Backrooms (2026) 🟨
“Reality Drew A Dog Wrong And Then It Ate A Furniture Store Owner” 🟨💀
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🎬 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?
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⚠️ Content Warning ⚠️
This movie is generally horrifying.
There are distorted versions of people, body horror, blood, people getting dragged away, decapitated heads, psychological horror, scalping, some graphic imagery, violence, nightmare rooms, dark rooms, loud scares, and a whole lot of imagery that is just wrong.
Not haunted.
Wrong.
Also, I have to say this right now. Some entitled grandmother brought an eleven-year-old boy and a younger little sister to see this movie. The little sister clearly did not want to be there. She was horrified when the first trailer came up for Insidious. Like, the little sister broke out into tears, and me and my sister were like, what the f*** did this woman bring small kids to an R-rated horror movie?
If the little girl couldn’t make it past the Insidious trailer, then this movie would have mortified her.
So my sister actually got up and went and reported them to the front desk, and they got kicked out.
Good.
Because oh my God, this movie would have traumatized that small girl.
🟨 Backrooms For Dummies 🟨
Before we go any further, let’s explain what the Backrooms even are for anyone who has never heard of them.
The Backrooms started as an internet horror idea from around 2019. The basic idea is that reality can glitch, and if you “noclip” out of the real world like a broken video game, you fall into this endless maze of empty yellow rooms, ugly carpet, buzzing fluorescent lights, and hallways that just keep going.
It is not scary because it is full of ghosts.
It is scary because it feels wrong.
It looks like an office building, a hotel hallway, a dead mall, a furniture store, or some weird room you swear you have seen before, but everything is slightly off. No people. No clear exit. No logic. Just room after room after room.
Over time, the internet expanded the lore with different levels, strange entities, distorted rooms, pool areas, dark hallways, and creatures hiding inside the endless maze.
So basically:
The Backrooms are what happens when reality tries to make a normal building, but fails.
And this movie runs with that idea hard.
If anyone wants more information, heres a full video explaining the full lore of the Backrooms.
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🧭 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview
Before I even get into the actual plot, I think this review needs a “Backrooms For Dummies” section.
Because the Backrooms are one of those things where people who know internet horror immediately understand what they are looking at, but people who have never heard of it are probably going to look at a blank yellow wall and go, “Why is everyone scared of carpet?”
So what even are the Backrooms?
The Backrooms are basically an internet horror idea where reality can glitch, and if you “noclip” out of reality, you fall into this endless maze of weird empty rooms. Yellow wallpaper, ugly carpet, buzzing fluorescent lights, no windows, no clear exit, and everything looks familiar but also completely wrong.
It is like retail hell that goes on forever. And for those of us who worked in retail, we call that the holiday season.
What I really loved about this movie is how it explains the Backrooms. The whole thing about the Backrooms is that it basically tries to mirror reality, but it mirrors it wrong. The description our two main characters give in the movie is that it is like asking someone who has never seen a dog before to draw a picture of a dog. They can draw it, but it does not look right.
That is the Backrooms.
It knows rooms exist, but not how rooms work.
It knows furniture exists, but not where furniture goes.
It knows people exist, but it does not understand how people are shaped.
That is why there are chairs clipping through the floor, furniture stuck together, signs written backwards, rooms that go nowhere, and distorted versions of humans walking around with six eyes, two faces, or faces shoved upwards in ways faces should not go.
Everything is all wrong.
The movie follows Clark, a furniture store owner whose life is anything but normal. He got kicked out of his house by his wife, he is living inside his own store, he sleeps on one of the display beds, watches TV using one of the display TVs, and is trying to keep his job and his store together even though you can tell this guy does not have his life held together at all.
He goes to therapy with Mary, and at first the movie feels like it is Clark’s story. But as the movie goes on, Mary basically becomes more of the main character in the second half, which I was not expecting, and honestly I really liked that.
Clark discovers a strange entrance into the Backrooms in the basement of his furniture store, and from there, the movie becomes this mix of nightmare horror, therapy, remembering, and people being unable to change.
And yes.
There are monsters in this movie.
It is not just empty Backrooms.
The monsters in this movie are distorted versions of people.
And oh boy, are they creepy.
🎥 Quick Director / YouTuber Movie Segment 🎥
One thing I do want to give this movie credit for is Kane Parsons.
Now, to be clear, he did not create the original Backrooms concept itself. The Backrooms started as an internet horror image/lore thing before him.
But Kane Parsons, also known as Kane Pixels, is the guy who took the Backrooms and turned it into that really popular YouTube analog horror series. He basically helped define what a lot of people now picture when they think of the Backrooms.
And the fact that he got to direct the actual movie version is awesome.
Because usually Hollywood takes an internet idea and gives it to someone who clearly does not understand it. But here, the guy who helped make this version of the Backrooms famous actually got to make the movie.
I’m also in full support of YouTubers making movies.
This is the second movie this year where a YouTuber made a movie, with the first being Markiplier’s Iron Lung. And honestly? Good. Let YouTubers cook.
Because if they have the vision, the style, and the actual passion for what they are making, I would rather see that than another lifeless studio horror movie made by people who barely understand why the original thing was creepy.
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🎭 Character Rundown
Mary was an interesting character. I really liked her.
I also liked how the movie basically makes her more of the main character by the second half of the movie. I wasn’t expecting that. At first, it feels like Clark is going to be the one we follow the entire way through, but by the second half, Mary is the one I cared about more.
I don’t think I have seen the actress who played Mary before, but I really liked her. She did a great job, especially in the second half when the movie becomes more about her trying to survive the Backrooms and understand what the hell happened to Clark.
Clark is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and yes, I have definitely seen that actor before. He was in Doctor Strange. That’s where I knew him from.
Clark is a good character, but I cared more about Mary than I cared about Clark. Clark was just too nutty. He lost it. If he ever had it. Even before the Backrooms, this guy was already not okay. He gets kicked out of his house, drinks too much, lives in his own furniture store, screams during therapy, and is clearly carrying around a lot of anger.
Then the Backrooms get involved and he just gets worse.
Bobby and Kat were the two side characters, and they were somewhat important. The actors who played Bobby and Kat were fine. I don’t think I have seen those actors before, but they did a great job at portraying normal people. Like, I really thought they were just normal people.
They are not these overly written horror movie characters. They feel like two regular people who get dragged into something insane because Clark needs proof.
And Kat honestly had some of the funniest lines in the movie.
When Clark brings them into the Backrooms, Kat says, “Bobby, are you sure he didn’t drug us?”
Bobby says, “Nah, I’d know if I were drugged or not.”
And Kat says, “You’re always on drugs!”
That got me.
Then later when Clark is tying a rope around Bobby and Kat asks why Bobby, Clark says it is because Bobby has the camera.
And Kat says, “It’s not like the camera is attached to him!”
Exactly.
The camera is not attached to Bobby.
Just give someone else the camera.
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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow
I think the pacing mostly worked, but I do have one big complaint.
I wish we had more time in the Backrooms.
I feel like we spent way too much time in the overworld.
Man, I sound like I play Minecraft too much.
I just said overworld.
I do play Minecraft way too much.
But yeah, that is about my only real complaint. I wish we had more time in the Backrooms. I almost said the Upside Down like this is Stranger Things. No, I mean the Backrooms.
The stuff outside the Backrooms does matter. It sets up Clark, Mary, Bobby, Kat, the therapy theme, Clark’s marriage issues, Mary’s childhood, and the whole idea of remembering. But every time the movie actually goes into the Backrooms, that is when it becomes amazing.
The rooms are creepy. The props look impressive. The furniture clipping through floors is creepy. The distorted humans are horrifying. The whole place feels like reality tried to make a building and did not understand what a building is supposed to be.
So yeah, I liked the pacing overall, but I still wish the movie gave us more Backrooms.
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✅ Pros
The creatures worked for me.
They creeped me the f*** out.
Slight spoilers ⚠️:
There are monsters in this film, yeah thought should tell y’all that.
The monsters are not just random monsters. They are distorted versions of humans. That is what makes them horrifying. There is a guy with six eyes. There is a girl with two faces clipping into each other like a mirror. There is a small guy with one side of the face lopsided upwards, like the eyeball is shoved up there.
It is nightmare fuel.
And the reason it works is because it fits the Backrooms. The Backrooms tries to mirror reality, but it mirrors it wrong. So of course the humans it creates are wrong too.
The rooms are wrong.
The furniture is wrong.
The people are wrong.
Everything is wrong.
I also loved the props and the set design. The props look impressive. I had to think, wait, did they actually build these rooms themselves? Like the people behind the scenes? How many of these rooms did they have to build? That must have taken a lot of work.
The Backrooms do not feel like some cheap CGI place. They feel physical. Like the actors are actually walking through these horrible rooms where chairs are clipping through floors and mannequins are half stuck in the ground.
The movie also had scares that actually got me.
The Christmas tree scene made me scream. The distorted Clark figure hovering over Mary’s face made me and my sister scream. And I am not talking about a little “oh that startled me.” I mean we actually yelled.
That is when you know a horror movie worked.
I also really like that this is a YouTuber movie. Kane Parsons directed this movie, and I am honestly happy to support YouTuber movies. I still can’t believe that guy was able to direct his own Backrooms movie.
That is insane.
But also good for him.
Because this movie does not feel like some random studio looked at an internet thing and said, “Okay, we will turn this into a generic monster movie.”
It feels like the person who understands the Backrooms actually got to make the Backrooms movie.
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❌ Cons
My biggest complaint is that I wish we had more time in the Backrooms.
For a movie called Backrooms, I wanted more Backrooms.
That is not me saying the outside stuff is bad. The outside stuff matters. Clark’s life matters. Mary’s backstory matters. The therapy stuff matters. But still, the Backrooms are the most interesting part of the movie, and I wanted more of that.
My other issue is the ending.
I do not mind vagueness. I like the lack of answers sometimes. I am fine with the movie not explaining everything. I do not need the movie to sit me down and explain the full lore like a school lesson.
But please do not make it so vague where I can’t even interpret what the hell that ending was.
The movie starts to give us some explanation with the scientists, and then the movie is like, no f*** that, we are going to end with the most bizarre ending ever, which ill get to in the spoilers.
And that left me befuddled.
Did Mary escape?
Was the scientist room real?
Was she still in the Backrooms?
Did the Backrooms copy her?
Was this all in her mind?
I do not know.
And again, I don’t mind vague.
But this was very, very vague.
I’ll also say the movie is not at all subtle with its messaging, the whole movie is about trauma. And by the third actor movie, our main character is hitting the monster on the side of his head with a piece of her trauma. I will not get into details. That’s for the spoilers, but it is so over the head. You may as well throw a brick at the window.
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🧠 Final Thoughts
This movie is amazing.
In my opinion, recently crazy.
I genuinely thought this was a 10 out of 10 horror movie because it actually creeped me the f*** out.
The monsters worked. The Backrooms worked. Mary worked. Clark losing his mind worked. The theme of therapy and remembering worked. The way the Backrooms tries to recreate reality but gets everything wrong worked.
This movie is not just about yellow rooms. It is about therapy, memory, and someone refusing to change.
The Backrooms itself feels like a broken memory machine.
It remembers things, wrong.
But it remembers them wrong.
And that is what makes it scary.
Please go out and say this movie and support the director.
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⭐ Rating
10/10
This movie creeped me the f*** out.
And for a horror movie, that is the whole job.
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🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨
From this point forward, I am going into full spoilers.
And I mean full spoilers.
Because this movie goes completely unhinged by the end.
If you have not seen Backrooms, stop reading here.
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🟨 Spoilers
Anyways, we actually start at the beginning with a hazmat suit guy in the Backrooms. It is the recording at the beginning, and it is found footage from first person view. He is panicking. He is alone. He enters a room with electronics that apparently him and his crew set up, and he starts hearing noises.
He barricades himself inside this tech room, then he goes into another hallway and finds another room that has detailed cloud paintings. He hears a creature coming. We do not really see the creature, but it looks elongated and distorted, like a stick man kind of figure. It lunges at him, the camera drops, and then we open with the Backrooms title.
Then we open with Clark going to his job. He runs a furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and yes, the irony of him running a furniture store while the Backrooms entrance is in the basement is kind of clever. I know it is not really irony, but it is kind of clever, because the Backrooms already look like some endless broken furniture store nightmare.
Clark’s life is anything but normal. He got kicked out of his house by his wife, and he tells his therapist Mary about it during their session. She has him do a focus study where they get into character. She plays his wife and he plays himself.
And oh boy is he broken.
He says something along the lines of his wife was asleep, he was working late doing inventory, he came home late, and what matters is he came home drunk. He drank a few beers, bumped into a glass bottle, and it broke. She woke up, they got into an argument, and she kicked him out.
Then he starts yelling about how dare she kick him out of his house that he pays for while she goes to college that he also pays for so she can become a doctor. Then he goes off about how he needs the job while she is sitting around on her fat ass doing nothing.
Then Mary, playing his wife, says something like, “Can I say something? What is it like to be a failed architect?”
And Clark screams, “I’m not a f****** failure at architect!”
Then he calms down and says, “I… I… I am sorry. I snapped.”
Yeah.
Clearly this guy ain’t normal.
After that, Clark leaves because the session is over, and he goes back to his job where he is filming an ad with his two assistants, Bobby and Kat. Bobby is filming Clark dressed as a pirate with a fake peg leg. Actually, they only have the money for a peg leg, so he uses the leg of a furniture chair as a peg leg.
That was both kind of funny and sad at the same time.
It was actually funny seeing him walking around like a pirate and being all like, “Arrr matey, come on down to our store. Everything is on sale. You don’t have to worry about credit.”
He tries to sit in a chair to end the ad, but the chair breaks and he falls on his butt. Bobby keeps recording and says it is extra footage, and Clark tells him to shut the camera off now.
Again, it is funny, but also sad, because this guy wanted to be an architect and now he is living in his furniture store dressed as a pirate selling chairs that break under him.
And yeah, he is living in his store.
That is how not held together his life is.
He sleeps on the bed that is on display and watches TV using one of the TVs that is on display. It is like, okay, yeah, your life is kind of messed up. I am even surprised this guy is holding the job up. How is he even paying Bobby and Kat? How is he even keeping this place open?
Same day, he has a technician guy come check out the power because he tells him the lights keep flickering downstairs and upstairs with no coherent order or rhyme or reason. The guy asks where the power box is, and Clark takes him downstairs into this cozy carpet basement room with chairs, a table, and the power circuit.
And there is already something weird there.
There are two red light switches randomly placed sideways on the bottom of the circuit board when he flips the lid open.
Uhhhh.
Oh, the Backrooms are clearly breaking through.
I mean, two light switches flipped sideways in the circuit board?
That is not right.
Anyway, that night, Clark is in his bed watching TV, and the TV goes off. The lights all turn on and off, and he sees the lights flickering in the basement. He goes to the basement and tries the circuits. The lights do not turn off. Then he decides to flip the two red switches, and then all the lights turn off, even though the red switches did nothing earlier when the circuit guy tested them.
Now Clark cannot even turn the light back on.
Then he is about to go back upstairs, and he sees this glimpse of very thin light in the wall. He looks left and right from different angles, and it disappears and reappears. He goes up to it, puts his hand up to it, and his hand clips through the wall.
He breathes heavily.
He pulls his hand out.
Then he goes through the wall and enters the Backrooms.
He enters this fluorescent yellow carpet room, and there is a pile of furniture right in front of him. Two chairs are stuck together like Jenga glue. Then he sees a backward stop sign that spells POTS instead of STOP.
So I gather everything is backwards and off.
He explores a bit and finds a hallway. He finds a cardboard cutout of a caveman with a recorder on its back speaking different languages, and Clark’s reaction is, “What the f***?”
Really Clark?
That is the odd part to you?
Not the fact that you just clipped through reality and there is this endless fluorescent room?
Anyway, he finds this thing stuck under something in the wall, and he sees a square cutout. It is kind of like if you cut it open and put the lid back on. He takes the lid off, and it is this square hole in the wall. There is a bag with IDs and tape recorders in it.
He goes through the square hole, and it leads him into another room where there is a chair clipping through the floor, shoes clipping through the floor, and a slanted staircase going upwards to a small door all the way in the corner.
As he enters the room, he hears a noise in the background and says, “Who’s there?” Then he sees the caveman cutout making noises. Then we hear something, and we see the caveman cutout fall on the floor.
So Clark runs.
He goes to the corner of the room, climbs up the stairs, and tries to open the small door. The door has three doorknobs. He opens the right doorknob after the third attempt and exits back out. Luckily, he went in a circle. He went back around, finds the room he came in through, and leaves through the wall.
Then Clark goes to his next session with Mary. He is late to it. He shows up late and tries to tell her what he found. He looks clinically insane. He looks like he is high on drugs. She asks him if he drank, and he says, “I’m not intoxicated. Why would you ask that?”
Then he tries to tell her he saw a room and that it is this endless fluorescent room and that he clipped through reality.
Of course, she does not believe him.
She thinks he is nuts.
He tries drawing a picture, and she says she does not believe him. Then he takes the picture back and points his finger at her, saying something like, “You know what? I’ll be back tomorrow with physical proof, and you’re going to have to f****** apologize to me.”
Jesus Christ, Clark, calm down.
Mary also carries around this small cutout shape of cement with her handprint in it. She had a horrible upbringing where her mom may have been schizophrenic and shut her daughter inside the house, made sure she did not leave, covered up every wall with newspapers, and covered up the doors with furniture. Eventually her mom got taken to a psychiatric ward.
So no wonder why Mary ended up becoming a therapist.
And at the beginning of the movie, she goes and visits her old childhood home while it is being demolished, probably where she got the little cutout of the handprint in the cement outside.
Anyway, Clark goes and pays Bobby and Kat a visit at their house. They are dating, and he is like, “I’ll pay you overtime. I just need two hours of your time tomorrow. Bring your camera. We’re going to do research.”
Then Bobby brings the camera and turns it on and asks, okay, what are they researching? Clark is vague, and Bobby and Kat are like, no, we need more answers than that.
Then Clark says he is going to enter through the door.
They are like, what door?
Then he steps through the wall.
And they are like, what the f***?
He tells them they have to come through the wall to his side. Bobby goes through, while Kat is like, no, no, no, are you crazy? Then Kat comes through because Bobby tells her to, and she sees the place and is shocked, especially Kat. She is like, what the f*** is this?
Clark says that is what he is trying to figure out. He wants to research it.
Then Kat says, “Bobby, are you sure he didn’t drug us?”
Bobby says, “Nah, I’d know if I were drugged or not.”
And Kat says, “You’re always on drugs!”
That was hilarious.
Anyway, they go to a room with a square hole that goes down very steep. Clark wraps the rope around Bobby, and Kat says, “Why Bobby though?”
Clark says, “Because he has the camera.”
And Kat says, “It’s not like the camera is attached to him!”
Again.
That is a fair point.
Bobby gets lowered down and finds a room full of piles of clothing. He says it smells down here and that there is clothing. Then he sees a room around the corner that is pitch black with flickering lights. He is like, lower the rope more, and Clark says he can’t because that was all the rope.
Bobby tries to lean forward a bit, seeing the dark room with the flickering light, and then he sees this creature stand up and try coming out the door, stomping towards him.
Bobby runs back and says, “Pull me up! Pull me up!”
So they start pulling him up. They pull him out of the hole, and it all looks fine until the rope starts getting pulled and Bobby starts getting pulled back. Kat tries pulling Bobby while Clark has to untie the rope. He tries to untie it. It does not work. Bobby gets yanked down, and then the creature comes up behind them, somehow knocks both of them down, and knocks the camera into the hole.
When the camera falls in, we see Bobby’s blood trail on the floor, and we see Bobby get yanked into the wall through some upside-down door in the wall.
Kat tries to run up to the door, then runs into the dark room next to it. We hear screaming. Then Clark ends up with the camera and goes into the dark room trying to escape.
He finds his way into a dark room with a Christmas tree.
And this scene was nightmare fuel.
This whole time, he has the camera and is recording everything. He walks up to the tree, looks around, and there are mannequins clipping halfway through the floor. Then he walks around the tree, and there is this small little figure in a chair sitting next to the tree. There is a lamp, and the small figure pulls on the string to the lamp, turning on the lamp.
Then this disfigured woman with ginger hair and a long red dress comes running out of the dark, all crooked and distorted.
And I screamed:
“Ahhhhhh!”
Clark runs the opposite way, finds a door, opens it, closes the door, and finds himself in a bathroom where there is a sculpture of a face inside the wall. He goes through another door and finds another room.
Then he hears Kat’s voice on the other side of a blank wall. She is saying she can see the door and the glass window. He asks if there is any doorknob where she is, and she says no.
Then we see the camera behind Clark, that he put on a table, getting lifted up by somewhat of a tall figure. Because the camera levitates higher and higher than what normal Clark height would be.
So who the f*** is holding the camera?
Then Kat’s voice says, “Behind you.”
Clark looks behind him, and the camera shuts off.
After that, Mary gets a phone call from Clark saying he is sorry and that he won’t be making it back. So she goes to his store to see what is going on. There is mail jammed under the door and overdue bills. She opens the door, the door is unlocked, and she tries calling out for Clark.
No answer.
She sees the flickering lights downstairs. She goes downstairs and sees the door-shaped tape Clark put there. Then she sees a fly go through the wall, clipping through it.
She panics a bit.
Then she decides to take off her jacket and put down her hair for some reason. She puts her hand through the wall, it clips through, and then she decides to walk on through.
She is completely befuddled on what the hell she just entered.
It is the same room Clark entered, but there is no pile of furniture anymore. So something changed. She tries to find Clark. There is no Clark. She finds a room with a pile of furniture, but a different version this time. Then she goes around the corner from the room and finds this dead-end wall with a weird cult-like drawing of a dark shadow figure version of Clark holding this child in the air while he has this demonic smile and is sitting on this fire throne.
It is weird.
Then she hears a noise behind her and says, “Clark?”
He says, “Yes, it’s me.”
Jesus, why are you hiding?
He says she is being too loud and tells her to be quiet. Then he comes around the corner, grabs her, says he is sorry, and she falls unconscious.
Then we see a flashback of her childhood, of her mother being taken away to a psychiatric ward. When she wakes up, she is at a dinner table in a house.
And this is where things get so, so, so much worse.
She is tied to a chair across from Clark. Right next to her is a figure. In the distance, there is the ginger-haired woman figure standing in the corner wearing a red dress. There is also a small figure sitting in a chair behind her in the corner.
Clark basically explains this place. This place mimics reality. It mimics people, but mimics them wrong.
Then Mary takes a look at the figure right next to her, and it is this chubby guy with six eyeballs. Then she looks at the ginger-haired woman in the red dress just standing in the dark corner. This woman has two faces clipping into each other, like her neck is all wrong. One normal face, and then another face half sticking out on the other side of her face. She is just standing there docile.
Then there is the creepy small guy in the corner behind her on the chair with the lopsided face shoved upwards, with the eyeball shoved up there.
Clark is explaining that this place mimics reality but remembers things wrong. Somewhere out there, there is a guy with a striped shirt. Somewhere out there, there is someone with a red dress like this woman, but these versions are distorted versions.
Then he opens the fridge.
And there is the decapitated head of Kat.
This part confused me because the movie gives no explanation. Mary looks shocked, and the answer Clark gives is so vague. He says something like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s my manager. I tried to help her but…” and then sighs.
Dude, I’m going to need you to elaborate on that.
Why is your manager’s decapitated head in the fridge?
Also, you can tell Clark is starting to lose it.
If he ever had it, let’s be honest.
Oh, this is where the movie gets so much worse, and I am so glad that mother and her two kids got kicked out because this would have traumatized that small girl.
Clark takes a knife, and he says the best part about these distorted figures is they do not feel anything. Then he takes the knife and jabs it into the chubby guy’s neck.
The guy does not react.
Clark says, see, they do not feel pain. Think how amazing that is.
Then he takes the knife out of the neck, and I am not joking when I say this, he says, “Oh, but the better part is…”
Then he unbuttons the guy’s shirt and says, “You can eat them.”
Then he starts taking his hand and pulling chunks out of the guy’s stomach onto the table. The inside looks like it is made of foam.
Ummmmmmmm.
Yeah.
Clark’s lost it.
The house they are in is a recreation of his house. So he is happy. He wants to stay here forever. Yep, again, Clark is mentally gone.
He wants to play a roleplay game. He wants Mary to play the role of his wife so he can get his anger off his chest. He asks if this is all his fault. Mary is saying whatever he wants, she will give it to him. They can sit down and talk. They can discuss this.
He says he wants her to say this is not his fault.
She says, “This is not your fault.”
Then he wants her to say she was wrong.
She says, “I was wrong.”
But he says no, he does not want her to say it like that. They need to set the stage. They are going to roleplay. She is going to play his wife, and he is going to play himself.
Then he says something is not right. He asks the ginger-haired lady to turn off the lights. He says, “Turn off the lights,” and she just stands there, not reacting. Clark laughs and says he has been over this with her, and she does not respond well. So he gets up and turns off the light himself.
Then he says something is still not right.
This is where the movie completely goes unhinged.
He gets up, goes to the ginger-haired distorted lady, and scalps her head.
What the f***.
Then he puts the scalp hair on Mary’s head to resemble his wife because his wife was a ginger. Then he starts saying the exact same things he said during the roleplay in the beginning at the therapy session. The exact same things.
Only this time, Mary is wearing a scalped hair of a distorted human who is just standing in the corner with her head scalped.
Mary says she is not his f****** wife. Clark tells her to stay in character. She shakes her head, and the scalp hair falls off.
Then she finally says something normal.
She tells him this is all his fault. She tells him he is a narcissist who is beyond help. She says the problem is not that he broke a bottle and that ended his relationship. It is that he is whiny and complains and blames his problems on everything else and everybody else. It is never his fault. He just blames it on everyone else.
She says he is beyond help and she cannot help him.
Well, finally something normal is said.
Then Clark says, “I’m beyond help. I’m the cause of my problem.” He starts breaking down in tears and asks how he stops this.
Mary says she does not know.
Then he says, “You know what? I don’t want to change.”
Then footsteps come out from the hallway. Bigger footsteps. The ginger-haired lady awakens and jolts and runs over to the corner of the room and starts slamming against the wall in fear.
And what is the distorted ginger-haired lady fearing?
How do I describe this?
A giant, cartoonishly taller version of Clark dressed in his pirate attire with the fake peg leg and the pirate hat comes walking in. And he has a distorted cartoonish face.
Yeah, this part made me go:
“What the f*** is going on?”
Clark gets up and says, “No, no, no, don’t worry, she’s our friend. She’s a therapist.” He says they do not have to change.
Okay, again, Clark has mentally lost it.
If he ever had it.
Then giant distorted pirate Clark picks up Clark and starts biting his shoulder open, like eating him for a meal.
Lovely.
Guess that is the other Clark.
Also, the irony is that what killed him was himself. And his lust for not changing. So what he thought was the safe place is not really safe. So now he is the meal.
Luckily, Clark untied Mary, and Mary escapes past the creature while he is munching on Clark as a meal.
And yes, that is a sentence I just said.
Mary starts running outside the door and finds this suburban neighborhood. She runs toward a door in the distance at the end of the hall, and then the figure comes out the door dragging Clark’s lifeless body by him, blood coming out of him. He drops Clark and starts pursuing Mary.
She tries opening up the door, but it is locked. So she enters another house, runs through the house, goes through hallways, goes through a door, gets chased, enters the Backrooms again, falls, and breaks her foot. But she gets up and starts walking off.
Then she makes her way to a door which, I kid you not, leads to this giant open gaping hole in a room where the floor is missing through several layers. Like several floors have been ripped out. So she has a very thin row of room to walk on. There are stairs a couple feet over, so she is scooching herself across the wall as the creature tries to break through the door because he is too tall to make it through.
The figure has torn-up skin on his hand, and it is all wrong and distorted.
She makes it to the stairs and starts crawling her way up. The creature breaks through the door. She opens the small door, gets through the patch, and it leads her into another Backrooms area.
She makes it through, and it leads her to a recreation of the basement in Clark’s store. She thinks she has exited and made it back out of reality, but when she goes up the stairs, it is all a mimicked version of Clark’s store.
Things are clipped through the floor, and the door to the exit has walls in front of it.
So she is still in the Backrooms.
Then this dark pirate figure comes up the stairs and starts dragging his pirate leg toward her. She starts going around corners, takes a wooden leg of a chair, and uses it as a weapon to fend him off. As he is walking toward her, she uses the leg of the chair to break his wooden leg, knocking him to the floor.
Then he starts crawling.
She passes a section where these fire hydrants go off. She gets blinded by one of the fire hydrants and falls unconscious.
And this moment made me and my sister scream.
We see her just laying there. She wakes up slowly. She turns around, and there is the distorted Clark figure just laying over her, hovering over her face right in front of her.
That made me and my sister scream out loud.
He tries opening his mouth to eat her, and she pushes his face away. Then she grabs the rock with her handprint in it out of her pocket and starts smashing his head with it.
She gets up and enters a small crevice in the wall. The creature cannot follow her because he is too big. He starts moaning and trying to reach his hand toward her, but she crawls through the small crevice.
On the other side are two hazmat suit guys, and they fire-extinguisher her. She falls on the floor. They thought they were dealing with a monster, but no, it is a person, and they seem baffled.
So they bring Mary through a hallway, dragging her through. They take her outside into what I can only describe as a warehouse with scientists and hazmat suit guys. They just exited through a door into the entrance of the Backrooms.
So these people are studying the Backrooms.
Mary falls unconscious.
Anyway, she wakes up, and she is walking down the hallway in a white outfit while they are escorting her to a room. They pass by a room with a table, and on the table is the dead body of that distorted Clark.
Yikes.
One of the scientists takes her to a room. A guy comes in and asks if she minds if he asks her questions. She does not respond. He says okay and asks how she got in there.
She says she went through a wall.
He asks if she came through a store too. He pulls up an image and asks if she can confirm this is the store. He pulls up the exact image of Clark’s store, and she nods her head.
He asks if she was there shopping. She says she was looking for somebody. Then he pulls out a picture from his file and says Clark, but it is a blurred picture. He asks if she can confirm this is the person.
Then she says, “Where am I?”
He says he cannot answer the question.
She asks what his name is, and I think he said Gary.
Then she asks what they do. He says this place used to make MRI machines, or they used to, until they found the Backrooms. Now they make it their sacred duty to study the Backrooms and to refine it because it is more important than anything.
He says after going through and studying it, it is hard to even describe.
Then Mary says it is like asking someone who has never seen a dog to draw a picture of a dog. They can draw it, but it will look all wrong.
And that is the best description of the Backrooms.
Then she asks what is going to happen to her, and he says that is not up to him to decide.
He says they could just talk like normal people because they have both been there. Maybe get stuff off their chest. Maybe learn a thing or two more about what they saw.
But Mary is listening to nothing. The guy’s voice starts distorting like white noise to her.
Then we cut to the Backrooms, and the Backrooms expanded more. We see a recreation of her old house. We see outside electric poles with missing posters of Bobby and Kat lined up in a row clipping through the floor. We see a recreation of the stock of Clark’s store.
Then we cut to Mary, who is sitting in a chair in an empty room that is a recreation of that scientist room she was in.
So maybe you are thinking like I did.
Was this all in her mind?
Was she not in a scientist room?
I don’t know.
Then we cut to the front of her, and a distorted figure of herself is there. This figure has three layers of her face in a row, like a distorted version of herself. It is in the Backrooms.
And that is how the movie ends.
Yes.
That is the most confusing ending ever.
And honestly, that is the one thing I am still stuck on. I like vague answers. I like the lack of answers. But that ending is so vague that I cannot even interpret what the hell it means.
Did Mary escape?
Did she not escape?
Was the scientist room real?
Did the Backrooms copy her?
Was she still trapped?
I don’t know.
But even with that confusion, I still loved the movie. The movie is about therapy, remembering, and the Backrooms recreating things wrong. Clark refused to change, and what killed him was basically himself. Mary survived, but then the Backrooms remembered her too.
And that is horrifying.
Because the scariest thing about this movie is not just that the Backrooms are endless.
It is that if you stay there long enough, the Backrooms starts remembering you.
And it remembers you wrong.
—
⚠️ Content Warning ⚠️
This movie is generally horrifying.
There are distorted versions of people, body horror, blood, people getting dragged away, decapitated heads, psychological horror, scalping, people being eaten, someone stabbing a distorted human in the neck, a man pulling chunks out of a creature’s stomach, nightmare rooms, dark rooms, loud scares, and a whole lot of imagery that is just wrong.
Not haunted.
Wrong.
Also, I have to say this right now. Some entitled grandmother brought an eleven-year-old boy and a younger little sister to see this movie. The little sister clearly did not want to be there. She was horrified when the first trailer came up for Insidious. Like, the little sister broke out into tears, and me and my sister were like, what the f*** did this woman bring small kids to an R-rated horror movie?
If the little girl couldn’t make it past the Insidious trailer, then this movie would have mortified her.
So my sister actually got up and went and reported them to the front desk, and they got kicked out.
Good.
Because oh my God, this movie would have traumatized that small girl.
—
🧭 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview
Before I even get into the actual plot, I think this review needs a “Backrooms For Dummies” section.
Because the Backrooms are one of those things where people who know internet horror immediately understand what they are looking at, but people who have never heard of it are probably going to look at a blank yellow wall and go, “Why is everyone scared of carpet?”
So what even are the Backrooms?
The Backrooms are basically an internet horror idea where reality can glitch, and if you “noclip” out of reality, you fall into this endless maze of weird empty rooms. Yellow wallpaper, ugly carpet, buzzing fluorescent lights, no windows, no clear exit, and everything looks familiar but also completely wrong.
It is like retail hell that goes on forever. And for those of us who worked in retail, we call that the holiday season.
What I really loved about this movie is how it explains the Backrooms. The whole thing about the Backrooms is that it basically tries to mirror reality, but it mirrors it wrong. The description our two main characters give in the movie is that it is like asking someone who has never seen a dog before to draw a picture of a dog. They can draw it, but it does not look right.
That is the Backrooms.
It knows rooms exist, but not how rooms work.
It knows furniture exists, but not where furniture goes.
It knows people exist, but it does not understand how people are shaped.
That is why there are chairs clipping through the floor, furniture stuck together, signs written backwards, rooms that go nowhere, and distorted versions of humans walking around with six eyes, two faces, or faces shoved upwards in ways faces should not go.
Everything is all wrong.
The movie follows Clark, a furniture store owner whose life is anything but normal. He got kicked out of his house by his wife, he is living inside his own store, he sleeps on one of the display beds, watches TV using one of the display TVs, and is trying to keep his job and his store together even though you can tell this guy does not have his life held together at all.
He goes to therapy with Mary, and at first the movie feels like it is Clark’s story. But as the movie goes on, Mary basically becomes more of the main character in the second half, which I was not expecting, and honestly I really liked that.
Clark discovers a strange entrance into the Backrooms in the basement of his furniture store, and from there, the movie becomes this mix of nightmare horror, therapy, remembering, and people being unable to change.
And yes.
There are monsters in this movie.
It is not just empty Backrooms.
The monsters in this movie are distorted versions of people.
And oh boy, are they creepy.
—
🎭 Character Rundown
Mary was an interesting character. I really liked her.
I also liked how the movie basically makes her more of the main character by the second half of the movie. I wasn’t expecting that. At first, it feels like Clark is going to be the one we follow the entire way through, but by the second half, Mary is the one I cared about more.
I don’t think I have seen the actress who played Mary before, but I really liked her. She did a great job, especially in the second half when the movie becomes more about her trying to survive the Backrooms and understand what the hell happened to Clark.
Clark is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, and yes, I have definitely seen that actor before. He was in Doctor Strange. That’s where I knew him from.
Clark is a good character, but I cared more about Mary than I cared about Clark. Clark was just too nutty. He lost it. If he ever had it. Even before the Backrooms, this guy was already not okay. He gets kicked out of his house, drinks too much, lives in his own furniture store, screams during therapy, and is clearly carrying around a lot of anger.
Then the Backrooms get involved and he just gets worse.
Bobby and Kat were the two side characters, and they were somewhat important. The actors who played Bobby and Kat were fine. I don’t think I have seen those actors before, but they did a great job at portraying normal people. Like, I really thought they were just normal people.
They are not these overly written horror movie characters. They feel like two regular people who get dragged into something insane because Clark needs proof.
And Kat honestly had some of the funniest lines in the movie.
When Clark brings them into the Backrooms, Kat says, “Bobby, are you sure he didn’t drug us?”
Bobby says, “Nah, I’d know if I were drugged or not.”
And Kat says, “You’re always on drugs!”
That got me.
Then later when Clark is tying a rope around Bobby and Kat asks why Bobby, Clark says it is because Bobby has the camera.
And Kat says, “It’s not like the camera is attached to him!”
Exactly.
The camera is not attached to Bobby.
Just give someone else the camera.
—
⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow
I think the pacing mostly worked, but I do have one big complaint.
I wish we had more time in the Backrooms.
I feel like we spent way too much time in the overworld.
Man, I sound like I play Minecraft too much.
I just said overworld.
I do play Minecraft way too much.
But yeah, that is about my only real complaint. I wish we had more time in the Backrooms. I almost said the Upside Down like this is Stranger Things. No, I mean the Backrooms.
The stuff outside the Backrooms does matter. It sets up Clark, Mary, Bobby, Kat, the therapy theme, Clark’s marriage issues, Mary’s childhood, and the whole idea of remembering. But every time the movie actually goes into the Backrooms, that is when it becomes amazing.
The rooms are creepy. The props look impressive. The furniture clipping through floors is creepy. The distorted humans are horrifying. The whole place feels like reality tried to make a building and did not understand what a building is supposed to be.
So yeah, I liked the pacing overall, but I still wish the movie gave us more Backrooms.
—
✅ Pros
The creatures worked for me.
They creeped me the f*** out.
The monsters are not just random monsters. They are distorted versions of humans. That is what makes them horrifying. There is a guy with six eyes. There is a girl with two faces clipping into each other like a mirror. There is a small guy with one side of the face lopsided upwards, like the eyeball is shoved up there.
It is nightmare fuel.
And the reason it works is because it fits the Backrooms. The Backrooms tries to mirror reality, but it mirrors it wrong. So of course the humans it creates are wrong too.
The rooms are wrong.
The furniture is wrong.
The people are wrong.
Everything is wrong.
I also loved the props and the set design. The props look impressive. I had to think, wait, did they actually build these rooms themselves? Like the people behind the scenes? How many of these rooms did they have to build? That must have taken a lot of work.
The Backrooms do not feel like some cheap CGI place. They feel physical. Like the actors are actually walking through these horrible rooms where chairs are clipping through floors and mannequins are half stuck in the ground.
The movie also had scares that actually got me.
The Christmas tree scene made me scream. The distorted Clark figure hovering over Mary’s face made me and my sister scream. And I am not talking about a little “oh that startled me.” I mean we actually yelled.
That is when you know a horror movie worked.
I also really like that this is a YouTuber movie. Kane Parsons directed this movie, and I am honestly happy to support YouTuber movies. I still can’t believe that guy was able to direct his own Backrooms movie.
That is insane.
But also good for him.
Because this movie does not feel like some random studio looked at an internet thing and said, “Okay, we will turn this into a generic monster movie.”
It feels like the person who understands the Backrooms actually got to make the Backrooms movie.
—
❌ Cons
My biggest complaint is that I wish we had more time in the Backrooms.
For a movie called Backrooms, I wanted more Backrooms.
That is not me saying the outside stuff is bad. The outside stuff matters. Clark’s life matters. Mary’s backstory matters. The therapy stuff matters. But still, the Backrooms are the most interesting part of the movie, and I wanted more of that.
My other issue is the ending.
I do not mind vagueness. I like the lack of answers sometimes. I am fine with the movie not explaining everything. I do not need the movie to sit me down and explain the full lore like a school lesson.
But please do not make it so vague where I can’t even interpret what the hell that ending was.
The movie starts to give us some explanation with the scientists, and then the movie is like, no f*** that, we are going to end with a distorted version of Mary sitting in the exact same chair.
And that left me befuddled.
Did Mary escape?
Was the scientist room real?
Was she still in the Backrooms?
Did the Backrooms copy her?
Was this all in her mind?
I do not know.
And again, I don’t mind vague.
But this was very, very vague.
—
🧠 Final Thoughts
This movie is amazing.
In my opinion, recently crazy.
I genuinely thought this was a 10 out of 10 horror movie because it actually creeped me the f*** out.
The monsters worked. The Backrooms worked. Mary worked. Clark losing his mind worked. The theme of therapy and remembering worked. The way the Backrooms tries to recreate reality but gets everything wrong worked.
This movie is not just about yellow rooms. It is about therapy, memory, and someone refusing to change.
Clark cannot move on. He cannot admit fault. He wants everyone else to tell him it is not his fault. Then he finds a place that recreates his house and gives him distorted versions of people, and instead of trying to leave, he wants to stay there forever.
Mary is the opposite. Mary is a therapist. She has her own childhood trauma. She carries that little cement handprint from her old house. And by the end, she has to survive this place that keeps remembering and recreating things wrong.
The Backrooms itself feels like a broken memory machine.
It remembers things.
But it remembers them wrong.
And that is what makes it scary.
I highly recommend y’all go watch the smoothie and
—
⭐ Rating
10/10
This movie creeped me the f*** out.
And for a horror movie, that is the whole job.
—
🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨
From this point forward, I am going into full spoilers.
And I mean full spoilers.
Because this movie goes completely unhinged by the end.
If you have not seen Backrooms, stop reading here.
—
🟨 Spoilers
Anyways, we actually start at the beginning with a hazmat suit guy in the Backrooms. It is the recording at the beginning, and it is found footage from first person view. He is panicking. He is alone. He enters a room with electronics that apparently him and his crew set up, and he starts hearing noises.
He barricades himself inside this tech room, then he goes into another hallway and finds another room that has detailed cloud paintings. He hears a creature coming. We do not really see the creature, but it looks elongated and distorted, like a stick man kind of figure. It lunges at him, the camera drops, and then we open with the Backrooms title.
Then we open with Clark going to his job. He runs a furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and yes, the irony of him running a furniture store while the Backrooms entrance is in the basement is kind of clever. I know it is not really irony, but it is kind of clever, because the Backrooms already look like some endless broken furniture store nightmare.
Clark’s life is anything but normal. He got kicked out of his house by his wife, and he tells his therapist Mary about it during their session. She has him do a focus study where they get into character. She plays his wife and he plays himself.
And oh boy is he broken.
He says something along the lines of his wife was asleep, he was working late doing inventory, he came home late, and what matters is he came home drunk. He drank a few beers, bumped into a glass bottle, and it broke. She woke up, they got into an argument, and she kicked him out.
Then he starts yelling about how dare she kick him out of his house that he pays for while she goes to college that he also pays for so she can become a doctor. Then he goes off about how he needs the job while she is sitting around on her fat ass doing nothing.
Then Mary, playing his wife, says something like, “Can I say something? What is it like to be a failed architect?”
And Clark screams, “I’m not a f****** failure at architect!”
Then he calms down and says, “I… I… I am sorry. I snapped.”
Yeah.
Clearly this guy ain’t normal.
After that, Clark leaves because the session is over, and he goes back to his job where he is filming an ad with his two assistants, Bobby and Kat. Bobby is filming Clark dressed as a pirate with a fake peg leg. Actually, they only have the money for a peg leg, so he uses the leg of a furniture chair as a peg leg.
That was both kind of funny and sad at the same time.
It was actually funny seeing him walking around like a pirate and being all like, “Arrr matey, come on down to our store. Everything is on sale. You don’t have to worry about credit.”
He tries to sit in a chair to end the ad, but the chair breaks and he falls on his butt. Bobby keeps recording and says it is extra footage, and Clark tells him to shut the camera off now.
Again, it is funny, but also sad, because this guy wanted to be an architect and now he is living in his furniture store dressed as a pirate selling chairs that break under him.
And yeah, he is living in his store.
That is how not held together his life is.
He sleeps on the bed that is on display and watches TV using one of the TVs that is on display. It is like, okay, yeah, your life is kind of messed up. I am even surprised this guy is holding the job up. How is he even paying Bobby and Kat? How is he even keeping this place open?
Same day, he has a technician guy come check out the power because he tells him the lights keep flickering downstairs and upstairs with no coherent order or rhyme or reason. The guy asks where the power box is, and Clark takes him downstairs into this cozy carpet basement room with chairs, a table, and the power circuit.
And there is already something weird there.
There are two red light switches randomly placed sideways on the bottom of the circuit board when he flips the lid open.
Uhhhh.
Oh, the Backrooms are clearly breaking through.
I mean, two light switches flipped sideways in the circuit board?
That is not right.
Anyway, that night, Clark is in his bed watching TV, and the TV goes off. The lights all turn on and off, and he sees the lights flickering in the basement. He goes to the basement and tries the circuits. The lights do not turn off. Then he decides to flip the two red switches, and then all the lights turn off, even though the red switches did nothing earlier when the circuit guy tested them.
Now Clark cannot even turn the light back on.
Then he is about to go back upstairs, and he sees this glimpse of very thin light in the wall. He looks left and right from different angles, and it disappears and reappears. He goes up to it, puts his hand up to it, and his hand clips through the wall.
He breathes heavily.
He pulls his hand out.
Then he goes through the wall and enters the Backrooms.
He enters this fluorescent yellow carpet room, and there is a pile of furniture right in front of him. Two chairs are stuck together like Jenga glue. Then he sees a backward stop sign that spells POTS instead of STOP.
So I gather everything is backwards and off.
He explores a bit and finds a hallway. He finds a cardboard cutout of a caveman with a recorder on its back speaking different languages, and Clark’s reaction is, “What the f***?”
Really Clark?
That is the odd part to you?
Not the fact that you just clipped through reality and there is this endless fluorescent room?
Anyway, he finds this thing stuck under something in the wall, and he sees a square cutout. It is kind of like if you cut it open and put the lid back on. He takes the lid off, and it is this square hole in the wall. There is a bag with IDs and tape recorders in it.
He goes through the square hole, and it leads him into another room where there is a chair clipping through the floor, shoes clipping through the floor, and a slanted staircase going upwards to a small door all the way in the corner.
As he enters the room, he hears a noise in the background and says, “Who’s there?” Then he sees the caveman cutout making noises. Then we hear something, and we see the caveman cutout fall on the floor.
So Clark runs.
He goes to the corner of the room, climbs up the stairs, and tries to open the small door. The door has three doorknobs. He opens the right doorknob after the third attempt and exits back out. Luckily, he went in a circle. He went back around, finds the room he came in through, and leaves through the wall.
Then Clark goes to his next session with Mary. He is late to it. He shows up late and tries to tell her what he found. He looks clinically insane. He looks like he is high on drugs. She asks him if he drank, and he says, “I’m not intoxicated. Why would you ask that?”
Then he tries to tell her he saw a room and that it is this endless fluorescent room and that he clipped through reality.
Of course, she does not believe him.
She thinks he is nuts.
He tries drawing a picture, and she says she does not believe him. Then he takes the picture back and points his finger at her, saying something like, “You know what? I’ll be back tomorrow with physical proof, and you’re going to have to f****** apologize to me.”
Jesus Christ, Clark, calm down.
Mary also carries around this small cutout shape of cement with her handprint in it. She had a horrible upbringing where her mom may have been schizophrenic and shut her daughter inside the house, made sure she did not leave, covered up every wall with newspapers, and covered up the doors with furniture. Eventually her mom got taken to a psychiatric ward.
So no wonder why Mary ended up becoming a therapist.
And at the beginning of the movie, she goes and visits her old childhood home while it is being demolished, probably where she got the little cutout of the handprint in the cement outside.
Anyway, Clark goes and pays Bobby and Kat a visit at their house. They are dating, and he is like, “I’ll pay you overtime. I just need two hours of your time tomorrow. Bring your camera. We’re going to do research.”
Then Bobby brings the camera and turns it on and asks, okay, what are they researching? Clark is vague, and Bobby and Kat are like, no, we need more answers than that.
Then Clark says he is going to enter through the door.
They are like, what door?
Then he steps through the wall.
And they are like, what the f***?
He tells them they have to come through the wall to his side. Bobby goes through, while Kat is like, no, no, no, are you crazy? Then Kat comes through because Bobby tells her to, and she sees the place and is shocked, especially Kat. She is like, what the f*** is this?
Clark says that is what he is trying to figure out. He wants to research it.
Then Kat says, “Bobby, are you sure he didn’t drug us?”
Bobby says, “Nah, I’d know if I were drugged or not.”
And Kat says, “You’re always on drugs!”
That was hilarious.
Anyway, they go to a room with a square hole that goes down very steep. Clark wraps the rope around Bobby, and Kat says, “Why Bobby though?”
Clark says, “Because he has the camera.”
And Kat says, “It’s not like the camera is attached to him!”
Again.
That is a fair point.
Bobby gets lowered down and finds a room full of piles of clothing. He says it smells down here and that there is clothing. Then he sees a room around the corner that is pitch black with flickering lights. He is like, lower the rope more, and Clark says he can’t because that was all the rope.
Bobby tries to lean forward a bit, seeing the dark room with the flickering light, and then he sees this creature stand up and try coming out the door, stomping towards him.
Bobby runs back and says, “Pull me up! Pull me up!”
So they start pulling him up. They pull him out of the hole, and it all looks fine until the rope starts getting pulled and Bobby starts getting pulled back. Kat tries pulling Bobby while Clark has to untie the rope. He tries to untie it. It does not work. Bobby gets yanked down, and then the creature comes up behind them, somehow knocks both of them down, and knocks the camera into the hole.
When the camera falls in, we see Bobby’s blood trail on the floor, and we see Bobby get yanked into the wall through some upside-down door in the wall.
Kat tries to run up to the door, then runs into the dark room next to it. We hear screaming. Then Clark ends up with the camera and goes into the dark room trying to escape.
He finds his way into a dark room with a Christmas tree.
And this scene was nightmare fuel.
This whole time, he has the camera and is recording everything. He walks up to the tree, looks around, and there are mannequins clipping halfway through the floor. Then he walks around the tree, and there is this small little figure in a chair sitting next to the tree. There is a lamp, and the small figure pulls on the string to the lamp, turning on the lamp.
Then this disfigured woman with ginger hair and a long red dress comes running out of the dark, all crooked and distorted.
And I screamed:
“Ahhhhhh!”
Clark runs the opposite way, finds a door, opens it, closes the door, and finds himself in a bathroom where there is a sculpture of a face inside the wall. He goes through another door and finds another room.
Then he hears Kat’s voice on the other side of a blank wall. She is saying she can see the door and the glass window. He asks if there is any doorknob where she is, and she says no.
Then we see the camera behind Clark, that he put on a table, getting lifted up by somewhat of a tall figure. Because the camera levitates higher and higher than what normal Clark height would be.
So who the f*** is holding the camera?
Then Kat’s voice says, “Behind you.”
Clark looks behind him, and the camera shuts off.
After that, Mary gets a phone call from Clark saying he is sorry and that he won’t be making it back. So she goes to his store to see what is going on. There is mail jammed under the door and overdue bills. She opens the door, the door is unlocked, and she tries calling out for Clark.
No answer.
She sees the flickering lights downstairs. She goes downstairs and sees the door-shaped tape Clark put there. Then she sees a fly go through the wall, clipping through it.
She panics a bit.
Then she decides to take off her jacket and put down her hair for some reason. She puts her hand through the wall, it clips through, and then she decides to walk on through.
She is completely befuddled on what the hell she just entered.
It is the same room Clark entered, but there is no pile of furniture anymore. So something changed. She tries to find Clark. There is no Clark. She finds a room with a pile of furniture, but a different version this time. Then she goes around the corner from the room and finds this dead-end wall with a weird cult-like drawing of a dark shadow figure version of Clark holding this child in the air while he has this demonic smile and is sitting on this fire throne.
It is weird.
Then she hears a noise behind her and says, “Clark?”
He says, “Yes, it’s me.”
Jesus, why are you hiding?
He says she is being too loud and tells her to be quiet. Then he comes around the corner, grabs her, says he is sorry, and she falls unconscious.
Then we see a flashback of her childhood, of her mother being taken away to a psychiatric ward. When she wakes up, she is at a dinner table in a house.
And this is where things get so, so, so much worse.
She is tied to a chair across from Clark. Right next to her is a figure. In the distance, there is the ginger-haired woman figure standing in the corner wearing a red dress. There is also a small figure sitting in a chair behind her in the corner.
Clark basically explains this place. This place mimics reality. It mimics people, but mimics them wrong.
Then Mary takes a look at the figure right next to her, and it is this chubby guy with six eyeballs. Then she looks at the ginger-haired woman in the red dress just standing in the dark corner. This woman has two faces clipping into each other, like her neck is all wrong. One normal face, and then another face half sticking out on the other side of her face. She is just standing there docile.
Then there is the creepy small guy in the corner behind her on the chair with the lopsided face shoved upwards, with the eyeball shoved up there.
Clark is explaining that this place mimics reality but remembers things wrong. Somewhere out there, there is a guy with a striped shirt. Somewhere out there, there is someone with a red dress like this woman, but these versions are distorted versions.
Then he opens the fridge.
And there is the decapitated head of Kat.
This part confused me because the movie gives no explanation. Mary looks shocked, and the answer Clark gives is so vague. He says something like, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s my manager. I tried to help her but…” and then sighs.
Dude, I’m going to need you to elaborate on that.
Why is your manager’s decapitated head in the fridge?
Also, you can tell Clark is starting to lose it.
If he ever had it, let’s be honest.
Oh, this is where the movie gets so much worse, and I am so glad that mother and her two kids got kicked out because this would have traumatized that small girl.
Clark takes a knife, and he says the best part about these distorted figures is they do not feel anything. Then he takes the knife and jabs it into the chubby guy’s neck.
The guy does not react.
Clark says, see, they do not feel pain. Think how amazing that is.
Then he takes the knife out of the neck, and I am not joking when I say this, he says, “Oh, but the better part is…”
Then he unbuttons the guy’s shirt and says, “You can eat them.”
Then he starts taking his hand and pulling chunks out of the guy’s stomach onto the table. The inside looks like it is made of foam.
Ummmmmmmm.
Yeah.
Clark’s lost it.
The house they are in is a recreation of his house. So he is happy. He wants to stay here forever. Yep, again, Clark is mentally gone.
He wants to play a roleplay game. He wants Mary to play the role of his wife so he can get his anger off his chest. He asks if this is all his fault. Mary is saying whatever he wants, she will give it to him. They can sit down and talk. They can discuss this.
He says he wants her to say this is not his fault.
She says, “This is not your fault.”
Then he wants her to say she was wrong.
She says, “I was wrong.”
But he says no, he does not want her to say it like that. They need to set the stage. They are going to roleplay. She is going to play his wife, and he is going to play himself.
Then he says something is not right. He asks the ginger-haired lady to turn off the lights. He says, “Turn off the lights,” and she just stands there, not reacting. Clark laughs and says he has been over this with her, and she does not respond well. So he gets up and turns off the light himself.
Then he says something is still not right.
This is where the movie completely goes unhinged.
He gets up, goes to the ginger-haired distorted lady, and scalps her head.
What the f***.
Then he puts the scalp hair on Mary’s head to resemble his wife because his wife was a ginger. Then he starts saying the exact same things he said during the roleplay in the beginning at the therapy session. The exact same things.
Only this time, Mary is wearing a scalped hair of a distorted human who is just standing in the corner with her head scalped.
Mary says she is not his f****** wife. Clark tells her to stay in character. She shakes her head, and the scalp hair falls off.
Then she finally says something normal.
She tells him this is all his fault. She tells him he is a narcissist who is beyond help. She says the problem is not that he broke a bottle and that ended his relationship. It is that he is whiny and complains and blames his problems on everything else and everybody else. It is never his fault. He just blames it on everyone else.
She says he is beyond help and she cannot help him.
Well, finally something normal is said.
Then Clark says, “I’m beyond help. I’m the cause of my problem.” He starts breaking down in tears and asks how he stops this.
Mary says she does not know.
Then he says, “You know what? I don’t want to change.”
Then footsteps come out from the hallway. Bigger footsteps. The ginger-haired lady awakens and jolts and runs over to the corner of the room and starts slamming against the wall in fear.
And what is the distorted ginger-haired lady fearing?
How do I describe this?
A giant, cartoonishly taller version of Clark dressed in his pirate attire with the fake peg leg and the pirate hat comes walking in. And he has a distorted cartoonish face.
Yeah, this part made me go:
“What the f*** is going on?”
Clark gets up and says, “No, no, no, don’t worry, she’s our friend. She’s a therapist.” He says they do not have to change.
Okay, again, Clark has mentally lost it.
If he ever had it.
Then giant distorted pirate Clark picks up Clark and starts biting his shoulder open, like eating him for a meal.
Lovely.
Guess that is the other Clark.
Also, the irony is that what killed him was himself. And his lust for not changing. So what he thought was the safe place is not really safe. So now he is the meal.
Luckily, Clark untied Mary, and Mary escapes past the creature while he is munching on Clark as a meal.
And yes, that is a sentence I just said.
Mary starts running outside the door and finds this suburban neighborhood. She runs toward a door in the distance at the end of the hall, and then the figure comes out the door dragging Clark’s lifeless body by him, blood coming out of him. He drops Clark and starts pursuing Mary.
She tries opening up the door, but it is locked. So she enters another house, runs through the house, goes through hallways, goes through a door, gets chased, enters the Backrooms again, falls, and breaks her foot. But she gets up and starts walking off.
Then she makes her way to a door which, I kid you not, leads to this giant open gaping hole in a room where the floor is missing through several layers. Like several floors have been ripped out. So she has a very thin row of room to walk on. There are stairs a couple feet over, so she is scooching herself across the wall as the creature tries to break through the door because he is too tall to make it through.
The figure has torn-up skin on his hand, and it is all wrong and distorted.
She makes it to the stairs and starts crawling her way up. The creature breaks through the door. She opens the small door, gets through the patch, and it leads her into another Backrooms area.
She makes it through, and it leads her to a recreation of the basement in Clark’s store. She thinks she has exited and made it back out of reality, but when she goes up the stairs, it is all a mimicked version of Clark’s store.
Things are clipped through the floor, and the door to the exit has walls in front of it.
So she is still in the Backrooms.
Then this dark pirate figure comes up the stairs and starts dragging his pirate leg toward her. She starts going around corners, takes a wooden leg of a chair, and uses it as a weapon to fend him off. As he is walking toward her, she uses the leg of the chair to break his wooden leg, knocking him to the floor.
Then he starts crawling.
She passes a section where these fire hydrants go off. She gets blinded by one of the fire hydrants and falls unconscious.
And this moment made me and my sister scream.
We see her just laying there. She wakes up slowly. She turns around, and there is the distorted Clark figure just laying over her, hovering over her face right in front of her.
That made me and my sister scream out loud.
He tries opening his mouth to eat her, and she pushes his face away. Then she grabs the rock with her handprint in it out of her pocket and starts smashing his head with it.
She gets up and enters a small crevice in the wall. The creature cannot follow her because he is too big. He starts moaning and trying to reach his hand toward her, but she crawls through the small crevice.
On the other side are two hazmat suit guys, and they fire-extinguisher her. She falls on the floor. They thought they were dealing with a monster, but no, it is a person, and they seem baffled.
So they bring Mary through a hallway, dragging her through. They take her outside into what I can only describe as a warehouse with scientists and hazmat suit guys. They just exited through a door into the entrance of the Backrooms.
So these people are studying the Backrooms.
Mary falls unconscious.
Anyway, she wakes up, and she is walking down the hallway in a white outfit while they are escorting her to a room. They pass by a room with a table, and on the table is the dead body of that distorted Clark.
Yikes.
One of the scientists takes her to a room. A guy comes in and asks if she minds if he asks her questions. She does not respond. He says okay and asks how she got in there.
She says she went through a wall.
He asks if she came through a store too. He pulls up an image and asks if she can confirm this is the store. He pulls up the exact image of Clark’s store, and she nods her head.
He asks if she was there shopping. She says she was looking for somebody. Then he pulls out a picture from his file and says Clark, but it is a blurred picture. He asks if she can confirm this is the person.
Then she says, “Where am I?”
He says he cannot answer the question.
She asks what his name is, and I think he said Gary.
Then she asks what they do. He says this place used to make MRI machines, or they used to, until they found the Backrooms. Now they make it their sacred duty to study the Backrooms and to refine it because it is more important than anything.
He says after going through and studying it, it is hard to even describe.
Then Mary says it is like asking someone who has never seen a dog to draw a picture of a dog. They can draw it, but it will look all wrong.
And that is the best description of the Backrooms.
Then she asks what is going to happen to her, and he says that is not up to him to decide.
He says they could just talk like normal people because they have both been there. Maybe get stuff off their chest. Maybe learn a thing or two more about what they saw.
But Mary is listening to nothing. The guy’s voice starts distorting like white noise to her.
Then we cut to the Backrooms, and the Backrooms expanded more. We see a recreation of her old house. We see outside electric poles with missing posters of Bobby and Kat lined up in a row clipping through the floor. We see a recreation of the stock of Clark’s store.
Then we cut to Mary, who is sitting in a chair in an empty room that is a recreation of that scientist room she was in.
So maybe you are thinking like I did.
Was this all in her mind?
Was she not in a scientist room?
I don’t know.
Then we cut to the front of her, and a distorted figure of herself is there. This figure has three layers of her face in a row, like a distorted version of herself. It is in the Backrooms.
And that is how the movie ends.
Yes.
That is the most confusing ending ever.
And honestly, that is the one thing I am still stuck on. I like vague answers. I like the lack of answers. But that ending is so vague that I cannot even interpret what the hell it means.
Did Mary escape?
Did she not escape?
Was the scientist room real?
Did the Backrooms copy her?
Was she still trapped?
I don’t know.
But even with that confusion, I still loved the movie. The movie is about therapy, remembering, and the Backrooms recreating things wrong. Clark refused to change, and what killed him was basically himself. Mary survived, but then the Backrooms remembered her too.
And that is horrifying.
Because the scariest thing about this movie is not just that the Backrooms are endless.
It is that if you stay there long enough, the Backrooms starts remembering you.
And it remembers you wrong.
Anyways here’s the next horror movie I’m looking forward to seeing, Clayface.
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