Backrooms

Introduction to Backrooms

Backrooms is one of the standout films of 2026, offering a truly insightful view of the mind's pathways and keys, and seamlessly blending them into a unique and compelling narrative.

The film is directed by Kane Parsons, a young director making his cinematic debut, and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. The story was also co-written by Kane Parsons and Will Soodik.

The film Backrooms effectively portrays its characters' psychological aspects through interactions between Clark and Mary, creating a compelling psychological rhythm.

The film may be somewhat slow-paced at times, but the mystery takes the viewer away from this negativity and diverts attention. Several factors weaken the film's psychological impact.

Parallel world or mind chambers?

The film blends the two, so you can't definitively say it's just a parallel world or that it's just mind chambers, which is good for the film's flexibility and its frightening conception.

Because if you stop at only one interpretation, you lose what minds can imagine, and the film's material becomes rigid and unshapable, and the idea becomes stagnant, its pulse unchanging.

One mystery remains: where did that strange world come from, and what terrible energy gave birth to it? This is the film's central question, left unresolved.

Escaping from bitter reality

One of the things that prompted me to think about the film's hidden meanings and main characters is that both are burdened with psychological weight, trying to escape difficult memories from the past, and view their reality as bitter.

But when Clark and Mary stumbled upon this hidden world and its terrifying rooms, they felt they were embarking on a new experience they had to complete, driven by a desire for change and a curiosity to discover a new area of their lives that might offer some compensation for their stagnant existence.

The captivity imposed by our frustrating memories, which drag us toward surrender, and by our distorted and unhealthy desires must be resisted with all our might so that they do not ultimately possess us and force us to commit destructive acts.

A detailed look at Backrooms

Backrooms seemed to present us with a very inspiring idea and a very exciting, promising start. However, as time passed, it surprised us with changes that sometimes seemed rather boring and illogical. These changes continued until the end of the film, leaving us with a completely unsatisfying and even ambiguous ending.

The film also left us with some questions and confusion, offering no systematic answers or even predictions that aligned with the events and logic. This was one of the film's flaws. It initially created suspense and ambiguity in the plot, then abruptly ended with an open ending and numerous questions that invite the viewer to think and answer them using their own intellect and deductions.

The film relied heavily on psychological horror and linked it to the back rooms in a dramatic way, but it failed to include any reservations on the part of the characters about entering such back rooms out of mere mischief, as if it were an entertaining game rather than a strange dimension or an exceptional area filled with illogic and other frightening things that would make a normal person hesitate repeatedly before embarking on this experience.

Some illogical elements fall under the category of mere coincidence and do not depend on a well-thought-out plot, such as Mary's obedience in escaping the deformed creature through an opening at the top of the place.

There is also the company that discovered this frightening area of back rooms, and which has turned to trying to explore this back room, completely detached from its actual work as a medical company operating in the field of radiology. This is truly strange, and its motives are somewhat obscure. What is the ultimate benefit of discovering the nature of the back rooms or trying to fathom their depths, given their frightening atmosphere that suggests the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of unraveling their mysteries?

Film facts and theory

"Async Research Institute, a Bay Area imaging startup, awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop next-generation MRI hardware"

This sentence appeared in a scene, clarifying many of the film's features, facts, and underlying theory, but it did not reveal the whole truth. The full truth was left to the viewer and their expansive imagination.

Certainly, many things shape the film's facts and theories, such as memories and places in our minds that recur and spread in the back rooms, taking on hundreds of forms. There is also the distortion and disappearance of landmarks, which mirrors the mind's paths in ending a problem it cannot solve. So it either distorts it or hides it completely, and the problem no longer exists.

We must not forget that in some scenes, when different people enter the back rooms, the features change and take shape according to each person's memories and mental landscape.

Some elements in the film point to a specific possibility. For example, the radiation suits worn by the men confirm the presence of radioactive activity that led to the creation or activation of this world, along with the experiments conducted on some people. As we saw in one of the last scenes, a person was lying on a table while another looked at a screen displaying an image of him created by radiation.

The conclusion raised this question, which was not definitively answered: Was this a product of the mind or the result of radiation experiments? This leads us to another question: where and for how long will this extend? Will it evolve? Will it become limitless? In this scenario, an additional scene or dialogue should have been added to show that the expansion of this matter might engulf our entire world.

Overall

Overall, Backrooms is undoubtedly one of the standout films of 2026. It has an original concept, and its visual execution is distinctive. Despite the slow pace and the incomplete plot, there is a truly frightening psychological atmosphere that keeps the viewer in a constant state of tension.

We mustn't forget the quality of the photography, which highlighted the complex features of the back rooms and the unnatural distortion in some of their features, a truly remarkable effect.

The acting was also excellent, and the character development was good, but the strangeness lay in some of the decisions, which sometimes contradicted common sense yet were grounded in curiosity and a passion for discovery.

The sound design in the film did a good job of highlighting the tension and psychological turmoil of the characters, and the skillful lighting defined the backgrounds of the rooms.

There were also some scenes without a specific purpose or clear meaning, which is surprising, such as the scene with Mary and her mother. Looking down at their feet as debris falls overhead means nothing and symbolizes nothing.

In conclusion, Backrooms is a fairly good film, although it could have been executed much better and the plot more skillfully crafted. Ultimately, however, it presents a frightening psychological profile and a strange, exciting, and unsettling idea that sparks a lot of imagination and serves its purpose.