Backrooms Movie Review: A Creepy Found-Footage Dive

The setup is almost absurdly simple. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a quiet, weary warehouse manager at a suburban furniture showroom, discovers a strange doorway in the basement - a door where no door should be. Behind it is a maze of discoloured, beige, fluorescent-lit rooms that stretch into infinity. He brings in Mary (Renate Reinsve), a disgraced architect, to help him map the space. The film then splinters: Bobby (Finn Bennett), a reckless security guard, follows them in. Kat (Lukita Maxwell), a digital archivist, tries to document from the outside. Phil (Mark Duplass), a corporate fixer, wants to seal the door permanently. Meanwhile, Avan Jogia’s Naren Warne plays a podcaster obsessed with “liminal phenomena,” and Robert Bobroczkyi appears as a silent, towering figure known only as Pirate Clark - a doppelgänger from deeper in the maze. The plot is less a linear story than a descending spiral of overlapping realities, where characters meet their own echoes and the furniture showroom becomes irrelevant.

Parsons’ Backrooms functions best as a mood piece. The visual design is phenomenal - those endless, sickly-yellow corridors, the damp carpet, the low hum of lights. It feels exactly like the nightmares of office boredom you’ve had. Finn Bennett’s Bobby provides the only real energy; his panic feels visceral, and his death sequence (a long, silent shot of him running through identical rooms until his legs give out) is the film’s most effective scene - no dialogue, just degrading hope.

But the script, co-written by Parsons and a credited team, struggles to juggle its ensemble. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is wonderfully understated, a man who treats the impossible with weary practicality. “I think it wants us to get lost,” he mutters at one point, and Ejiofor makes you believe him. Renate Reinsve’s Mary, however, gets a bogus backstory about a lost child that feels like grief-padding for a movie that didn’t need it. Mark Duplass’s Phil is a one-note corporate villain - fun for five minutes, then repetitive.

The science-fiction elements - specifically the notion that these rooms house copies or memories of people - are introduced late and never fully integrated. Robert Bobroczkyi’s Pirate Clark is a terrifying visual (7’7”, silent, wearing a filthy warehouse vest) but the film doesn’t fully utilise him. He looms, he appears, he disappears. It’s a wasted icon.

Where the film succeeds is in its dread of scale. The endlessness is claustrophobic. Parsons uses wide shots that make characters look like ants in a beige maze, and the sound design - layers of distant static, air-conditioning, and muffled footsteps - wears you down. The final act abandons clarity for pure sensory overload, which will polarise audiences. Some will call it profound; others will check their watches. At 111 minutes, it’s too long for the thin plot, but the atmosphere is often gripping enough to carry you through.

Pros

• Visually stunning - the liminal space is realised with obsessive, nightmarish detail.
• Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve deliver grounded, emotionally legible performances.
• Finn Bennett’s physical performance as a man losing his mind is harrowing and believable.
• The sound design and score create an unbearable, effective tension.
• Ambitious thematic ideas about memory, identity, and infrastructure.

Cons

• The narrative becomes frustratingly vague in the third act; resolution is nearly absent.
• Mark Duplass’s character is a cliché that drags the tone into melodrama.
• Some plot threads (the podcaster, the doppelgänger logic) are underdeveloped.
• At over 1 hour 50 minutes, the pacing dips in the second act.
• The horror relies heavily on atmosphere over incident; jump-scare fans will be disappointed.

Backrooms is a bold, flawed experiment that will be argued about for years. It’s a gallery installation of dread that occasionally forgets it’s a film with an audience. Kane Parsons proves he can build a world - and a tense, memorable one at that - but he still has work to do on story architecture. If you’re willing to get lost in the yellow hallways without a map, you’ll find moments of genuine, awful wonder. If you need a door out, you might not find one until the credits roll. 7/10 from me, but with the caveat: your mileage will vary depending on how much you love the texture of limbo.