Backrooms
★★Skip itIs Backrooms worth watching? (No spoilers)
Starts really strong: the opening found footage is a great intro, the characters are intriguing, with the Backrooms being genuinely scary at first. Then the third act gets messy, keeps switching genres, and the answers are a letdown. Pirate Clark is terrifying and amazing, but overall it's just not worth the watch, so close!
⚠️ Spoiler warning: everything below the quick take, including the full review and ending explained, contains spoilers.
Backrooms review
"And the best part... you can eat them!"
The Backrooms, while initially engrossing and terrifying, fails to deliver a satisfying watch. Neither its narrative nor horror aspects truly feel satisfying, mostly due to the messy third act.
It starts so strong. The found footage at the beginning is an amazing intro to the world. Both Clark and his therapist's stories and backgrounds are intriguing, and at first the backrooms are quite scary.
However then the kids die, and we jump some amount of time into the future.
This is where the narrative should have gave us more answers, and possibly questions, while the horror themes would hopefully ramp up to a thrilling end.
Unfortunately neither of these were delivered. It felt as if the genres were constantly changing at the end. Clark seemingly became a new person, both characters backstories were quite pointless, and the company behind everything ended up being a nothing burger explanation.
That being said, the pirate Clark was both terrifying and amazing to watch, loved the dinner scene.
Overall, while Backrooms starts off with a bang, and a promising first hour, it's failure to fulfill what it promises makes it almost worth the watch, but not quite.
Is Backrooms scary?
Scare level: 3/5
At first, yes. The early found-footage scenes and endless empty hallways are creepy, and Pirate Clark is genuinely terrifying. It's mostly slow, liminal-space dread with an unseen creature, not gore or constant jump scares, and the scares fade in the last act.
Backrooms ending explained
Scientists from a company called Async, led by Phil, rescue Mary from Captain Clark. Phil wants to know what she's learned, and hints she may never be allowed to leave. In the final shot, a deformed copy of Mary sits silently in a recreated room inside the Backrooms.
The ending suggests the Backrooms absorb people and their memories and rebuild them as strange copies. That ties back to the film's themes of memory and trauma, including Mary's backstory with her agoraphobic mother.
My take: the company behind everything ends up being a nothing-burger explanation, and the backstories don't really pay off.
Does Backrooms have a post-credits scene?
No. Backrooms has no mid-credits or post-credits scene.
Movies like Backrooms
- Annihilation (2018) ★ – explorers in a strange zone that copies what's inside it
- Skinamarink (2022) – minimalist, liminal-space horror
- Vivarium (2019) – a couple trapped in an endless, identical world
- Cube (1997) – people trapped in a maze of identical rooms