Backrooms (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Backrooms ⭐️⭐️⭐️½

A horror film that starts with genuine brilliance, trusting empty space and wrong geometry to unsettle, before slowly losing confidence in its own premise.

When I came into this, I was only vaguely aware of the internet mythology surrounding Backrooms, but in case you missed it altogether, let me just bring you up to speed. It all started in 2019 as a piece of internet folklore: a single image of an empty yellowish office-like space accompanied by the unsettling suggestion that one might accidentally ‘glitch’ out of reality and end up trapped there. That was the whole idea: no explanation, no psychology, no plot.

Then over time, people collectively started expanding on it, and the mythology grew. Borrowing the language of videogames, the idea was that one could ‘noclip’ through the world and emerge somewhere behind existence itself: endless corridors, fluorescent lights, damp carpets and no obvious way out.

It is one of those concepts that sounds faintly ridiculous when explained and yet taps into something oddly primal. The unsettling feeling that reality has stopped behaving properly.

That’s where director Kane Parsons (better known online as Kane Pixels) got his inspiration from. He first gained attention as a teenager back in 2022, by creating a series of short Backrooms films on YouTube. These low-budget, digital nightmares, shot on what seems like VHS tapes, were built around ‘liminal spaces’ (a Latin term that means ‘threshold’, hence places or states of transition), found-footage aesthetics, and a real understanding of how to make empty rooms feel terrifying: no cheap jumpscares, just pure, unsettling atmosphere. His original Backrooms YouTube videos exploded online and became so successful, racking up millions and millions of views, that they attracted the attention of Hollywood.

I realise that’s a lot of explaining, but I’m sure your enjoyment of this film will be massively amplified if you are more in tune with this mythology. That’s not to say that you couldn’t come into this completely fresh and, in a way, you should.

The film starts with a terrific (and terrifying) prologue as an unseen man, holding a video camera, walks anxiously around a series of empty rooms and corridors. As you’re watching, you constantly have the feeling that reality has quietly malfunctioned, that somebody may be watching and that there might be something lurking around the corner.

With hindsight, this pre-title sequence almost became my experience of the whole film in miniature.

First: ‘oh, this is intriguing.’ Then: ‘this is actually really scary.’ Then: oh no… there’s a monster. I think I preferred it when this was just empty and moody. And finally: wait… what was that about?

The difference is that at that stage, I didn’t mind it too much. Early confusion can be exciting. You assume the film is planting questions and that sooner or later it will reveal a shape underneath the mystery.

And for the best part of the first half of this film, I genuinely thought that might happen. There was a point where I really thought: ‘this could end up being one of my favourite horror films of the last decade, if not more.’ The film seemed uninterested in conventional horror mechanics; instead, it started by fully trusting that original idea, from that first photo in 2019, that empty spaces, wrong geometry, and endless repetition can be frightening enough. I thought it was brilliant. Unnerving. Tense as hell.

Then, slowly, the film began to lose confidence in its own premise.

For a start it introduces monsters (or zombies… or whatever they are) and that, to me, is always a fatal mistake, as one hundred years of cinema history have taught us: the fear of what’s lurking around the corner is often so much scarier than the reveal itself. That’s why Jaws was (and still is) so terrifying, because you hardly see the shark. There are dozens of examples in films to prove the point: Signs, The Descent, The Haunting. Even Spielberg himself forgot his own rule in War of the Worlds.

Of course, horror has survived monsters before, but the more the film explains, externalises and symbolises, the less frightening it becomes.

Because there is, of course, a whole psychological reading at play here. Our protagonist is emotionally ‘trapped’ after being dumped by his partner, and clearly the endless corridors and rooms represent his repeating thoughts, his inability to move past trauma and, I suppose, the monsters are just external representations of his emotional pain. But the film seems unable to handle those connections properly.

Once the threat starts shifting from the ‘environment horror’ to the ‘character behaviour horror’ (a transition that isn’t earned at all, almost as if the film had skipped about three scenes of development), it all falls apart. Characters began behaving in ways that felt more allegorical than human. Motivations became muddy. Revelations arrive without enough grounding. Entire scenes seemed designed to signify something before they were convincing as drama.

Conceptually, it was interesting, but dramatically, it was a mess.

What frustrates me is that visually the film never collapses. Even when I stopped believing in the narrative, I remained fascinated by the images. Those distorted interiors, impossible spaces, environments that seem to have been dreamed by somebody with half a brain who once worked night shifts in a deserted store.

The atmosphere never fully disappears. Which makes the disappointment even greater.

Because buried somewhere in it, there is a version of Backrooms that trusts silence, ambiguity and empty space. A version that understands that sometimes horror works best when there is no monster waiting around the corner.

Just another corridor.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.