Official Trailer
Rating: 0/10 | Genre: Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction | Runtime: 110 min
Starring: Renate Reinsve, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
I just watched Backrooms and honestly, I’m not even sure where to start. This movie has a 0/10 on TMDB, and after sitting through all 110 minutes, I understand why.
The premise is actually pretty cool. A doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom and people start getting trapped in these endless, repetitive hallways. It sounds like the kind of thing that could be genuinely unsettling. Turns out it’s just a slog.
What’s the actual story here?
The movie follows five people who discover this doorway and decide that the smart thing to do is go through it. Once they’re in, they realize they’re stuck in these repeating spaces that look like the fluorescent-lit back hallways of an office building. Everything is beige and yellow. Everything smells like old carpet.
Renate Reinsve plays Sarah, who finds the doorway first. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Marcus, a guy who gets pulled in after her. Mark Duplass is there too, along with Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell as the other trapped people. They spend most of the movie walking around, getting confused, and occasionally panicking when they realize the space might be infinite.
That’s really it. They walk. They get tired. They argue about whether they’re dreaming. Some of them start acting weird. Nobody has any good ideas about what to do.
Why doesn’t it work?
The pacing is absolutely glacial. For a 110-minute movie, it feels like three hours. There’s barely any tension because nothing actually happens. They’re trapped in hallways, but the hallways never do anything threatening. They’re just hallways.
Ejiofor is a great actor, but even he can’t save scenes where he’s just walking down a corridor looking confused for the fifteenth time. The script doesn’t give him anything to work with. None of the dialogue sounds natural. People keep explaining things that are already obvious, and they say it in a way that no real person ever would.
The sound design is the worst part though. There’s this constant low humming that’s supposed to be unsettling. It’s just annoying. And the score, whenever it shows up, is so heavy-handed that it undercuts any moment that might have been creepy.
Is there anything good about it?
The cinematography is fine. The way they shot the endless hallways is technically competent. The production design makes those spaces feel sterile and depressing, which I guess is the point. But looking at a boring thing competently is still just looking at a boring thing.
There’s maybe one scene about halfway through where something slightly weird happens, and for like two minutes I thought the movie might get interesting. It didn’t. That moment goes nowhere.
The ending
I won’t spoil it, but the ending tries to do something ambitious. It tries to suggest that there’s a bigger mystery here, some kind of science fiction explanation for what’s happening. The problem is that the movie hasn’t earned the right to go for a twist ending because nothing before it was engaging enough to make me care about the answer.
Backrooms had potential. The concept works. The cast is capable. But the execution is so flat and the pacing so sluggish that it completely wastes everything it has going for it. Save your time and just scroll through Reddit posts about the Backrooms creepypasta instead. You’ll get more out of those.
Verdict: Skip it. Hard pass.
Did anyone else actually watch this? Let me know if I’m being too harsh in the comments.
Where to Watch
Streaming availability varies by region. Check your favorite streaming platform to see if this title is available in your country.