Backrooms

Entering a liminal space has been a recurring nightmare of mine for years, and this movie is the embodiment of that dread and infinite strangeness. I went in with zero knowledge of director Kane Parsons, his YouTube fame, or the Backrooms phenomenon itself, which made for a genuinely eerie watch. I immediately did the deep dive to fully understand what I had seen. I still can't believe a 20-year-old first-time feature director convinced A24 to back something this obtuse and methodical for a mainstream release.

It could be described as a slow burn, but the dread starts from the first scene and never lets up. It escalates in the background, quietly and relentlessly. None of these characters are trustworthy. You can't root for any of them. And so we are stuck experiencing the madness alongside these ultimately unhinged individuals, brought to unsettling life by a superb cast. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve lead the way, and they are precisely as unnerving as this world demands.

The structure is particularly suspect as well. Much like the Backrooms itself, it is chaotic, absorbing and creates an unsettling anti-rhythm. Your footing is never assured, like walking on a frozen lake at the cusp of spring. That prolonged state of being is agonizing. That is where the terror lives. In that slow, suffocating state of waiting for something around every corner.

Backrooms also cleverly avoids all jump scares and has no interest in conventional horror tropes. People die unexpectedly. It's shocking. As an experience, the film begs for wonder and exploration, fully aware of how dangerous this world is. We do get some answers as to what is happening. This phenomenon is being studied, and while no one knows what the entity is, there is one chilling fact. It's spreading.

I need Part 2 right now.