Warning, Contains Spoilers!
A little late to the game, I know. But I had to go and watch the film twice to really absorb it and give it a fair review. And let me tell you, there was a lot that I missed the first time I watched it! So here are my thoughts.
When I left the theater, I was quiet.
Not disappointed. Not bored. Not angry.
Quiet.
Most movies let you know what you think of them before the credits roll. You walk out ready to talk, recommend, complain. The Backrooms was not that kind of movie. It was so hard to put into words. I walked out feeling nostalgic and pensive; exploring my emotions. Not in the cheap horror way with a million jump scares. This was quieter. Unsettling. It really got under my skin.
I was genuinely confused when I saw people saying that it was a boring movie that didn’t have jump scares. I mean,that’s what I loved most about it. It made me think.
As I watched reviews of these people complaining about Obsession and Backrooms calling them ‘slow or boring.’ Much of modern horror is built around instant gratification. Explain everything. Resolve everything. Scream, clap, post, move on. Horror especially gets treated like a machine that is supposed to produce a scare every few minutes or else it has failed. And honestly, in general, people don’t really understand horror. I’ve seen some amazing films in horror get a 40% – 50% positive ratings! People don’t like sad or scary unless it’s jump scares.
If The Shining came out today, I honestly think a lot of people would call it boring. They would say nothing happens, as if the hotel taking its time is not the point. As if the horror is not in the slow change. The repetition. The madness creeping in on Jack, turning him against the family.
You have to be willing to sit with slow burn horror.
Kane Parsons understood that as he directed the film from the viewpoint of each character. We saw what they saw, not was about to happen. I find that refreshing with other YouTube directors as well. I loved Markiplier’s interpretation of Iron Lung in his movie earlier in the year for that very reason. Slow, deliberate, psychological.
Parsons wanted to show the uneasiness and yet wonder of what the maze was. What all these rooms were. The characters saw cameras, hinting at an organization that may be studying the space. Or maybe this incredible space was owned by them…Clark or Mary didn’t know.
I have been in this world for years, long before it became a theater experience. I followed Kane Parsons (Aka Kane Pixels) through the online series: the cryptic ASYNC footage, the impossible architecture, the sense that this place was both artificial and ancient. Or maybe it was created by a man named Ivan Beck. We can all speculate, and a few people may have figured it out. But viewers like myself will probably get more out of the film if they have watched the series. There are easter eggs, details, and layers that hit different when you already know the language of his world.
But I do think the movie stands on its own.
It does not overexplain, but it does guide the audience through that first encounter. Kane and Will Soodik seemed to understand that entering the Backrooms should feel like trespassing into a place where the rules have not agreed to introduce themselves yet.
Clark
Clark feels defeated before he ever steps into the Backrooms. Chiwetel Ejiofor is extraordinary here. There is a heaviness to him from the start, but it never feels like a performance begging for pity. Clark is not simply a broken man. He is a man who has carried his own wreckage for so long that he has mistaken the weight for identity. A failed marriage. A failing business. A life that did not become what he thought he was owed. Beneath all of his bitterness, addiction, shame, and the terrible comfort of blaming everything outside himself.
Until he finds the null zone. (For those not familiar, this is an area that the Backrooms and our reality join together, allowing us to pass through.) That is what makes his story so painful. When Clark enters the Backrooms, he does not just find a nightmare. He finds purpose.
For the first time in years, he has something that belongs to him. A mystery. A discovery and a place no one else understands. A world peeking from a sliver in his furniture store’s basement. Waiting to be found. To someone like Clark, that is intoxicating.
One of the things I wanted more from the movie was Clark’s descent. I loved his performance, and I loved where his story went, but I wanted to feel more of the psychological erosion. I wanted fewer stretches of him simply walking and more time watching the Backrooms work on him. What did he see when he was alone? What did he hear? How did he learn about the Still Lifeforms?
By the time he calls Mary and tells her he is staying, something in him has already crossed over. I just wanted to see more of that crossing. Not because the movie failed, but because it was so good I wanted more. Clark’s not lost, he’s right where he wants to be.
And to me, that is one of the most disturbing parts. Clark’s obsession is disguised as discovery. Going deeper means he has purpose, that he’s been chosen. Isn’t that how we all get hooked on one thing or another? Our phones, social media, doom scrolling. It all takes us away from the reality of our lives, and yet for many can be so self destructive.
Cap’n Clark
The Captain Clark figure is one of the more interesting ‘boogie man’ I’ve ever seen. Yet, he’s so much more. Not just because it is grotesque and frightening. But because it feels personal in a way most monsters do not. He is Clark’s strong emotions manifested into everything he hates about himself and his life.
Clark spent years wearing that pirate persona, selling furniture through gritted teeth, turning himself into a mascot for the life he hated. It was the costume of humiliation. I think it is the strongest emotional memories that are at the forefront of our mind. Much like a parasite (or a new entity born) the Backrooms are leeching from his memories.
And since Clark has held so much resentment, blame, and anger; that is what the Backrooms has for it’s framework. The man he was ashamed of being. That is what makes the Still Life entities so unsettling. They feel like failed attempts at understanding humanity. A room mixed with several people’s memories and experiences, but no idea how to put it together or understand it’s purpose.
Like Clark says:
“Imagine describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one before and then asking them to draw it. It will look similar, but the devil is in the details…”
Cap’n Clark is Clark’s darkest sense of self. When that thing finally destroys him, it feels like a man being consumed by the version of himself he fed for years.
Mary, Who Deserves Far More Praise
This needs to be said because it’s been driving me nuts in all the interviews I’ve watched. Renate Reinsve is incredible in this movie.
I have seen plenty of praise for Chiwetel Ejiofor, and believe me, he deserves it. But it has honestly irritated me how little I have seen people talk about Renate with the same fervor. YouTube comments, interviewers, reactions — and I keep thinking, hello? Did we watch the same film? She did a great job.
If no one else is going to mention it, I sure as hell will.
Mary could have easily become a flat character: the quiet therapist, the professional woman with a traumatic past, the calm observer pulled into someone else’s madness. But Renate gives her something much more complicated. Her face carries entire scenes before she says a word.
Mary is watchful. Clever. Wary. She has the demeanor of someone who learned very young that stillness is survival. Take it from someone who knew exactly when to stay still and silent.
We first see Mary watching as her childhood home is being torn down. It’s a look of aprehension, yet sadness and longing all at once. Her house is being demolished to make room for something new, which is a very common theme among Kane’s work. How must that have felt to her? The old replaced with the new, the memories slowly fading of a place that held history, laughter, tears. And now simply forgotten.
In the movie, Mary’s mother showed symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis, and Mary’s childhood was shaped by that instability. A home should be a safe place, but for Mary, home was a prison with nothing but the paper covered windows holding her back. That is why her language about loops and self-made prisons matters. She tells Clark that people stay trapped. They do not climb out. They do not open the window.
She recognizes Clark’s loneliness because she knows the shape of it. At the party, conversations happen around her, but she is not really in them. Then she sees a mother and daughter together, something ordinary and loving in a way her own childhood never was, and it breaks through her composure.
She has to excuse herself, goes into another room, and takes painkillers.
That moment says so much. Mary is calm because she has practiced being calm. She is collected because that means she has control. That control goes out the window (ha.) as soon as she crosses that fateful threshold.
And that journey makes the Backrooms feel even more haunting and surreal.
The Backrooms
The more I think about this film, the more convinced I am that the Backrooms is not just a place, like another dimension, it is alive.
Maybe not alive the way we are alive. But it responds, it absorbs. It takes the emotional residue of the people who enter it and builds from that material. Clark brings shame, rage, addiction, resentment, and the shell of a man he cannot forgive himself for becoming.
Mary brings childhood trauma, loneliness, restraint, and the memory of a house that taught her fear before it taught her safety.
The Backrooms takes these things and renders them.
Not accurately, but built from emotions.
That is why the horror works. The rooms are not random. Familiar, but rotting. Personal, but distorted. The Complex gives them something that creeps toward them, masquerading as the life they brought inside.
That, to me, is where Kane’s vision is fascinating. It becomes psychological horror in the truest sense. Not just “what is chasing me?” but “how does this place know what to build and why does it exist?”
The Ending
I understand why the ending is open.
The Backrooms has always lived in uncertainty. It would feel wrong for a movie like this to close every door and explain every hallway. Some stories need to leave you at the threshold.
But I did leave feeling slightly dissatisfied. The ending feels almost like a pilot episode for a series, or the doorway into a second movie. And yes, with another movie greenlit, that makes sense. Still, I wanted just a little more about what may happen to Mary.
Does ASYNC give her an ultimatum? Does she have to work with them now? Do they threaten her into silence and monitor her for the rest of her life? Are they going to kill her?
If the implication is that they are going to kill her, then the abruptness makes more sense. But if there are other possibilities, I wanted the film to let us see just a little more. I was vested in Mary and her character, it reminded me of ‘The Final Girl,’ like many horror films have. Is she actually going to survive it all and work for them?
At the end we see that the Backrooms already has some version of her. I’m thinking it is because she was directly exposed to the complex and it can sense more of her, or alternatively it is evolving and becoming faster at creating. Whether the real Mary walks out of that room or not, an echo has been made. A Still Life wearing her outline.
It left me hungry. I wanted more of the world. More of Clark’s experience. More of the psychological effect this place has on the people inside it. Less walking simulator, maybe, and more unraveling. I wanted the movie to linger longer in the parts where the Backrooms was not just a weird place.
And maybe that is the compliment inside my criticism. I wanted more because the movie pulled me in.
The Thing That Followed Me Home
What stays with me is not just the monster. It is not just the lore, the easter eggs, ASYNC, or what this may mean for Ivan Beck and the future of the story. What stays with me is the feeling that the Backrooms does not chase people. It waits for them to bring themselves inside. Or more disturbing, it is bleeding into our world. How long until it consumes us all?
Clark brings his demons and mistakes the doorway for salvation. Mary brings her childhood. Both enter a world that seems empty at first, but the walls are remembering. The hum is not background noise.
It is a magnetic pulse, drawing us deeper into the waters
That is why I was quiet when I left the theater. It shifted something in my brain that I could not immediately name.
It made me think about the loops we all live in. The windows we refuse to open and just accept that we are ‘wired that way.’ It made me think about loneliness and longing. After all, it’s uneasiness that keeps us all awake at night. Isn’t that somehow worse than imaginary monsters?
The Backrooms is as thought provoking as it is strange. It asks something of its audience. It asks you to accept that the answer may not just be shoved in your face. I know some people will not have patience for that.
I did.
And even with the things I wanted more of, I kept thinking about it.
The theater doors opening. The ordinary world waiting outside. And me, quiet, because some part of me was still wandering down those halls.
I think that is what good horror does. It does not simply scare you. It leaves a door open somewhere in your mind and lets the light flicker behind it.
So now I want to know what you thought.
Did The Backrooms work for you as a slow burn, or did you want more answers? Were you satisfied with Mary’s ending, or did it leave you wanting something more concrete? What do you think the Backrooms actually is — a place, an entity, a memory machine, or something worse?
And most importantly:
What do you think it would build from you?
Drop your theories in the comments. I want to hear every strange, unsettling thought this movie left behind.
