I finally watched Backrooms (2026) and I honestly have very mixed feelings about it, because on one hand I really admired it, and on the other hand it also frustrated the hell out of me.
This is not a normal horror movie. If someone goes into this expecting a clean story, obvious explanations, and a standard monster movie, they’re probably going to hate it. Backrooms is much more about atmosphere, dread, confusion, memory, and psychological decay than about giving the audience a neat, satisfying plot. And that’s both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.
What I liked
The first thing I have to say is that the atmosphere is incredible. This film absolutely understands what makes the Backrooms concept so unsettling in the first place. It’s not just “scary yellow hallways.” It’s the feeling of being trapped inside a place that looks weirdly familiar but completely wrong at the same time. The empty rooms, the fluorescent lighting, the dead silence, the sense that every corridor is leading nowhere, the movie gets that part so right. It feels cold, lonely, ugly, and dreamlike in the worst possible way.
Visually, I thought it was stunning. Kane Parsons clearly knows how to build tension through space rather than just through loud noises or cheap jump scares. A lot of horror movies scream at you to make you react. Backrooms doesn’t do that most of the time. It just lets you sit in the discomfort of these liminal spaces until they start to feel genuinely hostile. There were scenes where almost nothing “happened,” but I still felt anxious because the environment itself felt wrong.
I also liked that the film tries to do something bigger than “people enter scary maze, monster kills them.” There’s clearly a deeper idea here about memory, identity, obsession, depression, and becoming trapped inside your own mental decay. Clark’s whole character arc is built around that. He’s not just a guy wandering into a supernatural maze, he’s already emotionally stuck before he ever enters it. The Backrooms just becomes the physical version of what he already is inside: lost, repetitive, broken, unable to move forward. I actually thought that was one of the smartest things about the movie.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is also great in it. He gives Clark a sadness and instability that makes the character feel more tragic than just “creepy horror guy.” And Renate Reinsve as Mary works well too, especially because she brings this quiet emotional heaviness to the film. She feels like someone trying to keep herself together while walking straight into something she absolutely does not understand.
What didn’t fully work for me
Now for the part where the movie lost me a bit.
As much as I liked the mood, I can’t pretend the film’s storytelling is clean, because it isn’t. This movie is messy on purpose, but sometimes it crosses the line from “mysterious” into “underwritten.” There were moments where I wasn’t intrigued, I was just annoyed. Not because I need every little thing explained, but because the movie sometimes feels like it’s holding back basic emotional payoff, not just lore.
That’s my biggest issue with Backrooms: it gives you a lot of images, ideas, fragments, symbols, and vibes, but not always enough structure to make those things hit as hard as they should. I understood the emotional direction of the story, but there were stretches where I felt like the film was more interested in being eerie and cryptic than in actually developing the relationships and themes enough to land properly.
The pacing is also uneven. The first half pulled me in immediately because the mystery and tension were so strong, but the second half became more abstract and emotionally slippery. I don’t mind slow horror at all, in fact I usually love it, but here I sometimes felt the movie drifting rather than building. It’s like it kept circling its own ideas instead of sharpening them.
And then there’s the ending.
My thoughts on the ending
The ending is definitely the kind of ending that will split people hard. Some people are going to call it brilliant and haunting, and others are going to say “that’s it?” I’m honestly somewhere in the middle.
I do think the ending is thematically interesting. The idea that the Backrooms doesn’t just trap people physically, but absorbs them, copies them, distorts them, and reflects their damage back at them, is creepy as hell. The final sections with Clark and Mary suggest that the Backrooms is almost like a machine built from memory, trauma, repetition, and emotional collapse. It doesn’t just contain monsters — it turns you into part of the architecture of the nightmare.
That’s a great idea.
The problem is that the film doesn’t fully earn the emotional impact of that ending the way I wanted it to. I understood what it was going for, but I didn’t feel as devastated by it as I should have, because the movie stayed so distant and ambiguous for so long that it kept me at arm’s length. I admire the ending more than I love it.
What kind of horror movie this actually is
I think this is important because I can already imagine a lot of people watching Backrooms and coming out angry because they expected the wrong movie.
This is not a crowd-pleasing, straightforward horror film. It’s not trying to be The Conjuring. It’s not trying to be Smile. It’s not even really trying to be a traditional creature feature. It’s much closer to psychological liminal horror, the kind of film that wants to make you feel disoriented, trapped, emotionally numb, and vaguely miserable.
If you like horror that is weird, abstract, atmospheric, and a little emotionally cold, there’s a good chance you’ll really appreciate this. If you want clean lore, clear answers, and a satisfying resolution, this movie will probably piss you off.
My final opinion
Overall, I think Backrooms is one of those films that I respect a lot, even if I’m not completely in love with it. I think it’s visually brilliant, genuinely creepy, and far more ambitious than most mainstream horror. It absolutely nails the oppressive, unreal feeling of the Backrooms and turns liminal space into something emotionally toxic and terrifying. At its best, it feels original, hypnotic, and deeply unsettling.
But I also think it’s flawed. The pacing drags at times, the story can feel frustratingly vague, and the emotional payoff isn’t always as strong as the atmosphere deserves. For me, it’s the kind of film that stays in your head more than it fully satisfies you while you’re watching it.
So no, I wouldn’t call it a perfect horror movie. But I also definitely wouldn’t call it forgettable. It’s one of those films where even the parts that didn’t fully work for me were at least trying to do something interesting, and I’ll take that over generic horror trash any day.
My rating: 7.5/10
Beautifully unsettling, visually brilliant, emotionally bleak, occasionally frustrating, but absolutely worth watching if you like weird atmospheric horror.
If you have a different opinion, feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to hear your take.
Leave a Reply