‘Backrooms’ Review: Traditional Boiler Room Fuels Safe Results in Creepypasta Adaptation

Backrooms is a more than competent horror film with an expertly assembled cast, sleek cinematography, and a complex narrative about the subterranean emotional roots of who we are and where we come from. There are strange, cerebral horrors mapped against its characters’ fears, objectives, and states of mind. It follows the rules of a well-made film, which would once have seemed unexpected, maybe even disruptive, in mainstream horror. But after a decade of A24-backed genre prestige, that kind of discipline is no longer novel. Horror has become comfortable with dramatic structure, clean character arcs, and the familiar machinery of Save the Cat logic.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a furniture store owner whose disappearance pulls his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), into the orbit of something impossible. When Mary goes to Clark’s store looking for answers, she discovers an entrance to the Backrooms: a vast fluorescent labyrinth of empty corridors and dead space. What she finds inside is not just a maze but a hideous collection of humanoid figures and a monstrous presence beyond anything she could have imagined. Her search for a missing patient becomes a descent into a world where familiar spaces warp into something hostile, unknowable, and alive.

It is a shame, then, that when presented with the opportunity to make a horror film about the existential cruelty of nothingness, Backrooms keeps reaching for safer, more familiar shapes. Kane Parsons, who directed the film based on his game-changing short films, has a one-in-a-million perspective. His work carries a tragic and dynamic understanding of eternity, liminality, and the cruel punishment of forever. A reductive read might call what he does “vibes-based,” but that misses the point. At his best, Parsons creates a strange form of sinister philosophy.`