🧂 The Backrooms (2026)

Two thirds of a great horror movie. Then it finds the exit and trips over it.

Directed by Kane Parsons. Distributed by A24. 2026.

A masterclass in dread, right up until it stops to explain itself.

Give The Backrooms this much: it drags one of the internet's best creepypastas onto the big screen and, for a while, absolutely nails it. This is a liminal nightmare that defies logic, endless yellow rooms and hum and wrongness, and for its first two thirds it is a genuinely great horror movie. The buildup is patient. The camera work is confident. The setting is eerie, compelling, and far more impressive than the budget has any right to be. Then the film reaches the ending, and the ending reaches back and quietly undoes almost everything good that came before.

For most of its runtime the story belongs to Clark, a failing furniture store owner running on rage and a slow slide into the bottle, and to the therapist trying to help him actually work through it. She is a woman doing a hard job with a difficult man, and that relationship is the spine of the film. It mostly works, which is exactly what makes the back half so frustrating.

The protagonist handoff. Somewhere in the final stretch, The Backrooms stops being his story and quietly becomes hers. The movie pulls the protagonist role away from the man we have followed the whole time and hands it to his therapist, and it does it on the back of a rushed backstory dump that lands too late and explains too little. There is no time to settle into her as a lead. By the point she is meant to be our anchor, the audience has already gone cold on both of them, watching two strangers instead of the people we thought we knew.

Clark loses the plot. It does not help that, before he is shoved aside, the business owner stops making any sense. With no explanation the movie bothers to earn, he curdles into a chaotic neutral stranger who has simply lost his mind, blank and unhinged because the script needed him that way, not because the place did it to him.

The botched ending. This is the modern horror curse, and The Backrooms catches it bad. The final act mistakes "more" for "scarier" and overdoes every last beat. The low point is a scene between the two leads where the former main character starts carving up the backroom creatures and offering the pieces around as food. The whole sequence is cringe from start to finish, and honestly it should have been cut on the editing room floor. It doesn't unsettle you. It just makes you wince.

The goofy reveal. After all that patient dread, the monster finally shows itself, and it is a letdown: kind of silly, kind of goofy, nowhere near worth the wait.

The explanation that explains nothing. The film also tries to tell you what the backrooms actually are, and the big swing, that it's like someone drew a dog that has never seen a dog, is half brilliant and half nonsense. It's a striking image that doesn't fit the story around it and gives the viewer no relief. And that's the real miss, because the backrooms works best as exactly the thing you cannot understand or control, no matter how hard humanity tries to map it, tame it, and move into it as living space. The moment the movie hands you an answer, it trades away the one thing that made the place frightening.

So why only three shakers? Because for all of that, the movie earns real goodwill back. The first two thirds are legitimately great, and the whole production is a quiet flex. It is innovative in specific, clever ways, and it proves you do not need a twenty million dollar budget to make something competitive. Kane Parsons built it for under ten million and it has already cleared well over three hundred million worldwide, the kind of number that makes the whole industry sit up. It got the backrooms onto the big screen and made it work, and that alone is worth the ticket.

The verdict: A great horror film hiding inside a botched one. Watch it for the first two thirds, for the craft, and for the simple fact that someone finally put the backrooms in a cinema and pulled it off. Just brace yourself for an ending that throws most of it away.

So, is it worth getting lost for? For two thirds of the runtime, absolutely. After that, mind the exit.

Pass the salt. 🧂