Backrooms review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 05.28.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Backrooms feels less like a coherent journey than wandering through somebody else’s damaged psyche. A man loosely attached to reality retreats toward an alternate world that seems controllable, only for its spaces, images and rules to grow deeply wrong. The horror is atmospheric rather than dependent on jump scares, and one chase in particular operates as pure nightmare fuel. I knew little about the internet phenomenon behind it, which may explain some confusion, but uncertainty is also central to the film’s effect. Obsession explores related territory more successfully; this remains strange, flawed and memorable enough to deserve a look.
Full review — contains spoilers
Backrooms is a weird movie.
I'm not entirely convinced I understand what happened, and I'm not entirely convinced the movie cares whether I understand it or not.
The setup seems to involve a man who is only loosely attached to reality finding comfort in an alternate world that feels more controllable than his actual life. The deeper the movie goes, the more it starts to feel like you're wandering around inside somebody else's damaged psyche. Whether that's literally what's happening or not, I couldn't tell you.
What I can tell you is that it's creepy.
This isn't really a jump-scare movie. There are a couple of those, but most of the horror comes from the atmosphere. The visuals are unsettling. The spaces feel wrong. The logic of the world feels wrong. There is a chase sequence that felt like pure nightmare fuel.
My understanding is that this is based on an internet phenomenon that I know very little about. Maybe people familiar with that material will get more out of it than I did. As a newcomer, I found it interesting but frequently confusing.
The biggest problem for the producers of this is that it comes out so soon after Obsession, which is playing in a lot of the same territory while being a significantly stronger film. If someone asked me which of them to see first, I'd tell them Obsession without hesitation.
Still, this is worth watching. I don't think it fully works. I don't think it entirely makes sense. But it stuck with me, and that's more than I can say for a lot of horror movies.