Club Benefits
- Rating: 4/5 stars
- Verdict: "Backrooms" may be adapted from a YouTube series, but it's made for the big screen. The performances are excellent, the tension is perfectly crafted and the set design is genuinely an art form. But the ending leaves you with just enough questions to slightly sour the experience.
- Where to watch: See "Backrooms" in theaters now
"Backrooms" made our list of the biggest summer movies to watch this year, and going into it, it was easy to see why. Yes, it's director Kane Parsons' first feature-length film, but it stars Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. It's produced by James Wan, Osgood Perkins and Shawn Levy. Sure, it's an adaptation of a YouTube series, but guess what? That's in right now. "Iron Lung" was a hit earlier this year, and "Obsession" made more money in its second week in theaters than in its debut.
In short, being in the YouTube horror genre is a selling point for this movie, not a shortcoming.
After seeing it on opening night (in a sold-out theater, no less), though, I'm here to tell you that this movie doesn't feel like a web series at all. This is a full-bodied, feature-length psychological horror movie made for the big screen. The set design is incredible, the performances are great and the directing leads to perfectly crafted moments of tension.
It's also incredibly accessible, particularly if you're familiar with some of the bigger horror movies of the past few decades. You don't need to have seen the web series of the same name to see this movie. Because watching "Backrooms," it's impossible not to be reminded of a few major movies: "The Blair Witch Project," "The Cabin in the Woods" and "Inception."
Malcolm has been with Tom's Guide since 2022. He watches dozens of new releases every year to make sure you don't have to watch any of the bad ones.
'Backrooms' feels familiar but never stale
Of the three movies I just referenced, this movie has the most connective tissue with the first two, particularly "Blair Witch." There are two major sequences of this movie shot from a first-person perspective using a 1980s to '90s style handheld camera. The first one kicks off the movie, while another occurs in the film's second act, which you can see highlighted at various points in the movie's official trailer.
These first-person sequences are incredible for tension building. In the movie's opening scene, in particular, you feel like you're playing a first-person shooter video game; you sit up, the adrenaline gets pumping and you're just waiting for when (not if) something is going to happen.
But the "Cabin in the Woods" aspect of this film is important too. At the end of the first scene, we see that a group of people is watching what happens in the "Backrooms": a dimension of infinite spaces set in a slightly askew office building that is accessible through various portals on Earth.
This group is Async, a shadowy institution that will be familiar to fans of the web series but unfamiliar to anyone else. As the movie goes on, we see one Async employee in particular, Phil (Mark Duplass), monitoring Clark (Ejiofor), a furniture store owner fallen on hard times, and Mary (Reinsve), his therapist, as they explore the various spaces within the Backrooms. While Async isn't aiding in a ritual sacrifice, as Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford do in Joss Whedon's 2012 horror film, but its clear that Async wants to keep its thumb on the scale of what happens in these rooms as much as it's able.
Now, as for how this movie connects to "Inception?" That's a bit more complicated. If you read the plot synopsis of this movie on Wikipedia, the ending of this movie feels straightforward. But if you actually watch the movie, you'll be left with so many questions about what just happened over the previous 110 minutes.
It was the one aspect of "Backrooms" that didn't work for me, because I'm not sure this movie is intentionally being as ambiguous as Christopher Nolan was when he cut away from the spinning top in "Inception." The more research I do after the fact, the more it seems that there's a clear way to interpret the ending of "Backrooms." The problem is that the actual presentation of the movie doesn't mirror that intent. If there's a clear way to view this narrative, I wish that's what Parsons and writer Will Soodik had actually delivered.
Verdict: This adaptation of a YouTube web series is made for the big screen
Despite my qualms with the ending of the movie, this was still a great movie. More importantly, it was a great movie-going experience. My theater was packed. People audibly gasped on several occasions. You're on the edge of your seat and forgetting to breathe at times. It's everything you'd want from a big-screen horror film.
So yes, you could wait for this movie on one of the best streaming services (likely HBO Max), but I wouldn't. Not only is the theatrical experience for this movie great, but the sound design is excellent, and the set design of "Backrooms" is genuinely art. While it might just seem like a never-ending office building, all the little details have to be nailed down just right. Every oddly-located door, every off-kilter piece of furniture, etc., they all have to be crafted and placed just so, and the more I think about it, the more I'm impressed.
If you can handle horror at all, this movie is one you'll want to see in theaters. It's the YouTube horror genre hitting full stride, and just another piece of evidence that these small-screen adaptations are perfect for bringing to the biggest screens possible.
"Backrooms" is in theaters now
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