Full spoilers for Backrooms (2026) follow.
I just watched Backrooms, and I have absolutely no frakking idea what I just watched. I know there’s an impossible world hiding behind a wall in a furniture-store basement, that people can wander into it and disappear, and that at some point a gigantic, deformed pirate decides to make everybody’s day considerably worse. I understand those individual events. Ask me how they fit together, what that world actually is, or why it seems to know things it shouldn’t possibly know, and we’re going to have a problem.
Here’s the really strange part: I enjoyed the hell out of it. I was unsettled, fascinated, occasionally frightened, and completely absorbed in the act of trying to understand what Kane Parsons was showing me. By the time the credits rolled, I had a list of questions long enough to qualify as its own feature film. And somehow, that made me like Backrooms even more.
The Movie Turned Me Into One of Its Investigators
That’s the cleverest thing about how Backrooms is constructed. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect running a struggling furniture store, discovers this impossible environment and immediately begins trying to understand it. He explores, maps, measures, returns, and eventually becomes obsessed. The film trains us to behave the same way. We’re investigating the rooms right alongside him, searching for patterns in a place that seems determined to scramble them.
Parsons establishes that relationship through Async researcher Naren Warne’s opening found footage. The camera limits us to his view, making every turn a decision about where to look and what to fear. Later, when Clark sets down his camera while trying to reach Kat, something unseen picks it up. That moment scared the shit out of me. Suddenly, something might be looking back through the camera we’d trusted.
Dread Is Doing a Remarkable Amount of Work
A lot of Backrooms consists of people moving through mostly empty spaces, and somehow those sequences are riveting. The rooms are brightly lit, the furniture is recognizable, and the architecture initially resembles places we’ve all visited: a deserted showroom, an office after closing, an institutional hallway, a building waiting to be occupied. Their familiarity gives us something to hold onto, while the tiny errors in their construction make that familiarity increasingly uncomfortable.
The sound design deserves enormous credit. Fluorescent lights hum, distant noises suggest movement beyond our view, and every corridor generates anxiety. Parsons understands how much suspense can exist between a sound and the moment we discover its source. Waiting for something to happen became one of the movie’s greatest pleasures.
The distinction matters because my experience was driven as much by curiosity as fear. I wanted to understand why Kat could see Clark through glass while he faced a solid wall, why the electrical circuitry in his store had connections leading nowhere, and why the Backrooms seemed to contain evidence of Clark before he entered them. I felt invited to notice things, even when I couldn’t yet make sense of them.
Clark Might Be the Saddest Part of This Whole Damn Thing
Amid all the cosmic weirdness, there’s one small detail I haven’t been able to shake: near the end, we see missing-person posters for Kat and Bobby, the two young people Clark brought into the Backrooms. We don’t see a corresponding poster for Clark. I can’t say that proves nobody searched for him, but the choice of whose faces appear in that montage is devastating.
Think about the opening therapy session. Mary (Renate Reinsve) tells Clark that he’s alone, and he protests that he has employees and customers. He confuses people being around him with people being close to him, all while his anger, self-pity, and refusal to take responsibility keep damaging the relationships he has left. Then he convinces Kat and Bobby to follow him into the impossible world, and they disappear. Their absence leaves a visible mark on the world outside. Clark’s absence goes unacknowledged in the posters we’re shown.
That’s the kind of detail that gives a story this abstract an emotional anchor. The film’s enormous, incomprehensible environment reflects something painfully recognizable about a man who has spent years pushing people away. Eventually he chooses to remain in a place populated by distorted imitations of human beings, and the grotesque pirate version of himself appears to consume him. There’s an awful logic to that ending, even if I can’t explain a single goddamn thing about how the creature physically exists.
My Knee-Jerk Verdict
I suspect Backrooms will frustrate viewers who need every mystery resolved, and there are stretches where its deliberate pacing tests just how long we can remain invested in wandering and watching. I felt that risk, especially as the questions piled up faster than the answers. But the film held me through the precision of its images, its deeply unnerving soundscape, and the surprisingly affecting connection between Clark’s character and the architecture surrounding him.
I walked away thinking about an unseen presence picking up a camera, a therapist confronting her history of confinement, and a man whose disappearance makes less noise than those of the people he took with him. I desperately want to discuss the dates, the power cords, Async, Pirate Clark, and the final image of Mary. That’s a hell of a result for a movie that left me this gloriously confused.
The full NerdClan KJR digs into the two therapy scenes, Mary’s arc, Async, the timeline, and that final image. Pull up a chair and join the NerdClan to keep exploring with me.
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