Reel Deal Reviews • "Backrooms" (2026) (Patreon)

A24 continues their streak of "Movies That Don't Appeal to Me at All" with their newest PLOP! in the toilet bowl, Backrooms (2026). 

Based on the "viral sensation" (a phrase that not only makes me look like a dinosaur, but sends more shivers down my spine than anything this two-hour turkey had to offer), Backrooms follows Clark, the owner of a fledgling furniture store, as he discovers a mysterious portal in his shop that transports him into the Backrooms, a mysterious (and very yellow) dimension. Unfortunately for Clark, he's not the only one lurking around the Backrooms' office-esqe hallways...

While I liked SOME aspects of this film, I really did not care for the majority of it. I thought it was pretty long, there were lengthy stretches of nothing happening, and it didn't go as full horror as I would have liked. Instead, go watch Hokum if your theatre's still playing it! Now! Go, before it's too late!

Here there be spoilers!

Before I get into the many aspects of the film I did not care for, let me list out what I did actually enjoy about it: 

1. The actual Backrooms sets are impressively made, even though they're pretty much just a bunch of blocks and walls with an ugly wallpaper. I'm sure that some of them (like the sequence near the end showing Mary’s childhood home turn into a Backroom version of itself) are just CGI, but some behind the scenes photos show that at least a handful of 'em were actually made. 

2. I appreciated the movie's attempts to try and look like the past, although whether it took place in the nineteen-eighties, nineties, or two-thousands was a little unclear. Nothing struck me as being TOO modern, except the TV commercials that look just a tad "HD thing filmed with a bunch of filters placed over it afterwards."

3. I appreciated the surprising amount of puppetry this film contains! As you can tell from my social media presence, there's nothing I love more than spooky stuff and puppets, so to have a bunch of gross little freaks got me to smirk and admit "Well, okay, this movie isn't ALL bad…" 

4. The ending was executed very well, meaning that I was literally at the edge of my seat watching the therapist Mary (a character who I didn't even really care for before) outrun the creepy-as-hell Captain Clark puppet. This was only a couple minutes of this two-hour movie, but I’ll still give the point!

5. The music (courtesy of Kane Parsons and Edo Van Breemen) was great! Sometimes, I couldn't tell if a thumping noise was part of the score, a character's heartbeat, or the angry stompings of a quickly approaching entity.

Okay, now that that's over with—I can't think of a film where I've yawned more often when watching it! This thing can be a REAL slow-burn at times—I've now spent probably fifteen minutes of my life watching this film's characters go "Woah... a portal... to these... rooms in the back... these... back rooms!" as they wave their hands back and forth through dimensions. (Okay, the dialogue wasn't THAT extreme, but it’s close!)

The script was pretty "meh," too. I get what it was trying to do, but I think that Backrooms suffers from the same issues that plagued Rob Zombie's two bastardizations of Halloween—things get less and less scary the more you explain it! Yes, we don't end the movie knowing what’s behind the Backrooms, but the explanation of its creation is unnecessary (even if it is a somewhat interesting metaphor about nostalgia and the past). I get it—the concept needed some more meat on its meager bones since it was going to be adapted into a movie, but that just begs the question of "Then why even bother making it a movie in the first place?" (The answer: MONEY! As I write this, an indie horror movie is outgrossing a Star Wars movie, which sounds fucking insane if you stop and think about it.) 

Besides the final chase, this movie wasn't really all that frightening, either. If you're walking into this expecting some nice monster-eating-people action, you'll be disappointed to know that the most you'll get are some scattered leftovers. There's those gnarly ass puppets I mentioned earlier, but for the most part, they're more "cool" than "scary" during their big moment. It's concerning when your horror movie doesn't curdle my blood as much as a Nextbot in a Backrooms Garry's Mod map!

I thought that Clark's actor (Chiwetel Ejofor) ran laps around (almost) everybody else in this movie. He dipped a bit when he was introducing his two employees to the Backrooms for the first time but re-gained my praise when he went full Jack Torrance near the end. The two employees were pretty hacky (Kat over Bobby), and I found Mary the Therapist was as wooden as the Captain's peg leg. However, the best performance in this film was Robert Bobroczkyi, AKA "The Lifeform," AAKA the Clark monster. I have a great respect for tall actors who wear pounds of makeup to give us fantastical characters, such as Doug Jones, Matthew McGrory, and Carel Struycken—and Bobroczkyi is no exception. I applaud him for giving some much-needed energy into this otherwise dull, dull movie.

Kane Parsons isn't even old enough to drink alcohol here in the United States, but here he is, directing a major big-boy release and kicking Disney’s ass in the box office! I gotta give him props: this movie does NOT look like it's made by someone who wasn't even around to see The Towers fall. It’s competently made and, if I wasn’t aware of him before, I’d have no idea that we’re only a couple days apart in age. My advice to Parsons as a slightly younger amateur writer/cartoonist who's never directed a film before? Tighten up your runtime, straighten out your performers, liven up your story, add more puppets, hire me to write your next movie, and give me lots of money. I hope his career continues with the same momentum (and his filmography improves in quality.) 

So, before you end up twisting and turning through the flickering hallways of your local cinema as you try to figure out which of the theatres is playing your particular showing of Backrooms, consider the fifteen dollars and two hours of your life you’d be coughing up and think: “Is this really what I want to do?” I mean, wouldn’t you rather watch something else? Like… uh, The Mandalorian and Grogu, or The Breadwinner, or that Michael Jackson biopic that mysteriously stops in 1993 for some reason? Actually, you know what? Just turn on your heel and go home at this point. (But make sure that your atoms don't perfectly align with anything on your way there! Yes, it's got an impossibly high chance of ever happening, but you never know...)