I Watched The Backrooms Movie and This Is My Opinion

Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers about The Backrooms.

I recently had the chance to go to the cinema to watch The Backrooms, so if you’ve also seen it, you’ll probably be interested in what other people think about it. That’s exactly what I’ll talk about in this article.

I decided to go alone because I don’t know many people who are very familiar with this topic, but at least in my case I had already seen enough content about the Backrooms and similar themes, like Dreamscape, to have high expectations for this movie.

I was curious to see how they would manage to turn an entire film into something based on an image that became popular in 2019, even though it was actually taken on June 12, 2002, during the renovation of an old retail store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, United States.

If you were wondering, this is the original image that made the Backrooms popular.

A brief summary of the Backrooms movie

Now, going back to the movie, the story mainly focuses on Clark, a furniture store owner who is dealing with multiple problems, both financial and mental. It seems that, although he doesn’t admit it, he feels lonely and struggles to accept real-life problems, such as the fact that he caused his relationship to end.

Clark doesn’t accept his mistakes and constantly blames other people and the world for what happens to him. This is exactly what Dr. Mary Kline tries to make him understand throughout most of the movie.

Clark sleeps at his own workplace, on a bed from his furniture store, so while he is watching TV, strange things start happening. For example, the store lights begin to flicker and, even stranger, for a brief moment the TV image switches to a recording showing yellow hallways. Then the TV suddenly turns off.

After several days, he decides to go down to the basement, where he accidentally discovers that when he flips a switch, something lights up on the wall. Just when he touches the wall, he realizes his hand can pass through it, and after doing so, he enters the Backrooms, a completely strange world for him.

And this is where the story begins. At first, nobody believes him. Although there are not many characters, the most relevant ones are Dr. Mary Kline, as well as Bobby and Kat, both employees of the store.

Clark manages to convince Bobby and Kat to go and see what he has discovered, so they enter the Backrooms with a camera to document everything. This turns out to be one of their biggest mistakes, because when they try to go deeper into the Backrooms, they end up being drawn in by an unknown presence.

Spoiler: none of the three of them make it out alive, except for Dr. Mary Kline, who, while trying to help Clark, visits his store and discovers that everything was real, and that the strange world behind the basement wall truly exists. Dr. Mary Kline survives, but eventually ends up in an unknown place where people are already investigating what happens in the Backrooms.

What I liked

The essence of the Backrooms feels quite authentic. Even though there are no levels, most of the time the movie focuses on yellow office hallways with fluorescent lights that feel like endless mazes where it’s easy to get lost.

I liked that the theme was respected. It doesn’t try to explain exactly why this happens, and that’s actually a good thing, because the Backrooms don’t really have a logical explanation, it just happens. They are random connections that appear and allow reality to connect with a completely unknown world.

Also, what happens in the Backrooms is, in a way, an imperfect memory of reality. It’s as if memories try to recreate reality but fail, ending up distorting it into something endless and, at the same time, unsettling.

What I didn’t like

I feel like the characters’ story gets a bit overshadowed. It doesn’t seem to make much sense in how the story progresses, especially regarding the characters. They all seem to simply die because of one of the entities, which is actually similar to Clark, but taller and more like a pirate (which is one of the versions he imitates during a furniture store commercial).

So my main criticism is the weak logic in the story. I feel Bobby and Kat could have been used much better, especially Bobby, who for me had a lot of charisma and a good sense of humor, but he’s the first one to die, which I found a bit disappointing.

The ending is a bit strange, because there are many people monitoring large parts of the Backrooms. It seems like they have been there for a long time, but it’s not really explained how they got there or how they built such a solid research operation.

At first, I thought it was an experiment, but the ending seems to suggest that everyone there arrived for the same reason and then simply got lost and couldn’t return. Once again, the ending feels a bit strange and, in my opinion, somewhat unnecessary.

They could have explored the idea of having more levels. There is almost nothing besides offices, clothes, and furniture, except for a scene with something similar to a pool and another that looks like a small neighborhood with houses. I would have liked to see more different levels, like the ones usually associated with dreamscape.

Even with these criticisms, it was a good movie, but not one I would recommend to everyone, only to those who at least have some idea of what the Backrooms are, because otherwise it might feel like a strange movie or even one that doesn’t make sense.

If you ask me, I’d give it an 8/10, so it was a good movie with some points that could have been better, not only from my perspective but also according to many online reviews.

The good thing is that the story doesn’t seem to end here. Everything suggests that Kane Parsons and A24 will release a sequel due to the movie’s success. We don’t know if, if it happens, it will follow the same timeline or focus on something new, but it’s definitely very likely that the second one will be better than the first if they take people’s criticism into account.