‘Backrooms’ is disquieting, but runs into third act issues

Have you ever seen something ostensibly normal – say, three shopping carts in the middle of an abandoned parking lot, or an empty, kitschy furniture store – and stared at it just a little too long? Long enough that the banality of it all suddenly becomes sinister, or the layout suddenly looks slightly off? In 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan gave name to the spaces that emit that uncanny feeling – the Backrooms.

As an idea, the Backrooms originated as creepypasta – a term for online horror stories that proliferate across the internet and become legend. The idea was that somewhere in an alternate dimension existed an endless array of carpeted, vomitous yellow hallways that, if you weren’t careful, you might find yourself lost in. In 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons came into the mix, starting a web series that eventually became the inspiration for the new film “Backrooms,” directed by Parsons and written by Will Soodik. The film certainly capitalizes on the disquieting nature of the original post and the series that followed. But, it also begs the question on whether or not one unsettling idea merits an entire movie.

For its first hour or so, Parsons pushes forward the aesthetic and ideas that makes the web series so captivatingly haunting, moving past a focus on spatial horror and attempting to take that same sense of wrongness and apply it to the characters at the center of the film. That idea works on paper, but as “Backrooms” plods on, it loses what original spark it had in the fog of thin characterization and a muddled third act.

Read Sammie’s full list on Rough Draft