Last night, I was able to dip into a screening for A24’s upcoming new creepypasta-adjacent movie Backrooms. I’m not the person reviewing the film, and quite frankly, I’m glad of it, as it’s almost an impossible movie to explain. That hasn’t stopped reviews from coming down the pipeline, however, and I appreciate how hard everyone is trying to explain an unexplainable movie.
Let's dive in, shall we?
First Up: Let's Try Explaining The Unexplainable
Listen, it's not easy to even find text from reviewers that really sort of illuminates how bizarre Kane Parsons' new movie is. Here’s a good college try from Deadline’s Pete Hammond, who absolutely did his best to give us some sort of frame of reference for Backrooms.
It’s like Twilight Zone meets The Shining meets Blue Velvet meets Twin Peaks meets Severance meets Blair Witch meets Silence Of The Lambs , and then throw in a dozen other weirder than weird movies that mess with your mind and you might get the idea of what you are in for.
I see some of these references in there, but Backrooms, to me, has so much going on, and is a heck of a lot more undefinable. Indiewire’s Ryan Lattanzio gave it more of a Haunted Mansion bent in his review. IE: "Is this haunted room actually, stretching, or is it your imagination?" Honestly for me, this may be the most apt of what I've read.
A murky lore starts to form in the backend of Backrooms like a cancerous tumor — are these halls and rooms and doors and the creepy, everyday stuff within them — like shoes half-sunken into the ground or armchairs jutting out of drop ceilings — projections of their entrants’ psyche? Or is the space building a kind of set out of its own dreams about… itself?
THR really tries to give context to what you’ll be watching when this 2026 movie release hits theaters this weekend, but while this quote reads like the movie makes some really meaningful points, that's not what I necessarily got out of the film.
In its best moments, Backrooms brushes up against something bittersweet about the way our memories warp a little every time we access them, until they’ve been stripped of real details and we’re left only with the emotional imprint they’ve left behind.
Yet, that doesn't mean I took away nothing from the film. I'm still mulling over what I watched hours later. It's all I want to talk about.
One Certain Truth About Backrooms?
What I can tell you for sure is that Chiwetel Ejiofer and Renate Reinsve are absolutely fabulous in this movie. There’s a couple of scenes where they bounce psychological ideas off of one another that are so absolutely entrancing, I forgot for a second I was watching an upcoming horror film.
The Guardian and other outlets all point this out, too. The Wrap calls them "brilliant performers," so no matter how Backrooms ends up making you feel by the time you get to the closing credits, it’s likely we will all be on the same page about the acting performances, at least.
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary.
All in all, not every reviewer is as sure you’ll be as “obsessed” with The Backrooms as you may have been with the recent Obsession release (CinemaBlend's roundup), but you will doubtless be interested in talking about what you just watched. So buckle up, because if you’re planning to see this one, you are in for an absolutely wild time.
