Backrooms Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Backrooms Blu-ray Movie Review

Citizen Kane.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 5, 2026

Here's a little tip for those who frequent the wild and woolly world wide web: be careful what you post online, you never know who (or how many) will be reading it. Case in point: a seemingly innocent if piquant description accompanying a photo of an empty furniture store under renovation initially posted anonymously on 4chan (ask your kids if you need to) stated:

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.

That evocative paragraph ended up going viral, evidently unnoticed by the original poster, leading to a whole online community (cult?) posting about the mysterious labyrinth called Backrooms. Those who per the above suggestion had to consult younger folks about 4chan and who may also have questions about "noclip" and/or the very term Backrooms might want to seek out a certain younger folk in particular named Kane Parsons, since he is the acknowledged Mayor (?) of Backrooms. Parsons was a mere 16 years old when he created a YouTube video about a guy falling (actually noclipping, but I digress) into the titular space (based on the photo of the abandoned furniture store), a video which also went viral and soon led to an entire YouTube series. Parsons was "all grown up" (again - ?) to the venerable age of 20 when he was tasked by A24 with directing this feature film version, and though he had become ancient at 21 in the interim, he became the youngest director in history to have a film take the top spot at the box office. Backrooms is an undeniably unsettling experience, but as to what it all "means", some curmudgeons may feel things are more subliminal than the oft repeated use of "liminal" as a general descriptor for the project's ambience in the supplements included on this disc.

Backrooms begins with "found footage" that deliberately apes the above linked YouTube video, with a panicked guy stumbling through the Backrooms fearful that someone or something is chasing him. Parsons and his screenwriting team have already dropped a hint or two even before the supposedly glitching video is seen with a quick "masthead" of sorts introducing one of Parsons' own contributions to Backrooms lore, a perhaps nefarious company called Async. That part of the story is alluded to interstitially if opaquely throughout the rest of the tale until a brief and still probably inadequate "Moishe the Explainer" bit toward the end of the film.

The "main" part of the story involves a hapless divorced man named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who has not been able to realize his dreams of becoming an architect, and instead is the owner of an obviously unsuccessful furniture store. Clark has also recently been divorced, and he's in mandated therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a woman who is pretty quickly shown to be experiencing her own form of post traumatic stress disorder. Clark is actually holed up in the store as his "residence", and he keeps experiencing electrical phenomena where the lights flicker and his television does odd things. A mysterious breaker in a panel downstairs seems to be pointing to something odd, and Clark ultimately sees a glow emanating between a seam in the drywall in the basement. He's shocked to discover he can pass through (AKA "noclip", you can thank me later) the wall, which provides him a perhaps unwanted entry into the Backrooms.

Suffice it to say Clark is able to convince two acolytes to join him in the Backrooms in order to get "evidence" they exist when Mary understandably thinks Clark is losing his already tenuous grip on reality. Without posting too many details, Mary ends up getting suspicious when Clark more or less disappears, and you can probably guess what she ends up doing. The result is both terrifying and kind of darkly comic as Clark and Mary start "role playing" in a distorted, surreal environment that is nonetheless ostensibly based on reality. That leads to the final vignette with Mary and the aforementioned Async entity in the form of employee Phil (Mark Duplass), who has been seen intermittently throughout the film.

In her occasionally high tech job, my wife had to attend a training session on the "dangers of artificial intelligence", and one of the really fascinating experiments the moderator did was to ask a chatbot to repeatedly duplicate a photo of a field. Just a field. Many of the copies were, well, picture perfect, but then suddenly there were completely weird additions and/or omissions, including a vintage John Deere tractor, with the imagery becoming increasingly distorted and removed from the original. Parsons and his writing team seem to be suggesting that the Backrooms function in somewhat the same way, attempting to "replicate" reality, or at least memories of reality, but "glitching" in the process, much as memories themselves fade and morph over time. There's also the idea surging through the film that trauma creates its own distorted "space" that then takes on a life of its own. It's an inherently fascinating premise, but I'm not sure it's developed coherently enough in the long run, but I suspect that's what sequels may be made for.

Backrooms Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Backrooms is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of A24 with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.85:1. The IMDb states Backrooms was captured with Red Komodo (found footage) and Sony CineAlta Venice 2 cameras and had a 4K DI. The film is deliberately and probably appropriately schizophrenic in its presentational proclivities, with the opening found footage and then later supposed commercial for Clark's store and then still later more found footage featuring Clark and his cohort all in recurrently glitching, interlaced "VHS quality" closer to 1.31:1. This lo fi material, which is intentionally distressed looking, helps to make sudden post credits shift to the wider aspect ratio and "true" high definition to be all the more remarkable even in SDR and 1080, though the change is arguably even more impressive in A24's 4K release. As arguably problematic as Parsons' kind of odd decision to cut away to various open skied areas on a few occasions may be in terms of consistently providing the claustrophobia the story almost depends upon, many of those moments are really impressive looking. While a lot of the Charles material is obviously designed to be almost drowning in yellows, Mary's material kind of varies between blues and browns until she, too, enters the dreaded Backrooms. Detail levels are generally excellent, though the Backrooms material is often so deliberately skewed with odd angles and bizarre lighting that there can be variances.

Backrooms Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Backrooms has an unsettlingly immersive Dolby Atmos track that makes the most of those above mentioned fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, as well as what almost amount to near startle effects with the various glitching and static filled "VHS" quality segments. Parsons, who is evidently one of those multi-hyphenates, also contributed to a labyrinthine sound design that (in what has been a rather odd recurring motif in several recent films in my review queue) has musique concrète tendencies, with odd warping tape sounds and other menacing low frequency washes entering the fray. Even the intentionally cloistered environment of the Backrooms provides really well designed directionality and engagement of the traditional surround channels. Dialogue (including an absolutely fascinating glut of foreign languages, which may be of interest to subtitle readers) is rendered without any issues. Optional English subtitles are available.

Backrooms Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Everything Must Go Bonus Footage (HD; 16:07) offers additional ostensible footage from an Async exploration.


• Filmmaker Commentary with Kane Parsons, Edward J. Douglas, Eugenio Battaglia and Edo Van Breemen


• Building the Backrooms Featurette (HD; 25:50) offers some background and production information.


• FVX & Scene Breakdown with Kane Parsons (HD; 15:58) features Parsons discussing various VFX including his experience with Blender.


• Prop Tour with Kane Parsons (HD; 1:45) is a funny look at a, well, backroom.


• VFX Breakdown - Opening Scene (HD; 5:24) has an optional commentary by Ed Douglas and Calvin Romaine.


• VFX Breakdown - Den Descent (HD; 2:06) has an optional commentary with Douglas and Romaine.

This comes in A24's traditional DigiPack with art cards and a slipcover.

Backrooms Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For any elders still scrambling to understand some of the terms outlined above, here's another one to chew on (pun intended): creepypasta. Hint: it is not that gluten free slop, and, yes, that's a joke, probably. If not fully realized, Backrooms is still an astounding debut feature from an incredibly talented young creator, and if certain questions are left unanswered (even for young folks), there's still a palpably spooky mood this film creates. The film at least in its setting if not its content will probably invariably remind some of Severance, even if that series' office is considerably more antiseptic than what's on display here (creator Dan Evans has acknowledged the influence of the Backrooms legend on the series, speaking of people who might see an internet post). Technical merits are solid and this is the relatively rare release from A24 that comes with quite a few supplements, all of which are very enjoyable. Recommended.