Backrooms (2026) Review
Liminal Spaces I don’t understand it, I can’t describe it…but I can’t stay away
Overview
A strange doorway appears in the basement of a furniture showroom.
R | US | 1h 51m | Horror, Mystery, and Science Fiction
There’s something uncanny about liminal spaces…how they hold you between what was and what’s about to be: both in a physical and psychological sense. There’s a strange suspended feeling of being in transition and dealing with decay.
We follow Clark, (Chiwetel Ejiofor) an alcoholic store manager watching both his relationships and his furniture store quietly decay. His life feels stalled out, caught in that same in between state. And the film mirrors this life externally…the store itself becoming a kind of mausoleum for forgotten lives and discarded memories. We also see this in Mary’s (Renate Reinsve) character, Clark’s therapist who is trying to help her patient with his troubles. However, I personally find her to be a little underutilized within the film. The film tries its best to give us personal angles to connect her character but it falls flat.
The spaces start to feel like echoes of places they once knew but can’t fully recall anymore. It raises an unsettling question: do these places ever really disappear, or do they just fade just waiting for them to stumble back into them? When the characters wander down the endless, looping corridors that feel eerily familiar but also completely alien, I was completely entrenched in the world building. There’s a fear of recognition without truly understanding. That being somewhere you should know but don’t. It echoes the loneliness we feel from the characters. The isolation they both have.
Clark has been haunted by his past, and in a moment of exposition from Mary, we discover that he is merely running away and making excuses for his actions. Throughout the film, he is the one who causes harm to others. His actions have severe consequences, but he remains determined to pursue his own path of exploration.
It settles into the psychological aspects, and I appreciate that the real tension arises from the design: both of the space and Clark’s unraveling mind. The space is where I wanted the film to really build upon. It’s foundation of eerie mania is ripe to be explored but we just never discover it. I will say it’s incredible to witness Kane Parsons’s first directorial feature film, and I’m eagerly anticipating his future projects. The longer I sit with the discomfort and the film the more it started to get under my skin.
