Backrooms is a liminal nightmare, until it isn’t

For a while, everyone I knew seemed to have Backrooms on their watchlist. Whether they were a fan of the horror genre itself or familiar with earlier works of the director, it seemed to be a unanimous preconception that a movie about exploring yellow-tinted liminal spaces where unknown, incomprehensible horror awaits the adventurer was something worth watching. Thus, it's pretty redundant to talk about how anticipated it was among the viewer base.

Backrooms started becoming a popular internet phenomenon in 2019. The words "liminal spaces" and "backrooms" are often used interchangeably, although there’s a subtle difference in that the latter is more malicious than the former. Empty, abandoned locations, doorways, and staircases that trigger a sense of nostalgia and comfort mixed with the unsettling absence of people and noise—it's no wonder the internet lore became popular with a generation that survived through isolation during the pandemic. The director, Kane Parsons, had previously released his own web series on YouTube called The Backrooms (Found Footage) and made his film debut at the age of 20 with Backrooms (2026).

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After what seemed like forever, Backrooms finally got its digital release, and yet, for some reason, it didn't seem to prompt as much discourse as another recently released film of the horror genre, Obsession. Of course, that isn't enough to immediately conclude the failure of the film, but that did sow the seeds of doubt in my mind and intrigued me to get started as soon as possible.

The premise is expected. A seemingly endless, apparently harmless physical space opens up below a furniture store, hiding in plain sight. It’s unsettling, resembling the set of every TV show taking place in an office during the 90s but with the saturation set to max and mundaneness cranked up so high it starts to feel like overcompensating – which it does. For a seemingly endless liminal space that shifts and moves, it's eerily stagnant and claustrophobic. The distorted, often muffled, fluctuating-in-volume audio does nothing to help settle the unease. It sets the scene perfectly, an immaculate representation of backrooms, the subconscious of the universe where everything and everyone is remembered, just incorrectly.

Without giving away the plot too much, it follows a furniture salesman, his employees, and his therapist as they discover and navigate this space. The film drops the viewer into the backrooms without any ado, letting you take a view of the place through grainy, shaky film as the cameraman unsteadily reports to someone and asks for help, struggling to find an exit in an ever-shifting dimension. We don’t find out what happens to him. We are not really supposed to. But it’s safe to assume he’s there, in the backrooms, whether it is in his original form or in the memory of the universe.

Of course, when liminal spaces become truly scary is when it forces you to face a physical manifestation of something you’re facing about yourself. You’re claustrophobic, rattled, and anticipating something sinister. Is there any better time for introspection? Backrooms taps into that throughout the movie, keeping the entities out of sight for the larger part of the movie.

The atmospheric, disconcerting nature of the film, unfortunately, stops somewhere around the first half for me. Despite the intense buildup of a mysterious nature, the film fails to sustain the same unsettling nature. The climax feels weak, and in spite of being the highest point of the movie that’s meant to truly knock you off your seats, it doesn’t. The last half of the movie was chaotic and a little listless. The falling action and resolution are similarly weak and somehow explain too much and too little at the same time.

This isn’t to say the movie was bad. I do think the movie has its merits; the atmosphere, the sound, and the setup were executed perfectly. It’s a movie venturing into the uncharted space (pun intended) of an internet creepypasta that has existed for a long time, and it isn’t easy to take such an abstract concept and give it a plot that works in its favour.

If you enjoy having to read in between the lines to understand what’s truly going on, this is a movie that should appeal to you. The direction of horror movies in recent times seems to have strayed from the usual supernatural haunted house or abandoned locations sheltering evil entities into something introspective, often incorporating social commentaries. Movies like The Substance, Obsession, and Heretic are a far cry from traditional horror, and Backrooms seems to bridge the gap between what horror is now and what horror used to be.

But if you’ve ever found those “your month, your liminal space” or “your month, your liminal space entity” and obsessively scrolled through each one only to find out your month has a zero percent survival rate, then you’d enjoy the movie. At least the first half of it.