‘Backrooms’ (2026) Movie Review - Gorgeous Liminal Horror that Keeps Teasing a Nightmare

I really wanted to love Backrooms more than I did. That is not because the movie is bad. It is not. It is because the movie is sitting on top of one of the best horror concepts in years and repeatedly acts like it is afraid to fully use it. The result is a film that I admired a lot, enjoyed in long stretches, and kept wishing would stop being polite and get truly terrifying.

The good news is that Kane Parsons absolutely understands the visual grammar of the Backrooms. That part works beautifully. The film nails the eerie, fluorescent, corporate-nightmare feeling that made the original concept so sticky in the first place. The hallways feel endless. The rooms feel wrong. The spaces feel like they were designed by someone who once heard the phrase “human comfort” and took it as a personal insult. The production design is fantastic, and the movie’s sets are so well built that it often feels like the crew successfully trapped a nightmare inside architecture. That alone gives the film real power.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is excellent as Clark, the furniture store owner whose ordinary life becomes the doorway into all this chaos. He brings a grounded, lived-in quality to the role that keeps the film from becoming pure concept art. Clark is at his best when he feels like a practical man trying to remain rational in a situation that has entirely stopped respecting rationality. Ejiofor sells the confusion, the fear, and the reluctant pull toward the unknown with real control. He makes Clark believable, which matters because the story asks a lot from him.

Renate Reinsve is just as strong as Dr. Mary Kline. She has the sharper, more observant energy in the film, and I wish the screenplay trusted her even more. Mary is a therapist, which makes her the perfect entry point into a story about hidden fears, unstable perception, and psychological collapse, but the movie only partially capitalizes on that idea. Reinsve is good enough to keep the character interesting even when the script is being coy, but I kept feeling like the movie was treating her as a mechanism for the plot rather than a person whose perspective could have made the whole thing richer. That becomes a recurring issue.

The film is very, very good at setup. Almost too good. It keeps dangling astonishing images, promising deeper dread, and building the sense that we are about to step into something genuinely horrifying. And then, just as it should push harder, it pulls back. The ideas are there. The vibe is there. The infrastructure is there. But the movie often feels like it is one terrifying scene away from becoming unforgettable and then chooses to sit quietly in a hallway instead. That is the most frustrating thing about it.

Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell add solid support, although the film does not always use them in the most satisfying ways. Duplass has a natural unsettling quality that fits this universe well, and Bennett and Maxwell help broaden the film’s human side, but several supporting threads feel underdeveloped. There are moments when I was interested in what a character represented more than what they were actually doing. That is not ideal. A movie like this should make every major character feel like a potential trapdoor into something worse. Instead, some of them feel more like a useful atmosphere.

The pacing is another mixed bag. At times, Backrooms moves with confidence and dread. At other times, it slows down around material that does not deserve the runtime. That is especially annoying because the movie has so many stronger ideas it could have spent more time on. It sometimes lingers on scenes that are not as important as the script seems to believe, while the parts that should have been given more space get rushed through like they were late for a meeting in reality. That imbalance is the movie’s biggest missed opportunity.

It wants to be a psychological horror, a sci-fi mystery, and an existential nightmare, and it mostly succeeds at looking like all three. But when it comes to actually scaring me, it often settles for unease instead of full-blown terror. The movie is creepy. Very creepy, in fact. Yet I kept waiting for that truly devastating sequence, the one that would make the entire premise snap into place and justify all of its visual brilliance. It never quite arrives. That does not mean the film lacks power. It means the film keeps stopping just short of its best self.

The world-building is excellent, though. You can feel Kane Parsons’ original internet-project DNA all over the movie in the best possible way. It respects the weirdness of the source material while expanding it into something much larger and more cinematic. That is not easy, and the film deserves credit for never flattening the concept into generic studio horror. It still feels like the Backrooms. It still feels liminal. It still feels like a place where reality has been discontinued. I just wanted more time spent on the parts that made that world terrifying in the first place. More isolation. More psychological collapse.

More of the awful feeling that you have entered a place where every hallway leads to another bad decision. Instead, the movie sometimes gets distracted by its own setup and by narrative material that feels less urgent than the atmosphere it is trying to sustain. There were points where I was genuinely frustrated because the film had already done the hard part. It had built the world. It had established the characters. It had the right look, the right sound, the right sense of wrongness. Then it kept hesitating. That is why my reaction landed where it did. I wanted it to scare me more. I wanted it to stop teasing and start biting.

Backrooms is visually outstanding, well-acted, and filled with the kind of nightmare imagery that horror fans have been waiting years to see properly translated to the screen. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve do excellent work anchoring it, and the production design is easily one of the film’s great achievements. But the movie repeatedly underuses its strongest setup, moves too quickly through the material that needed more time, and spends too long on the material that did not. It’s a smart, creepy, beautifully made movie that keeps coming within arm’s reach of greatness and then politely steps back.

Final Score- [7/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times