Backrooms (2026) | Liminal Labyrinth

While Obsession may have been the runaway box office success story of the year—until Spider-Man: Brand New Day came out—there was another horror movie making a killing at movie theaters recently. Based on the liminal space creepypasta stories that have been circling the internet for years, Backrooms is an attempt by novice film director Kane Parsons to capture the creepy atmosphere of vacant hallways and perplexing architecture in worlds trapped between reality. Does Backrooms live up to the hype, or does it get bogged down by the usual tropes we’ve seen lately? I’d say it’s a bit of column A and a bit of column B.

Pros

Mostly good acting from the cast
Decent pacing moves the story along
Set design, makeup, and props look great
Sound design and music add to the atmosphere
Good direction makes the place feel confusing and alive

Cons

Bait-and-switch of main characters with unnecessary retreading of moments
Nothing special about most of the characters
Characters make dumb or irrational decisions so the movie can happen
Third act kind of falls apart
The “thing” looked stupid

Plot & Thoughts

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner and proprietor of a furniture warehouse store in Santa Clara, CA, in the early 1990s. He’s fallen on hard times as of late. His business is not booming. He’s seeing his psychiatrist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), to deal with his recent separation from his wife. There seem to be some electrical issues in his warehouse that are causing power spikes and flickering lights. One night, while he’s lying on one of his beds in his store, as he prepares to go to sleep, a power surge happens. When he goes to investigate, he stumbles through a portal in his wall into the Backrooms. It’s a mysterious series of hallways and rooms cluttered with random objects and seemingly devoid of life, but that is certainly not the case. Clark’s curiosity and mental instability get the better of him as he seeks to find out more about the Backrooms and their purpose.

If you’re not familiar with the sub-genre of liminal horror, all you need to know is that it’s meant to be unsettling to the audience as they move through an uncanny and lonely environment. I’ve never been drawn to the concept much, personally, but I still think it’s unique enough that it’s worth exploring in movies and video games. For the most part, I think Backrooms does a pretty good job of representing the creepiness of these types of environments and concepts. A lot of that is due to the well-crafted sets and props that make the environments resemble the creepypasta stories of the internet. Things are shot in a way with certain camera angles to add to the uncanny experience. Everything is meant to feel a little off, and purely from a visual perspective, Backrooms succeeds.

Where Backrooms struggles is, unfortunately, with its plot and characters. Clark is the most interesting, and Ejiofor gives a compelling performance as he usually does, but that only goes so far. While his struggles make Clark the main character to latch onto, his decisions and those of the other characters around him don’t exactly inspire much intelligence. This is a horror movie, so the bar is set pretty low for expectations of a person’s ability to think logically or plan accordingly. Clark knows there’s something in the Backrooms, but he doesn’t seem concerned about it when he goes back in, nor does he plan for it when he brings people there with him. Then, there’s Mary.

Mary, Clark’s psychiatrist, who was not as prominently featured in the marketing material, is the other protagonist of the story and actually gets more backstory than Clark. However, she fails to be as interesting due to the somewhat dull performance of Reisnve and the slightly overt attempts to make you care about her after Clark’s story starts to fade into the background. This movie is guilty of a bait-and-switch, in which it makes you think you’re spending time with one character when another is the real focus. I was already attached to Clark and his struggles, so when the movie started making it more about Mary, it felt forced and unearned, much like how Mary finds her way into the Backrooms. There’s not a logical argument for why Mary would end up there, but the movie needs to happen, and we need to see a character be shocked by the existence of an alternate dimension for the third time in the movie, I guess.

Shortly after Mary ended up in the Backrooms, the movie started to lose me. Up to this point, there had been some creepy moments and cool imagery with some tense atmosphere to keep things interesting. Then some characters and their personalities suddenly shift, and we get a segment where dialogue is exchanged that feels like it has an agenda. I won’t go into detail because it’s mostly speculation on my part, but I just didn’t appreciate the interaction and the attempt to assassinate a character in the process.

The scene, unfortunately, does not improve when the creepy thing that we’ve only gotten glimpses of arrives and utterly disappoints in its design. Backrooms commits that cardinal sin of showing too much of a creepy thing to make it not creepy. The third act turns into a chase sequence with this thing until the movie just abruptly ends. I don’t mind the abrupt end or a lack of explanation, because I don’t think something like the Backrooms should be explained. However, considering how the first half of the movie mostly succeeds at setting things up and making the movie interesting, the latter half fails to stick the landing.

TL;DR

While Backrooms starts out relatively strong and continues to have some creepy moments and tense atmosphere throughout its runtime, it starts to sputter and stumble by the end. There are some things to appreciate about it, like the set design and unsettling aura of the environments. Despite there not being anything really explicitly horrific for the first half, I was very entertained. It’s just a shame that the final act doesn’t quite know how to wrap things up without showing too much and swapping protagonists in a clunky way.

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