Backrooms Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Backrooms succeeds where many internet-inspired adaptations fail. It captures the eerie, unsettling atmosphere that made the original phenomenon so popular while delivering strong visuals, genuine tension, and an engaging mystery.
While its ambiguity and slow-burn pacing may not work for everyone, the series remains a haunting and immersive horror experience that lingers long after it ends. A must-watch for fans of psychological horror and sci-fi thrillers.
Few internet phenomena have shown the staying power of The Backrooms. What began as a single eerie image — those yellow-tinged, fluorescent-lit corridors that feel disturbingly familiar yet completely wrong — grew into one of the internet’s most enduring horror myths. Millions of videos, fan theories, and creative interpretations followed. Now Kane Parsons, whose YouTube adaptations played a significant role in popularizing the concept, brings it to cinema screens. The result is one of the more genuinely unsettling horror films of 2026.
The story places a group of characters inside an endless maze of identical hallways, abandoned office spaces, and rooms that seem to follow no physical logic. The deeper they go, the less certain it becomes that any exit exists. What the film does well — and this is harder to pull off than it sounds — is resist the temptation to explain too much. The Backrooms remain strange and unpredictable throughout, and that sustained uncertainty is where most of the dread lives.
Kane Parsons shows real confidence making the jump from online storytelling to feature filmmaking. The production design creates environments that sit in an uncomfortable space between recognizable and deeply wrong — the kind of setting that gets under your skin gradually rather than announcing itself. Long corridor tracking shots and a sound design that makes every distant echo feel threatening do more work here than any conventional scare moment. The film understands something that a lot of horror misses — that what might be around the next corner is often scarier than what’s actually there.
Chiwetel Ejiofor grounds the film with a performance that prioritizes emotional authenticity over genre theatrics. His character’s confusion and fear feel earned rather than performed, which matters enormously in a film where the horror is largely psychological. You believe him, which means you stay with him.
The film isn’t without its weaknesses. The middle section slows down as characters move through environments that start to feel samey, and viewers who need narrative resolution will likely leave frustrated. The Backrooms concept is built on ambiguity, and the film honors that — but it does mean some questions are left deliberately unanswered.
Whether that’s a flaw or a feature depends entirely on what you want from horror cinema.
Also Read: Kattalan Movie Review: Antony Varghese Shines in a Film That Never Stops Screaming
What Works
- Atmosphere and world-building that genuinely disturbs
- Chiwetel Ejiofor’s grounded and convincing performance
- Sound design that creates dread from near silence
- Faithful to what made the original concept frightening
- Sustained unease rather than cheap shock moments
What Doesn’t Work
- Pacing drags in the middle act
- Repetitive environments will test some viewers’ patience
- The ambiguity won’t satisfy everyone
Final Verdict
Backrooms is the kind of internet-to-film adaptation that earns its place by understanding why the source material worked in the first place. It doesn’t inflate the concept into a generic monster movie or strip away what made it special. It preserves the core of the thing — the loneliness, the wrongness, the sense that you are somewhere you were never meant to be — and builds a film around that feeling rather than around plot mechanics.
It won’t answer all your questions. But then, the Backrooms were never something you were supposed to understand.