Backrooms Review: When Atmosphere Takes the Place of Story
Review summary
Backrooms, adapted from one of the best-known internet memes, has powerful atmosphere but struggles with rhythm and narrative coherence; a big idea that doesn’t fully become a cinematic story.
Backrooms is built on one of the best-known internet memes of recent years: an endless space of yellow rooms and corridors that doesn’t follow the rules of the real world and, more than a place, is a symbol of anxiety, loneliness and being lost inside the human mind.
The film’s starting idea is undoubtedly fascinating. The world of the Backrooms has extraordinary potential for a different kind of psychological thriller, and that is why I went in with fairly high expectations. But the longer the film went on, the more I felt it had become absorbed in showing its space and had forgotten the story.
A sluggish start
One of the film’s biggest problems begins in the very first minutes. Nearly twenty minutes are spent introducing the main character and the psychoanalyst, but the introduction is neither deep enough to make the characters believable nor engaging enough to hold the audience. As a result, the film enters its main story very late, and its opening feels far too drawn out.
A rhythm that wastes its chance
After the entry into the Backrooms, the film finally starts offering new ideas, but another problem takes over: rhythm. I have no problem with slow films; in fact, many of my favourites, such as Zodiac or Prisoners, are slow too. The difference is that in those works almost every sequence produces new information, deepens the characters or raises the tension; in Backrooms, I often felt the film was simply repeating the same sense of being lost.
The corridors, the rooms, the silence, the vague sounds and the long camera movements create a mysterious atmosphere at first, but when this pattern repeats again and again without noticeable progress in the story, suspense gives way to fatigue.
Debatable visual choices
Another decision that didn’t work well for me was the use of a video camera and first-person point of view. Perhaps the aim was to make the audience feel trapped in this endless space, but the drop in image quality gets in the way of the experience more than it helps.
In my opinion, if the film had used this style of footage only in a few moments and then handed the narrative back to the main cinematic camera, the idea would have been kept and the visual quality wouldn’t have been sacrificed.
Another problem is how the sequences connect to each other. The film deliberately hides many answers, and that is the nature of the Backrooms world, but there is a difference between ambiguity and an incoherent narrative. A mystery or psychological film doesn’t have to explain everything, but it should give the audience enough clues to discover the connections between events. Here, some scenes feel so detached from each other that it is sometimes hard to tell how they relate to the story’s overall path.
The biggest strength: atmosphere
Of course, this doesn’t mean the film is a complete failure. The biggest strength of Backrooms is its atmosphere. The film succeeds in conveying a feeling of being lost, alone and helpless, and the sound design plays a very important part in that. Long silences, ambient noise and the sense of being in a place with no rules draw the audience into the film’s world very well.
But for me, atmosphere alone is not enough. A film, however successful its atmosphere, ultimately has to have a story to tell, and every sequence has to have a reason to be there.
Backrooms has a very good idea, but it doesn’t succeed in turning that idea into a coherent cinematic narrative. The film focuses too much on creating mood and space, and as a result, story and rhythm are sacrificed.
In the end, I don’t think Backrooms is a bad film; I think it is a work with far more potential than what we see on screen. With a more coherent screenplay, a more controlled rhythm and a clearer narrative, it could have become one of the year’s most distinctive psychological thrillers.
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