Backrooms

77/100 Some films suffer under being very explicitly planned as the penultimate film in a cross-film story arc - or perhaps even in an entire franchise. A very clear example of this for me, is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014), that arguably barely did anything but set up the fourth and final film in the original Hunger Games tetralogy. Now, this might seem odd to bring up, as Backrooms (2026) is the very first fully fledged film in the franchise, and not a film that's meant to set up a grand finale, nor does it do it. Yes, Backrooms is not a penultimate film, but it suffers from something similar. It's an introductory film, and it's an introductory film that's not quite able to shake off this matter of fact, making it unfortunately somewhat embed into the structure of the film. It's to me very obvious, that director Kane Parsons wants to introduce us, the audience, to this huge world he has built around his interpretation of the Backrooms internet urban legend. In many ways, it's more successful at this than his Backrooms shorts are in this, but with the scope of his interpretation, the film can only scrape the surface. There's nothing about this that ruins the movie explicitly, and I do not wish that this liminal project, that purposefully plays with memory, would just reveal everything all at once. I suppose it just feels like the scope was expanded too fast for the format he was trying to fit it into, and that the concept already far outsizes the bits we were given in the movie. And once that is the case, I suppose you really are locked into making a very introductory film, where payoff, answers and even emotional communication feels more limited than it had to be. It's also important for me to highlight, that this doesn't ruin the film at all, and that it moreso limits it than anything. Because the scraped surface that Kane Parsons does manage to introduce us with, shows so much potential, and is so eerie, liminal and just slightly-off in the exact way his shorts became famous for. In many ways, I also feel the introduction of a named protagonist really helps do things his shorts weren't able to. As for once, it allows Parsons to play with her memory, ask how that plays into the backrooms as a concept, and how the backrooms is even connected to the human psyche if at all. At the same time, it lets us go beyond the found footage style - although it is still present - and into a role where we, the audience, watch things unfold in real time, rather than feeling that we are watching the past. The way this is mixed in, really heightens the stakes for me, also because a camera man that barely speaks, is much harder to empathise with, than Renate Reinsve as the shrink, Dr. Mary Kline. About the acting, I find it really good. I believe I read somewhere, that this film proved that even Renate Reinsve could have "misses" (referring to her immense streak of high quality performances leading up to Backrooms, including Sentimental Value (2025) and A Different Man (2024) among many others), which is something I found to be almost laughably wrong. There's no doubt, that this role required a more quiet performance than perhaps what she has become famous for, but I don't think it's worth holding against her, with how incredibly she pulls it off. Chiwetel Ejiofo (Clark) also greatly impressed me. He's an actor I'm glad gets the chance to lead a film as big as this, because he really does well. His character is by no means likeable, and he pulls this off in such a believable fashion, that I genuinely hope we will see him in more leading roles moving forwards. Another thing worth praising is the general production design. The sets are absolutely amazing, the locations picked are great, and the props and costumes are also just great. Manually creating liminal spaces, is certainly not easy, yet they both appear liminal and very faithful to both Kane Parsons original shorts, and the very spirit of the urban legend that the backrooms as a concept have become. To sum up everything, Backrooms is a film that once again shows Parsons' incredible potential, and while we get to see more of it realised here, it still very much feels like we haven't seen it fully realised yet, and hopefully, the sequel will be the first place where he can really unfold his Backrooms concept, seeing as this first film acted more than anything as an introductory piece. A very competent introdoctury piece, that's worth a watch however.