August 8, 2026 (Originally posted on personal site)
The Backsho-- I mean BackROOMS Movie Review Thing
So you know how movies have been made about indie games and internet memes and stuff? There was Iron Lung (which I also saw, I found it neat), there may or may not be one for Skibidi Toilet, and a long long time ago they even had one for some person named Fred, but now there’s the Backrooms. What started as a photograph of a place that was about to be renovated into some kind of indoors RC car track became this whole phenomenon about a place that just isn’t quite right, one of those “liminal” spaces.
Then that “liminal” word got thrown around without knowing what it really meant and a bunch of people also started adding a bunch of spooky monsters and random new “layers” with specific rules to them because I don’t know. I feel like the unsettling quality is kept by not just having obvious monsters or just making you think you saw or heard something but you’re never sure, meanwhile everything’s just off enough to be concerning. Not always having lumpy stickmen who sometimes sound like they’re about to fart on a roommate’s door, and not all this “almond water” product placement that got stuck in there for reasons I’m not sure of. Apparently it was a real thing that was in a shark tank once. I don’t think that any sharks wanted it though, they already live in water. I do know about almond milk, but I don’t remember how someone milks nuts aside from some vulgar jokes about terminology.
Anyway, I ended up seeing this movie at some point, largely for the memes but also wondering how they handled it in a feature film, and I came away thinking that this is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen recently, impressive coming from a director who’s only 20 (now 21). Is that the kind of thing someone wants to hear about a supernatural horror and/or suspense movie? Maybe? I mean, they did do a decent job with a lot of the atmosphere being kept, but I also just found a lot of it funny, intentional or not. And I like a bit of comedy with my horror.
So with that, I’m going to pretty much sum up my thoughts and also kinda the plot of this crazy movie. Which means spoilers. If you wanna see this yourself and figure out how scary or funny it is on your own, don’t stray past the divider too far, because I’m about to noclip my thoughts into reality or something.
Last warning before noclip is enabled and the spoilers show up.
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The movie proper starts out with camera footage of this hazmat suit guy running around in the Backrooms, finding some equipment set up and placed in the middle of a room before rambling on about something, then is interrupted by a noise. Turns out a seagull just noclipped in and got knocked out, then it scares the guy again by waking up. The guy then finds some nautical themed things and I start thinking this is the nautical restaurant level, before getting gotten by something we’re not going to see quite yet. Also some other guy is watching this tape.
Cut to the title card. Wow, short movie. Except, no, these two people are making handprints into some fresh concrete. Then a construction vehicle dumps a bunch of house rubble on them. Except, no, that was just a weirdly intercut flashback as this one woman watches this one house get torn down. That lady, Mary, turns out to be the therapist of this one guy, Clark, who runs a furniture store, who’s also had a falling out with his wife and now lives in said furniture store. They have a bit of a roleplay argument, with the therapist acting as his wife, where he also explains how he’s a FUCKING ARCHITECT but is stuck running the furniture store for reasons.
He then returns to said store, Captain Clark’s, to film a cheap local commercial where he’s wearing a bad pirate outfit, complete with a poorly strapped-on peg leg from a chair while also handling a crutch in order to not just be hopping around, before sitting in and breaking a flimsy chair. According to the camera guy, he should apparently be wearing a sultan outfit instead, which would solve the whole needing a crutch while wearing a taped on chair leg thing. Clark also hires an electrician to look at why the lights are being weird at night, finding nothing really out of the ordinary aside from a usually confusing breaker box. You gotta label those things.
Meanwhile, Mary is having intermittent flashbacks and staring into space and such about her troubled childhood, which I guess inspired her to become a therapist? This is just kinda intercut throughout for a bit I think, also she has a bit of concrete with her child handprint in it salvaged from the torn down house. Also there’s some self-help audiobook, on actual cassette tape because Audiobible Dot Gov or whatever didn’t exist back then in the 1990s, or at least the early part of it this movie takes place in. Back with Captain Clark, he’s sleeping in his display bed, going between watching what’s apparently Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (another weird movie I’ve seen) and also a commercial for his cowboy-themed rival in the furniture business, before he’s finally compelled to check out the basement and eventually figure out the deal with the electricity. He goes downstairs, shuts off all the power, and still sees a bit of light coming from a wall. He ends up going through the wall in full noclip and finds a whole pile of furniture in an expansive yellow room with corridors leading off wherever.
At this point I’m expecting him to pull out a measuring tape and figure out how much money he can make off this free real estate like in Barbarian (I also found that movie entertaining), but he just ends up running deeper into the place for a bit, finding a multi-lingual standee of a caveman, a hidden stash with a bag containing all sorts of floppies and a name tag of some secret company employee, and a tunnel that leads to another room with a chair pit and a wacky Wonka perspective hallway to a tiny door. He hears a noise coming from the previous room with the tunnel and starts freaking out, going through the tiny door and into the Chocolate Room-- No, wait, it just loops back to the furniture pile. He panics as he can’t find the door out, but it turns out he just felt up the wrong part of the wall and ends up back in his normal basement. He also RUNS BACK INTO THE SPOOKY ZONE just to grab a stool as a makeshift weapon. Maybe NOW he’ll realize he found a great supply of furniture to undercut his rivals?
However, there’s also just some guy in a dark room, the same from before, watching a tape from when this random furniture guy entered the Backrooms.
Clark returns to Mary in her office to explain what he’s found and attempt to not look crazy in front of someone who could easily send him to a place where crazy people are contained. He’s even drawn up a map because he’s a FUCKING ARCHITECT, and it soon becomes apparent that he’s been in and out several times already. He grabs the camera guy and the girlfriend and/or roommate of him from before to get video evidence, since this is the 1990s as it’s been established and there aren’t camera phones yet, just camcorders. The basement now just has a whole map so far and stuff looted from the Backrooms, and at this point it’s less “why isn’t he selling all this free furniture at insanely low prices” and more “this is such a major tourist attraction waiting to happen”. He even mentions there being a pool somewhere. Seriously, get on the marketing even if you’re really bad at it. Especially that you’re bad at it.
At this point the movie becomes something like Blair Witch but in an office. It’s the camera footage from the camera guy thinking he’s tripping balls and finding a reversed “POTS” sign funny. At some point they have a great idea to lower him with a rope into a sloped hallway that ends up in a room full of piles of laundry, which includes his favorite anti-apartheid shirt he was wearing before, but then there’s something else down there. This is of course where the whole thing falls apart, because the guy manages to climb back up the shaft, but the rope’s not all the way back up, and they fail to get both the rope or the pants it’s attached to off in time, resulting in something dragging him back down once said entity tugs on it. And then since the rope’s tied to a non-embedded bed, that also gets pulled down and knocks everyone else into the laundry room. Clark ends up grabbing the camera, and after a bunch of running through locations, including some crusty pool maintenance type rooms and a room full of Christmas cheer, from this one thing and also other entities briefly seen and heard, he hears the roommate girl on the other side of a wall and leaves the camera in the corner of the bathroom-type place he’s in, but then someone or someTHING picks it up.
Back to normal modern cameras, it’s time for a flashback with Mary as a kid with her crazy mom, who’s afraid of everything outside, or maybe she’s encountered the Backrooms at some point and thinks they’re out to get her. Honestly either or at this point. Waking up after the dream house starts imploding from the temporally-displaced wrecking crew, she gets a message on her answering machine from Clark, which prompts her to go to the now-clearly-abandoned furniture store and discover the entrance to the Backrooms when a fly goes through it, which at this point the doorway is reminding me of how the doorway to the third dimension in that one Simpsons was marked.
She steps through, and we see that part of the Backrooms has been thoroughly looted, with the entrance furniture pile gone among other things, and she makes her way to a mural clearly made by a someone who’s lost their mind and provided the usual environmental storytelling as seen in games and things based on this, and also including a shadow pirate in the middle. It turns out this is the product of Clark, who’s just hanging out in a nearby hallway, and he says to not be afraid of him or whatever’s about to show up, all the while the same fly from earlier is just sitting on the lady’s shoulder, then Clark straight up puts her in a chokehold.
After an unconscious flashback to her mom ending up in the insane asylum hospital place, Mary wakes up at a dinner table and tied to a chair, surrounded by liminal humans or something, with odd proportions and varying faces with different numbers of facial features. Clark is opposite her after setting the table, explaining how normal this place is, including how he can just stab this fat guy sitting at the table in the neck, claiming it feels good and also how these fake people are essentially furniture (which he would know as a furniture pirate guy), before tearing into his belly and pulling out a bunch of white goop he claims is edible, leaving some on a plate for the lady, who can’t even try it if she wanted to because her hands are literally tied.
At this point I’m jumping ahead a bit after where I looked up a query like “what does the backrooms man taste like” just to bring up a comment on a Reddit post saying something along the lines of “The Backrooms came up with this guy based on how he ate a whole cake on his birthday and now his clone is just full of cake. He is the cake man.” And then I found a video about this guy attempting to come up with the goop as a reproduced food item and coming to a similar conclusion of it being sorta cake-ish I think. Looking further into this later, apparently movie commentary from the director indicates it’s more like a bit of gelatinized sushi rice that’s gone off a bit after sitting out in the sun.
Back to the movie, Clark also scalps this red-haired woman-like being and shoves the hair on Mary like a bad wig, and it just looks hilarious because she just looks more annoyed than scared with this giant red hair on. Also there’s just a head in the fridge, not explained whether it’s the actual human head from the roommate or a weird clone of her, but at this point it doesn’t matter much. Then they return to the roleplay session from earlier, with Mary again posing as his ex-wife and for all we know also wearing the hair from a clone of her, and this time she goes off on the guy, explaining how he blames his terrible routine life on everything else but himself, before countering how he’s a FUCKING ARCHITECT with how he’s his own FUCKING BRAIN. She also throws off the wig by jerking her head over to the side in a scene that looked weirdly cut as if they had to actually take a moment to pull the wig off between takes before cutting back. Clark finally agrees to cut the ropes off Mary, when the scalped woman-esque being suddenly runs away into the dead end corner of the wacky dinner room, screaming while running into a wall. This random lamp guy who’s been in the background is near that corner and keeps flicking his lamp on and off.
The one being from before has finally shown up, and it turns out it’s based on Captain Clark, including being dressed as a pirate like he was in the commercial, and also stretched out much larger and taller. This being decides to pay the whole “eating liminal people” back in kind by taking a big bite of shoulder from its inspiration, Clark himself, who is full of crunchy red goop like people usually are. It also looks like a pose referencing that one painting where the giant guy is eating another smaller guy. Mary then books it past more wacky architecture, including a half-realized suburb and a probably actually bottomless pit, before ending up in a copy of the furniture store.
The pirate monster of course catches up while she checks the front door that opens right into a wall, and I swear I’ve seen real life architecture non-planning result in that sort of thing, and Mary stumbles over a bunch of stuff including some kind of gas trap. She also breaks the entity’s peg leg, which is its actual leg, meaning this bootleg of a person managed to get a detail better than the actual thing. She then gives it a hand… print, as in she’s been carrying the handprint concrete this whole time and bashes the monster’s face in until that piece crumbles. At this point I’m also realizing that when the liminal people are attacked in the head, there’s some blood, but they’re also made of cake-like goop through most of their body? Maybe it’s a scenario kinda like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat who has a skin mask with blood on top of a skull head.
The therapist, who’s looking like she’ll need even more therapy herself at this point, squeezes through a gap that the pirate monster can’t follow through, and on the other side is a hazmat suited person spraying more gas at her, with other hazmat people hanging around stopping the one guy. She gets dragged out of the Backrooms and into some facility with lots of people staring at her in some kinda garage. After scanning her to make sure she’s not an imposter, she’s cleaned up and sat down for an interview with the one guy from earlier who was watching the tapes. There was also a brief scene earlier where he was watching a Captain Clark’s commercial as if he was realizing something, I forget exactly when that was.
He asks her to confirm some details including where the furniture store was she noclipped into and who she was looking for. He then explains that the company he works for used to make MRI machines until they accidentally found the Backrooms somehow, and then became one of those top secret research companies focusing on their findings following that, being obsessed like those kinds of operations tend to be. They also kind of try to explain, or at least guess, at what the Backrooms are, some kind of thing that attempts to remember or recreate from vague description what real life is. Then it shows recreations of places from her life being embedded in the Backrooms. And then Mary was a cake monster. Or rather cloned into one.
But wait, it gets better. It turns out there’s special footage added back in theaters. I’ll sum it up real quick. It takes place a little before the events of the movie if you’ve been paying attention to the occasional posted dates. The first half is extremely scientific, as in it’s just documenting these hazmat scientists discovering a set of signs increasingly embedded in the floor, and proceeding to measure the fuck out of them. Meanwhile, I’m just dying here because this is the most accurate depiction of science I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. Real science is so much fucking measuring shit, with the occasional experiments which are then measured as well. They go on and on with this because they’re documenting it in excruciating detail, as they’re supposed to do because this is their job. Details like what material the signs are made of, how deep they’re embedded, their relative scale to each other with measuring tape and scales and markers in photographic evidence with additional diagrams, EVERYTHING. This goes on for several more minutes, culminating in an experiment to prove a hypothesis of a secret embedded sign through a wall theorized by extrapolating the positions of the others, which is confirmed. Hell yeah, archaeology!
Then of course it takes a turn to the stupid “usual horror movie character mindset” where they ditch the whole “actual scientific procedure and safety measures” thing just to go further into a spooky zone, after one of the guys spots a hand stuck on the inside of the wall they cut open to find the secret sign, which I also have to note the insides of the walls do have that pink fiberglass insulation, which more than justifies their hazmat suits. They creep onward and discover it’s just part of a mannequin that’s noclipped into the wall, and proceed further into the spooky dark area where there’s somehow a TV running, and yeah, guess what happens to these not-so-scientists soon after, given what happens at the start of the actual movie and throughout. It’s not a good thing for them at least.
As it turns out, the director behind this movie has been making short films all about the Backrooms on a YouTube channel this whole time, including the breakout short film called “Found Footage”, which I somehow didn’t realize before because I don’t pay much attention to specific things related to Backrooms lore, just that there’s a bunch of people who insist that there’s a million levels with random monsters and product placement in them, but this movie and the YouTube channel seem to stick more to the classic “yellow room” kind with some occasional extra bits including sometimes weird monsters like the occasional aforementioned lumpy stickmen (though not those specifically in the movie). So I figure this extra bit of movie is meant to tie back into that as well.
I did also decide to look at some videos on that channel as well. One of them related to the Backrooms is called “Presentation” and it’s mostly some corporate plan to use the Backrooms for cargo storage and also residential housing. Because that only seems natural, finding this alien dimension of infinite wacky hallways and maybe spooky monsters and deciding “let’s just put a bunch of stuff and people here for business reasons”. Related to fun concepts like “let’s use Hell for infinite power or a garbage incinerator” and whatnot. And another called “Lighting and Tile Survey” is more intensely scientific measuring of, guess what, the lighting and tiles in one of the more “standard” areas.
Long story short, this has been one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while for various reasons, largely including just finding things hilarious that I’m probably not meant to and also the whole “horror character syndrome” that comes up sometimes. And even so, it’s a decent take on the concept and abstract suspense/horror type movie in general. I recommend it, including the part about sitting through actual scientific type shit as the bonus.
Disclaimer about my taste in movies once again, I have vaguely low standards when it comes to movies and my recommendations are based largely on “did I find this entertaining or not”. Anyway, time to go be hungry for a man made of cake or something. Or maybe there’s other Backrooms with people made of different foods, like some kinda pizza man. Much more appetizing than real human flesh. Imagine now thinking about this kinda thing makes it real in the Backrooms, we could end up with a whole restaurant chain of delicious liminal men. Maybe there’s some Backrooms version of Henry’s Kitchen, no idea what would be cooked up in that. Or maybe that’s where it already is.
Also I should remember to disable noclip.
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Oh, right, I have to turn it off while cheats are still on.
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