Backrooms. What a strange film. What a uniquely unsettling experience. You’ll probably ask if I was satisfied? But conventional satisfaction requires a film that falls within a familiar framework. Backrooms is trying to be something else entirely. It asks whether you can surrender yourself to its distortions: in storytelling, in visuals, in sound. It aims to unsettle, disorient. And just when the handheld camerawork gets a bit too much (I’ve always struggled to enjoy found-footage horror), the film retreats into long, static frames. Utter stillness. A chance to breathe. But only for a bit… just like with life itself?

I think the temptation with a film like Backrooms is to solve it like a puzzle. To figure out what is happening, where these spaces are, what they mean… and just what the hell seems to be going on here. I suspect that’s a mistake. The film feels less interested in being understood than in leading you into strange places, like Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) does those videographers. So, let it.

Observe the unsettling interiors, the enchantingly bizarre geometries, the distorted memories. The disturbing notion that memories can be altered and fed on. Soak in the terrifying mystery of these rooms, the strange ways in which objects exist here. Perhaps there’s something dreadful around the corner. Perhaps not.

I did feel like I was wandering untethered through somebody’s subconscious… Perhaps all the play with architecture is on account of Clark being a failed architect? Is this where he’s been practising his stifled talent? Is that why he seems to feel safest in its deepest corner? I found myself soaking in the film through ideas of childhood trauma, conditioning, failed ambition and regrettable choices. Perhaps all of these are like the backrooms: vast, complicated, and seemingly impossible to escape from.

Fascinatingly, both Clark and Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) seem to be perfectly normal, with respectable jobs and stable lives. Like any of us. But peel away the first layer, and you’re faced with fear, insecurity, regret. It’s a lot like the backrooms, actually. At first, it feels familiar, normal… almost cozy and safe. But the deeper you venture, the stranger it gets. The more you travel, the more unpredictable it gets. I found myself thinking of Inception, where the deeper dream levels are full of chaos.

So, wait, is this how you’re supposed to see the film? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What does it matter? I’m saying this is how I saw it. Art, after all, exists to provoke feeling, introspection, and there are many ways of achieving that. Films like Backrooms aren’t interested in easy explanations. They remain deliberately open to interpretation, and they do this by prioritising mood and sensation over straight answers. They encourage you to sit with the discomfort. As you wander its corridors, I suspect Backrooms will be quite delighted if you find yourself wandering through the corridors of your own subconscious too.

And somewhere, as you lose yourself in these strange, endless rooms, in the infinite subconscious spaces we so dread walking into, the film asks if you are ready to confront a terrible possibility: that the monster we are searching for everywhere may have been us all along.