is a frustrating experience - a brilliant short film that was stretched to feature length and then filled with filler. For fans of the genre, it is essential viewing, if only to see what a fresh vision looks like when Hollywood gets its hands on it. For the casual viewer, wait for a rainy, quiet night - and pray your hallway doesn’t look too yellow.