Critic Reviews

Like so many of the most memorable, most surprising horror movies, Backrooms winds up feeling ripe for sequels and spin-offs. The only question is whether more movies in this vein could maintain the mysteries hanging over the Backrooms. Horror sequels tend to overexplain and overdevelop, answering questions that shouldn’t really be answered. Here’s hoping we never fully find out what the Backrooms are, or exactly why they make the hair on the back of our collective necks stand on end.

As bizarre as it is terrifying, Backrooms may not be a revolution in horror, but it’s a beyond-freaky remapping of the genre.

Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.

Sparse yet gripping, “Backrooms” and its minimalist story accommodate the audience’s own free-ranging imagination.

Backrooms could have easily been disposable internet-horror junk food—a feature-length extension of creepypasta aesthetics with nothing underneath. Instead, Parsons delivers something far more haunting: an affecting horror film about imprisonment, memory distortion, and the private hell of mistaking isolation for refuge.

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve’s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette’s production design and Parsons’s exquisite direction.

With connective tissue linking it to both Skinamarink and Synecdoche, New York, Backrooms is a chillingly ambitious debut that finds the terror in enclosed spaces and echoing silences. It’s a screen nightmare that could easily work its way into viewers’ real ones.

You’ll be screaming and climbing the walls with Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofer in this claustrophobic, let-me-outta-here groundbreaker from 20-year-old director Kane Parsons. This dude is diabolical.

Casts a surrealistic spell that’s unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.

It’s mesmeric and wildly unique in a way I suspect will stand the test of time, since nothing else put to film feels this much like watching the collective Gen Z nightmare come to life – a half-confused grief over never having lived in the analogue era, an attraction to and fear of VHS infomercials, sofa stores, and TV dinner trays.