Backrooms Turns The Big Screen Into A Camera-Fed Maze Trap

Lede

Backrooms wants to bend reality, but sometimes it mostly bends the cinema screen into a camera feed having a bad day.

Words used

Found footage – a film style that pretends the camera material was recorded by characters inside the story.
Aspect ratio – the shape of the image on screen, such as wide cinema framing, boxed footage or a smaller camera-feed image inside the cinema frame.
Liminal horror – horror built around empty in-between spaces, like corridors, offices, malls and rooms that feel familiar but wrong.

Hermit Off Script

Backrooms is clearly targeted to blow your mind and make you doubt your own reality, a bit like Exit 8 does when it turns repetition into paranoia. That part I respect. I like films that make the floor feel suspicious. But then it starts with that poor-quality camera footage, almost like a damaged recording pulled from a cursed archive. My first thought was: please, don’t let the whole film be like this. I already had that first-person view problem with Crime 101, except there the image still looked clean, sharp and deliberate. Here it feels lower, smaller, more trapped inside the recording device itself, as if the cinema screen paid full rent but the film brought a camera feed with trauma. It is better quality than Obsession, yes, but it still has that shrunken feeling, that not-quite-full-screen, not-quite-cinema look. And this is where I start getting annoyed. Why do interesting films now sometimes look prepared as recovered footage first and cinema second? Did they not afford better cameras? That would be one answer, but probably not the right one. The film has A24 behind it, a known cast and a theatrical release. So maybe the rough image is not poverty. Maybe it is a choice. But if it is a choice, then let us call it what it is: the new ritual where cinema borrows the language of broken recordings, surveillance clips and internet horror files, then asks us to admire the damage as atmosphere. I don’t mind dirt on the image when it carries meaning. I do mind when the big screen starts looking like it is apologising for being big.

P.S. The camera style could have worked better as a real on-screen frame, not just rough footage. Add timestamps, signal errors, battery warnings, corrupted file names, room data or audio spikes. Then the camera becomes part of the horror, not only a dirty filter over it. Poor quality creates mood. Information inside the frame creates tension.

Backrooms | Official Trailer | A24

Backrooms: The Maze That Forgot It Was On A Cinema Screen

A therapist enters the Backrooms after a patient vanishes into a strange dimension of yellow corridors, humming lights and rooms that look like an office building died without telling HR. Directed by Kane Parsons and released by A24, the film expands the viral internet horror idea into a full cinema experience.

The core idea is strong: reality slips, space stops behaving, and every hallway feels like it has been waiting for you to make one bad decision. The issue is not the Backrooms concept. That works. It is the screen language. The film moves between traditional cinema and camera-footage horror, and sometimes the big screen starts feeling less like a window into a nightmare and more like a projection of someone else’s recording device. Not fully opened as cinema, but viewed through a recording device. A screen inside a screen. A maze seen through equipment instead of space.

That can be a valid choice. Found footage can make horror feel immediate, dirty and alive. But when the image keeps reminding you of the camera more than the place, the endless rooms start to feel smaller. Good horror. Strange screen manners. Someone opened the wrong door, and cinema walked in holding a camcorder.

Cast and credits

Director: Kane Parsons
Writers: Will Soodik, Kane Parsons, with IMDb full credits also listing Roberto Patino in writing credits
Genre: Horror, mystery thriller, science fiction, found-footage horror
Main cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Composer: Kane Parsons and Edo Van Breemen, according to IMDb full credits
Production company/studio: A24, Chernin Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment, Atomic Monster
Runtime: 110 minutes on Rotten Tomatoes and The Numbers; IMDb lists 105 minutes
Release year and platform: 2026, theatrical release by A24

What does not make sense

A film can be listed in a 1.85:1 theatrical format and still feel as if the image has been filtered through camera-feed habits.
The story wants endless rooms, but the framing sometimes makes the world feel smaller, not stranger.
Found footage is meant to feel immediate, but poor image texture can also become a shortcut for depth.
A $10 million horror film does not need to look expensive, but it does need to look intentional.
Cinema keeps begging people to leave the sofa, then serves them visual grammar trained by recovered footage, streaming and online horror clips.
If the rough camera is part of the fear, fine. If it is there because audiences have been trained to accept any blurry rectangle as authenticity, less fine.

Sense check / The numbers

The Numbers lists Backrooms as opening wide in the US on May 29, 2026, in 3,442 theatres, with a maximum count of 3,565 theatres. [The Numbers]
Rotten Tomatoes lists the film as 110 minutes, rated R, with a Flat 1.85:1 aspect ratio. [Rotten Tomatoes]
Rotten Tomatoes showed 88 per cent from 247 critic reviews and 74 per cent from 5,000+ verified audience ratings when checked. [Rotten Tomatoes]
The Numbers lists a $10,000,000 production budget, an $81,402,424 domestic opening weekend and $135,057,858 domestic total by June 7, 2026. [The Numbers]
IMDb lists the runtime as 105 minutes, while Rotten Tomatoes and The Numbers list 110 minutes, leaving a 5-minute public listings gap. [IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, The Numbers]

The sketch

Scene 1: The camera-feed premiere
Panel shows a cinema audience watching a wide cinema screen. The Backrooms footage appears smaller inside the screen, with black space around it, like an old camcorder recording projected too small for the room.
Dialogue:
Audience: “Where’s the rest of the screen?”
Studio: “That’s the experience.”

Scene 2: The budget doorway
Panel shows a producer sitting in a director’s chair inside a yellow Backrooms corridor. A camera points towards a blurry figure in the maze. A door is labelled “Budget $10 million”.
Dialogue:
Producer: “Make it gritty.”
Audience: “Can we afford better cameras?”
Camera: “The internet loves this.”

Scene 3: The camcorder was the plan
Panel shows an old camcorder sitting on a throne in a yellow Backrooms corridor. Signs read “Recovered footage”, “Low light authenticity” and “Audience conditioned”. Three seats face the camcorder: cinema, home sofa and laptop.
Dialogue:
Cinema: “We were built for this.”
Home sofa: “We got used to it.”
Camcorder: “I trained you all.”

What to watch, not the show

The cinema screen absorbing camera-feed grammar until degraded footage becomes a visual language.
Horror economics, where low budget can mean creative freedom or convenient roughness.
Internet-born IP becoming theatrical product without always changing its native format.
Audiences accepting degraded image quality when it arrives wrapped as authenticity.
Studios learning that a niche online myth can be safer than an expensive original bet.
The slow shift from cinema as spectacle to cinema as a large preview window for streaming.

The Hermit take

The idea deserves a cinema screen.
The format keeps asking to be a camera feed.

Keep or toss

Verdict: Keep / Toss.
Keep the reality-bending premise and the liminal horror.
Toss the habit of making cinema look like a damaged recording unless the frame itself tells the story.

Sources

IMDb listing: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26657236/
A24 official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjdiohVOik
Rotten Tomatoes listing: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/backrooms
The Numbers box office page: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Backrooms-(2026)
The Guardian review and release details: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/may/27/backrooms-review-kane-parsons-icily-disturbing-horror-rewrites-the-genre-rulebook