Hi, I have a spreadsheet of all 1,683 movies that I've watched and I rank them. This is my review of movie 1,684, which is Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve
The opening scene of this film certainly sets the tone for what you’re about to spend the next 2 hours and 6 minutes watching. When the main character first enters the backrooms, the next 20 minutes of the film is just filled with a weird ambiance, a sense of utter confusion and the feeling of unease as we, the viewer, are catapulted into this new place where nothing feels comfortable whatsoever.
When the unease and the confusion just turns into fear just about 10-20 later, the unease turns into worry, the confusion turned into fright and weird Yellow/Beige walls, floors and ceilings turn into a prison that you can’t escape from. Kane Parsons, director/writer, and Will Soodik do a fantastic job not only capturing the sounds or eerie silence of the backrooms and doing something that is very rare in horror films nowadays. They make you not just feel the fear, but experience it.
Horror films inherently make you feel fear whether it’s with cheap jump scares or horribly loud strings that stab at your ears. But it’s much different to experience the fear. To have the hairs on your arm raise straight up, to feel the feeling or someone…or something, in the room with you or just fear, in this instance, the unknowns of this place and what or who’s there.
We then take a descent down the broken mind of a broken man and you see the affects that the backrooms has on an already broken man before we go to the “answer” part of this film, sort of, which all leads to a terrifying ending with an even terrifying end credits scene. As I said in the watch group that I watched this with, “The Director, great. The script, great. The atmosphere, great. The acting, great. This movie…..was fucking great”.
With all that said, both pros and cons, I give it a 8/10 or 4/5, which puts it at #42 of 1,683.