Backrooms (2026) Review

SPOILERS!!!!!!!

​Tonight I watched Backrooms with Liam, Charlee, Charley and Ethan

I wasn’t as hyped as most people for this movie but I was still excited. The short film showed a complex world that could be expanded on. Getting right to the chase, I did not like this movie.

Backrooms is about a character called Clark who discovers a secret doorway in his furniture shop to another… world? That’s the basic overview of the film. There’s also the whole other plot with the therapist but trust me, we’ll get to her. 

So, where do my problems lie? 

NUMBER 1: everyone is so fucking SLOW. I understand that it’s a strange new world and it’s all weird and bizarre but holy shit pick up the pace bro. Genuinely such a snails pace the characters and the movie has. But when Mary (the therapist) is getting chased by a tall creature and is not going as quick as I think she should, that shit bothers me. BUT, thats a me problem. 

Even when Clark finds this new world theres no sense of confusion or urgency. He stumbles into this place and he kind of looks around and travels deeper in. It’s fucking ridiculous. It’s as if he has no feeling as to how weird it all is. Just, “oh hey, found this weird world. oh well, let’s keep going!” Bro might as well be skipping up and down the halls with how NOT ALERT HE IS. Him walking at such a slow pace does not show wariness in this movie, it just looks SSSSLLLLLLOOOOOWWWWW.

NUMBER 2: Non existent fleshing out of the characters. Some could argue that erm actually, the first scene of Clark and Mary is when he’s telling her about how his wife kicked him out because blah blah blah WHATEVER but no. We see two, count ‘em, TWO therapy sessions. The first one is the one I just mentioned and the other one is when he discovers the Backrooms and goes to her looking like a fucking maniac. We hardly see not only the dynamic between these characters but also we hardly know these characters at all! Sure, Mary had a mum that was clearly suffering from mental problems which is probably why she went into the therapist scene but thats all we know of her. She’s Clark’s therapist and her mum was a paranoid and mentally disturbed individual. Clark is a failed (not really expanded on) architect and his wife kicked him out of “his” house. There is nothing here that has made me latch onto the characters because what is here is not expanded upon.

NUMBER 3: The creatures. Such a wasted opportunity. They could’ve gone so crazy with the designs but what we got was not that. What we got was fine but I wished there was MORE. There are only 3!!! There could be so many more with so many cool designs, I feel like i’m going insane. 

NUMBER 4: Mary. I already mentioned that she had a mother who was sent into a psychiatric hospital when she was a kid. For WHATEVER REASON Mary brings with her LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, the handprint she made in cement when she was younger with her mother. Thank god this movie showed me that she eats dinner with it, watches TV with it AND takes it to work because otherwise i’d think her STABBING IT INTO THE CREATURE THAT IS CHASING HER WOULD BE TOO RANDOM. I mean seriously. It couldn’t be a baseball or something? It had to be this handprint she made? “Oh but Amelia, they show at the beginning of the movie a flashback of when she did it with her mum outside of their house that’s currently getting knocked down” YEAH, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t of been a BASEBALL OR SOMETHING. I genuinely exclaimed out loud after the THIRD TIME seeing this fuck ass cemented handprint “I swear to god if I see that fuck ass cemented handprint one more time I’m going to lose my shit” 

NUMBER 5: The found footage section. I say section because that’s what it is. A section. What I wish was most of the film was not in it a lot. I’m a sucker for found footage films so I was disappointed it wasn’t longer. There was the intro scene as well that was similar but to me, it wasn’t enough. 

I will say though, it is incredible that a 20 year old has directed this. But, in some ways, it FEELS like a 20 year old has directed this. I don’t want to discredit Kane Parsons but I think more collaboration with multiple writers might’ve made this work. 

But yes, probably a harsh review but I had to express my frustrations. 

⭐️1/2 out of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️