A new generation of horror auteurs is upon us and the box office is booming! Following the crazy success of Obsession, this week Backrooms is hitting theatres, the latest from A24 and the first for director Kane Parsons. Parsons also co-produced the score with Ido Van Breemen. The film was written by Will Soodik and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a furniture store owner, and Renate Reinsve as Clark’s therapist Mary. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett as Bobby Roberts, and Lukita Maxwell round out the supporting cast. 

So is Backrooms a movie worth getting lost in or not worth exploring? Also, if you prefer a video review, we’ve got you covered!

Verdict

Before I get into more specific spoiler-free thoughts on the film, I like to lead with my verdict and unfortunately I’m giving this a dislike rating on the heart-o-meter. 

It’s closer to a mid than a hate, mostly because of how impressed I was with Kane Parsons’ direction and the performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor.

But overall the movie was just too long, and the three exceptional horror sequences in it weren’t enough to outweigh all the bloat.

Spoiler-Free Thoughts

Full disclosure, I wasn’t familiar with Backrooms or the concept before I saw this movie. So if this is one of those cases where it’s made by fans for fans, that went right over my head and is not something I can weigh in on or give you any sort of insight into whether or not they were accurate to all the lore.

Related to that though, this movie unfortunately made me think a lot about Iron Lung, which I haven’t thought about since we finished the podcast episode on that where I went scorched earth because I really did not like that movie. I will say I thought this was exceptionally better than that film but it also is plagued by a lot of the same issues. It’s clear the creative team really likes the backrooms concept, and they’re so passionate about it that it just doesn’t translate to people that maybe don’t share that familiarity with it.

And like Iron Lung, I thought the pacing of this movie was brutal. Backrooms is shorter, but it still was too long for what it was, to the point where people around me were yawning frequently and the theatre was mostly quiet the entire time. 

At an hour forty-five, the movie was just too long and really only had the three sequences in it that I mentioned before that are really good. They were so good in fact that every time they weren’t doing something like that, all I wanted was to get back to those creepy moments.

There’s a lot of unnecessary scenes too of characters talking or dropping backstory that didn’t really add much to the film. There was even a scene where they were shooting a commercial for the store that felt totally unnecessary. 

A great example of this is Mark Duplass’ role in this film, which could have been entirely removed and all of the things around it cut from the film, and it would have changed absolutely nothing important. In fact, I thought the inclusion of his character ruined the mystery of the Backrooms but also didn’t provide enough answers to make it more clear. I felt by simultaneously giving too much and not enough, I got left in a purgatory where I would’ve preferred it to be less explained and more of a mystery which would have helped trim the runtime and help the pacing issues.

I thought Renate Reinsve was fine in the movie. She was just another one of those characters that functionally I didn’t think really added a whole lot, and was really just a plot necessity to carry us into the end of the film.

The third act where her character becomes more involved also is the weakest chunk of the film. While it did feel too long, it also felt like a chunk of the movie was missing. After the second act is concluded with one of the great Backrooms sequences, by the time we return to that character, so much has changed and happened without any real cohesive explanation. This caused the ending to feel very messy and overall pretty unsatisfying too.

Now with all that said, I didn’t hate this movie and I want to give a lot of love to Kane Parsons, who was 19 when he made this movie. There is some exceptional direction here, and it was easily the strongest point of the film.

There was clearly a lot of thought put into almost every shot, and the strongest examples of this were these handheld shots on like an oldschool VHS camcorder. I loved the look and the feel of those sequences and how they showed off the exceptional set design that was going on. For anyone unfamiliar with the Backroom look, it made me think almost of a bad AI prompt in a way, as if you told AI to make an office building and this is kind of what it’s spit out. 

The makeup and costumes were fantastic too with a handful of things that I won’t spoil but that fit the vibe perfectly. These factors are what made those three sequences stand out from the rest of the film. I felt like they definitely could have kept going back to that well and really drawing out the tension before revealing what was also inside the Backrooms. I have zero concerns about Kane Parsons as a filmmaker and I’m really excited though to see what he can do with a better script.

Conclusion

Overall this just didn’t add up to a movie that I can enthusiastically recommend, but I will say that early reviews are a little more positive than I am on this film, so if you are intrigued by it, don’t let this review be the reason you don’t go to see it!

We started Screen Love Affair because we love movies, so if you’re intrigued by this film, go see this movie in theaters because you might like it more than I did.