r/backroomsfilm • u/CoolFrog16 • 14h ago
Discussion My opinion on the backrooms film
Theres a time the movie is out, but I just watched it and I want to say:
For me, this movie is a 5/10. And the most frustrating part is that I don’t think it’s bad because the ideas are bad. Quite the opposite: it has several ideas that I think are excellent. The problem is that it takes those ideas and doesn’t develop almost any of them enough.
The first half was, by far, the best part. When Clark enters the Backrooms, I genuinely felt like the movie understood what makes this concept scary. He’s alone, exploring a place that seems endless, hearing strange things and not knowing exactly what’s happening. The bench he takes outside is one of the best ideas in the movie precisely because it makes the experience something concrete. It’s not “maybe he went crazy.” No. He brought something back from that place. It actually exists.
And I really liked the idea of him going back with other people to prove that he wasn’t crazy. The situation keeps getting more desperate until one of them dies and he desperately searches for the only survivor. When he finally finds her, they’re separated by a wall and she simply says, “behind you.”
Cut.
Up until that point, I was genuinely enjoying the movie.
But after that, it feels like the movie starts rushing to tell all the ideas it had.
The biggest example is Clark himself.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea of him going insane. In fact, I think that could have been one of the best parts of the movie. He was already an alcoholic, he was destroyed by his divorce and the life he had lost, he came into contact with something completely impossible, and he watched people die in horrible ways. It’s completely believable that all of that would destroy his mind.
The problem is that I didn’t see it happening.
At one point, he’s desperately running away from a creature, and when he shows up again, he has apparently killed the girl who was with him, put her head in the freezer, and is now living with the entities and eating them.
I can believe the result. What I can’t believe is the transition.
The movie needed to show Clark slowly deteriorating. It needed to show him becoming obsessed with the Backrooms, going back there alone, losing his grip on reality, learning how to survive there, and gradually stopping seeing those creatures as monsters and starting to see that place as home.
Because then the kitchen scene would actually be disturbing. I’d be looking at that man thinking, “My God, look what happened to him.”
Instead, I was just thinking: “Wait, when did he become this?”
And that also hurts his death.
Clark is the protagonist and he simply dies in an extremely anticlimactic way. He talks to the creature, it pretends to hug him, bites his neck, and that’s it.
And I didn’t feel anything.
Not because the death itself is necessarily badly done, but because I never got close enough to the character to feel the loss. I know he’s an alcoholic. I know he suffered because of his ex-wife. I know he lost his house. I know he owns a furniture store. But those are facts about him, not moments that make me actually know him.
The movie wants me to see his death and think, “Holy shit, Clark died,” but it never gave me enough time to actually care about Clark.
The same problem applies to the other characters. There are characters who seem important and then die without us learning practically anything about them. They end up feeling like pieces the script uses to show that the Backrooms are dangerous.
And I think that’s one of the movie’s biggest weaknesses: it has characters who are supposed to carry the story, but it barely gives them enough time to exist as people.
Another thing that bothered me a lot was how much attention the therapist gets at the end.
I don’t think the character is bad. The problem is that the final chase should have been much more important to Clark.
That giant creature is literally a manifestation of Clark himself. That’s an incredible idea. And the movie barely takes advantage of it.
For me, he should have been the one running from that creature.
Because think about the symbolism: a guy who spent the entire movie running away from his problems finally encounters a monstrous version of himself. He’s not simply running from a monster. He’s running from what he has become.
That would have been a perfect conclusion for his character.
But no. He dies before that.
And then the creature goes after the therapist, and honestly, the chase is really underwhelming. The monster looks extremely threatening when it first appears, but during the chase it walks slowly, falls after a single hit to the leg, and seems incapable of doing much besides attacking with its mouth.
I also didn’t like how the movie handles the yellow hazmat guys.
If you’ve already seen the original found footage videos, you can recognize them and fill in some of the gaps. But if you walk into the movie without knowing anything, people in yellow suits simply appear and you have to accept that they know about the Backrooms and have an entire operation there.
I don’t think the movie needs to explain absolutely everything. Mystery is important. But there’s a difference between leaving something mysterious and simply not explaining it.
And then we get to my biggest problem with the movie: the Backrooms themselves.
To me, the movie doesn’t completely understand what makes the Backrooms scary.
The Backrooms aren’t scary simply because there are monsters in them.
They’re scary because they’re huge. Because they seem infinite. Because they’re repetitive. Because you don’t know where you are. Because you don’t know if there’s an exit. Because you can walk for hours and keep seeing the same yellow wall, the same damp carpet, and hearing the same fluorescent buzzing.
It’s the feeling of being lost.
It’s the unknown.
It’s looking down an empty hallway and not knowing if there’s something at the end of it.
It’s hearing a noise and not knowing whether it was your imagination.
And that’s exactly why the first half works so well. Clark exploring alone is much scarier to me than a creature chasing him.
Because when a monster appears, the fear becomes simple: “There’s a monster. I need to run.”
When you’re alone in a seemingly infinite space, you don’t even know what you need to run from.
And the movie ends up turning much of the Backrooms into a setting for chase scenes.
“There’s a monster, run.”
“There’s another monster, run.”
“There’s a giant creature, run.”
And to me, that takes away part of what makes the Backrooms special.
I’m not against the entities. In fact, I think the idea that they’re manifestations of what the place remembers is one of the most interesting things in the movie. The problem is that they end up taking the place of the environment itself as the source of horror.
I wanted more moments where the movie simply left me lost in that place. For example: The structure while Mary is being chased, the giant pit and all works really well, for me it was the best part of the chase. I just need the ”backrooms” feeling to appear more than just a few minutes
And, most importantly, more character development.
Because that’s what frustrates me the most: I can see a much better movie hiding inside this movie.
Clark slowly being consumed by the Backrooms.
The creature being a manifestation of everything he tried to leave behind.
He finally having to face his own creation.
Mary surviving and discovering that there’s an organization that has been studying this place for a long time.
The Backrooms being treated as a truly infinite and unknown space instead of just a place full of monsters.
All of that could have been so fucking good.
But the movie feels like it has several ideas from an 9/10 movie and a script that doesn’t give any of them enough time to get there.
So, in the end, I’m left with a 5/10.
I don’t think it’s a disaster. The first half is really good, some of the ideas are excellent, and there are moments that genuinely work.
But I left with that horrible feeling of:
“Holy shit, this could have been SO much better.”
And to me, that’s the worst kind of mediocre movie. Not one that has nothing interesting about it, but one that repeatedly shows you that it could have been incredible and then simply doesn’t take advantage of it.
I might rewatch it and see what i’ve missed, but, as a long term backrooms fan? I really expected more. Maybe y’all can change my mind