Jason Watches Backrooms (2026)

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:02][music] [music] >> The Backrooms is not a good movie, and I almost feel bad for saying that because the concept is honestly fantastic.

[00:00:20]The Backrooms as internet lore has this strange, eerie, modern myth quality to it. One of those horror ideas that feels like it crawled out of the brains of everyone who has ever gotten lost in a dead mall.

[00:00:34]It should work.

[00:00:36]It should be terrifying. It should feel like reality itself has developed black mold.

[00:00:42]Instead, the movie probably should have been called Chiwetel Ejiofor wanders around a weird place because that communicates basically the same plot.

[00:00:53]And it's a lot more honest.

[00:00:57]In Backrooms, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a man who accidentally stumbles into a strange pocket dimension where reality has glitched. Walls don't make sense.

[00:01:06]Furniture clips into the architecture.

[00:01:09]Rooms repeat endlessly. Objects appear where they shouldn't be. Imagine the Far Lands in Minecraft and you've got God, is that what the next Minecraft movie is going to be about?

[00:01:20]At one point, the character describes the place as like someone explaining a dog to a person who has never seen a dog before and then asking that person to draw a dog.

[00:01:31]Honestly, I like that line.

[00:01:35]It is a genuinely clever way to describe what the Backrooms are supposed to feel like, familiar but wrong.

[00:01:43]And it's probably the most interesting line in the entire movie, which is unfortunate because a single line of dialogue that early in the film should not be doing more work than the entire third act of the movie.

[00:02:02]The first chunk of this film is mostly Chiwetel Ejiofor wandering through rooms, staring at impossible furniture, slowly realizing that things are not right, and occasionally running into something vaguely threatening. It's just like my last trip to IKEA.

[00:02:20]And for a little while, that almost works. The set design is interesting. The atmosphere, well, it has potential. There are moments where the movie brushes up against something unsettling.

[00:02:36]And then, it just keeps going and going and going and going and going like an Energizer Bunny of boredom.

[00:02:49]After what feels like 30 minutes of watching this guy inspect wallpaper like he's considering refinancing it, he eventually enlists the help of two expendable characters to help him map out these backrooms. And I call them expendable because the movie does, too.

[00:03:04]Just without saying it out loud. These are not characters so much as human warning labels. They exist to prove that going deeper into this mysterious glitched dimension is in fact a bad idea. Shocking development, who would have guessed? Oh, hello, there's victim number one and victim number two.

[00:03:22]They're the only two victims in this movie. Well, that and the first guy.

[00:03:25]Three victims in this movie. That's it.

[00:03:28]But at least it does allow this movie to go full found footage for a few minutes.

[00:03:31]Crank down the resolution and save some money on visualizing the special effects.

[00:03:36]And then, when things go predictably sideways as we all knew it was going to, the movie suddenly switches gears and we get a new main character played by Renate Reinsve, and the entire movie begins to feel like somebody accidentally skipped a chapter or two, or several chapters, or possibly the entire part of the story that was supposed to be emotionally compelling.

[00:03:59]Uh, incidentally, I think that the most evil and terrifying thing that this movie did was put Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in one film, and then looked at poor guys like me on the internet and say, "Pah, pronounce that correctly, tubby."

[00:04:17]Thanks, guys.

[00:04:19]This is where the Backrooms really starts to fall apart, because this is not a scary movie.

[00:04:26]It's not a disturbing movie. It's not even especially weird in a way that feels rewarding.

[00:04:33]It is the absolute worst thing that a horror movie can be.

[00:04:40]It is boring.

[00:04:43]And whenever I say it's boring, I don't mean regular boring. I mean this film is prestige boring. The movie keeps acting like it's saying something profound. It gestures vaguely towards psychological breakdown.

[00:04:59]It flirts with ideas about memory, trauma, perception, identity, and I don't know, the inner workings of the human brain, I guess. You can see the movie is trying to convince you desperately that it is deeper than simple people get trapped in spooky rooms.

[00:05:19]The problem is it never communicates those ideas in a way that lands. It is not enough for a movie to stand in the corner wearing glasses and imply that it has themes.

[00:05:31]You have to actually develop them.

[00:05:33]Backrooms seems to believe that if characters look haunted, if they whisper dramatically and wander through enough ugly rooms, the audience will assume that something important is happening.

[00:05:44]But there is a big difference between ambiguity and vagueness.

[00:05:50]Ambiguity invites the audience to think.

[00:05:54]Vagueness makes the audience check their watches to see how much of the movie is left. And believe me, I checked my watch several times.

[00:06:04]Think this movie was my own personal backrooms because I felt trapped in it.

[00:06:09]Wait.

[00:06:11]Is this movie secretly genius?

[00:06:15]Was this movie actually my own backrooms because it was repetitive and it got uglier as it went on and on and oh my god, did this movie trap the audience in their own backrooms?

[00:06:28]No. No, that's stupid. Never mind.

[00:06:31]One of the most frustrating choices in the movie is what happens to Einar character. For much of the film, he is our anchor. He's the person we follow into this nightmare. He's the one trying to understand it, to survive it, to map it and make sense of it for some reason.

[00:06:47]And then about three quarters of the way through the movie, the movie more or less gives up on him and decides, "Hey, what if he's the villain now?"

[00:06:55]And look, that idea could totally work.

[00:06:59]A man trapped in an impossible space for far too long, slowly losing his mind, becoming dangerous, becoming part of the nightmare. That is a really strong horror concept. There is real tragedy there. There's real potential. Watching a sympathetic character gradually unravel inside a place that refuses to obey the simple laws of reality could have been powerful, but we absolutely 100% do not get to watch that happen.

[00:07:31]And that is the problem. By switching the protagonist role over to Renate Reinsve character, the movie cheats us out of that descent. We leave Einar alone in the backrooms and then we circle back later and suddenly the guy is Looney Tunes. He's threatening people with knives. He's tying people to chairs. He's choking people out like we missed an entire semester's course of back story.

[00:07:57]This movie tells us why he changed, but it does not let us experience it and that is a major flop. Because madness and horror is not effective just because someone starts yelling and waving cutlery around. It's effective when we understand the collapse. When we see little compromises, the fear, the exhaustion, the paranoia, the very moment that hope dies. The moment survival turns into obsession, the moment the person that we have cared about for an hour suddenly becomes a person that we are supposed to be afraid of. Instead the back rooms basically said, "Well, anyway, he's crazy now."

[00:08:39]Awesome. Thanks for that.

[00:08:41]That is not character development. That is lazy writing. And it's a shame. It is a real shame because Ejiofor is a terrific actor. He is more than capable of carrying a movie like this, but the script does not give him enough to play beyond confusion, concern, desperation, and then suddenly smash potato stomach eating knife guy. Yes, that is a thing in the movie. Renate Reinsve She's good.

[00:09:10]She's good, but her character arrives too late as a protagonist in the emotional structure of the movie for her to fully take over. She's not bad. The performance is not bad. The problem is the handoff. It's like watching a relay race where the first runner disappears into a hallway and the second runner shows up holding a map and then the movie insists that this was the plan the whole time.

[00:09:34]The structure of this movie is strange and I don't mean strange in a cool, unsettling reality is broken kind of way. I mean, it's strange as in did someone accidentally edit out the middle of the movie strange.

[00:09:45]And then there's the rating issue. Stick with me on this one.

[00:09:49]Backrooms is weirdly light on gore.

[00:09:52]There's a little blood, but nothing terrible. There's very little that I would consider truly disturbing in a visceral way. The movie's not even that especially graphic. There's no nudity, no one's getting their guts ripped out, and it's not especially shocking. And yet, the characters curse a lot in a bunch of scenes that feels weirdly artificial, as though someone realized late in post-production that they needed an R rating and sent the cast back into recording booths to sprinkle in some emergency F bombs.

[00:10:23]Yeah, I I honestly think that they ADR'd the F word into this movie. The movie's standing there like, "Look, look, we're adults. We say the F word. Please don't mistake us for PG-13 liminal horror."

[00:10:35]But [laughter] the profanity does not make the movie more intense. It just makes it awkward in the weirdest way.

[00:10:42]And speaking of bad decisions, the characters in this movie have the survival instincts of a toddler wearing a Batman cape. These people discover what is supposed to be a glitched pocket dimension inside of a furniture store, and instead of immediately backing out, calling the authorities, tying a rope to something, leaving markers, dropping breadcrumbs, spray painting arrows, or doing literally anything a functional adult human being with a working brainstem might do, they just wander right in, mouths open, eyes wide, no plan, no precautions, no sense that getting lost in a glitched IKEA might be an issue. And yes, I understand curiosity. I understand fear, and I understand shock. But at a certain point, when you have walked through the 17th impossible room and seen a chair fused halfway into a wall, maybe you should pause and say, "You know what?

[00:11:45]I'm going to leave a post-it note." But no, these people march forward like lemmings toward a very obvious seaside cliff.

[00:11:54]And the movie honestly needs them to be stupid for this film to work because if they behaved like even moderately cautious adults, the entire film would be over in 10 minutes. "Hey, we found a terrifying reality glitch in a furniture store. So we left, we called someone, and we went home. Roll credits."

[00:12:13]Honestly, it still might have been better than the movie we got. And the sad part is there are things in the backroom that work in isolation. Some of the set design is genuinely effective.

[00:12:23]The image of familiar objects clipped into walls or floors is eerie at first. It captures that uncanny video game glitch feeling pretty well, where the world looks almost normal, but something has gone deeply wrong. A shoe stuck halfway through the floor is creepy the first time you see it.

[00:12:43]A couch melted into a wall can be unsettling.

[00:12:47]A room that repeats when it should not repeat has potential. But the movie runs out of these parlor tricks pretty quickly. There's only so many ways you can show me a shoe stuck in a floor before I say, "Yep, that's another shoe stuck in the floor, all right."

[00:13:02]Eventually, the weirdness becomes wallpaper.

[00:13:05]Literally, in some cases.

[00:13:08]And that is deadly for a movie built almost entirely on atmosphere.

[00:13:13]If your movie is mostly people walking through strange spaces, those spaces got to evolve. The dread needs to deepen.

[00:13:21]The rules need to become more frightening. The characters need to uncover something that changes how we understand the place. But Backrooms mostly just gives us more rooms.

[00:13:32]Different rooms, sure. Weirder rooms, yeah.

[00:13:36]But still just rooms.

[00:13:38]And the ending does not help at all. It feels rushed and tacked on as if the movie knew that we needed some kind of explanation but didn't want to commit to anything too concrete. We get some kind of weird pseudo answer about MRI machines, a vague gesture towards what might have been happening, but nothing satisfying enough to justify the journey. And honestly, I kind of think the movie would have been creepy if they just simply said, "Hey, reality's glitched and we don't know why." That's scarier. That's cleaner. That is more in line with what makes Backrooms frightening in the first place.

[00:14:09]The Backrooms should feel like an error message from God. It should feel like the universe accidentally loaded the wrong file. It should feel like existence has a basement and you were never supposed to find the stairs that led there. But the movie keeps trying to make it about psychology and memory and whatever else is floating around in its thematic junk drawer. And none of it hits with enough force to really matter.

[00:14:33]And then there is the monster because of course there is a monster.

[00:14:38]And this is one of those cases where less should have been so much more because when the creature is hidden in shadow, glimpsed only briefly, or suggested through movement and sound, it has some presence. It feels threatening because your imagination is doing the full-time work. Then the movie shows it way too clearly.

[00:15:00]>> [laughter] >> And unfortunately, once it steps into full light, it stops being terrifying and starts looking like something that would chase you through Pirates of the Caribbean if you got out of your boat.

[00:15:12]There are monsters that benefit from a full reveal.

[00:15:18]This is not one of them. Some creatures should stay in the dark not because they are too horrifying to comprehend, but because the lighting department is doing them a favor.

[00:15:29]By the end, I was not scared. I was not moved. I was not disturbed. I was mostly just tired of the whole thing. And what is the biggest sin here is that I can handle confusing. I can handle slow. I love weird. The problem is is that the Backrooms feels lifeless. It takes a concept that should feel fresh, unsettling, and uniquely born from the internet age and turns it into a dull survival horror drama where people wander, panic, make bad decisions, and occasionally pretend that the movie is way deeper than it actually is.

[00:16:05]Backrooms is a dull, frustrating adaptation of a fantastic horror concept. It is atmospheric for about 10 minutes, confusing for another 20, and then boring for the rest of its runtime. It wants to be psychological. It wants to be a nightmare, but mostly it just feels like getting lost in a haunted furniture outlet with people who refuse to make sensible choices.

[00:16:32]And I swear if I have to watch one more person stare in wonder at a glitched room, I am going to no clip myself directly into traffic. But now I want to know what you thought. Did Backrooms work for you? Did it creep you out? Did you think it was secretly brilliant or did you also spend half the movie thinking, "Please, for the love of God, leave a trail of breadcrumbs, tie a rope to something, do literally anything for self-preservation other than wandering deeper into the cursed furniture dimension."

[00:17:03]Let me know in the comments because I genuinely want to hear your thoughts.

[00:17:06]And also because the algorithm demands tribute. And apparently comment sections are where we now sacrifice our opinions to the digital gods.

[00:17:15]And while you're down there, please hit the like button, share the video with somebody who loves horror, internet lore, creepy pastas, or watching me slowly lose patience with fictional people making bad decisions.

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[00:17:51]So you don't have to.

[00:17:53]You're welcome.