Backrooms
2026
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Instead of a carnival, if the belly of a whole new kind of beast had an abandoned mall as its chambers. Trippy hypnotic horror swallows you into a gradual onset of psychogenic fugue yet by the time it ends, you realize you haven’t even figured out what subgenre to put it under. Yet Backrooms somehow resembles so much of something out of an Adam Neville novel but not quite. Ejiofor locks in, eyes on the target. But, the issue remains as it has been with many of the movies in the horror genre. They first set the premise, make a mental map or a mnemonic system, fill in the design, create this giant and rather than placing the characters inside that design, rather make the design itself all about the characters. With that formula, the sense of immeasurability and incomprehensiveness vanishes, the scope pruned limited. The ‘cosmic’ part of the horror gets boxed into familiar themes like- personal trauma, loneliness, history of abuse, guilt-ridden conscience, letting go of the burden yada yada yada and thus doesn’t remain cosmic at all. The fear of the unknown gets molded into something we quite perfectly know. It’s like a David Cronenberg film, only the surrealism itself gets represented onto the screen vividly. This feature-length version tries too much to make sense of a USP that relished in exactly the opposite of that. P.S.- As a man from Odisha, I can’t fully express how very surprised I was to hear a few Odia words in a Hollywood movie.