Tags: blog, film, horror, essential, 2026
Author: KickingK
Date: Monday September 28th, 2026
Giddily exciting
Working in retail for most of my adult life, I'm extremely familiar with the kind of empty, or useless space, that now gets referred to as 'liminal space'. Empty, featureless corridors that serve no use other than to connect two fire doors. An extra, unused store room or office space for a business that's moved into a building slightly too big for it's usage. Weird gaps above, below or beside the tacked on facade of the shop and the actual structural shell of the building it's in.
And as a life long player of video games, I'm also intimately familiar with 3D video game architecture. The kind of architecture that's designed to mimic or evoke real world spaces, but with the intention of providing a space to play in, rather than a space to live or work in. That disconnect of intention resulting in a kind of 'uncanny valley' effect, where everything looks kind of real, but also feels just slightly off.
Backrooms combines these two aesthetics superbly. Mostly set in a kind of hybrid empty retail/conference/hotel/warehouse space that hasn't been designed for any of those purposes, but evokes that form anyway. The link to video games made explicit via the way that furniture and furnishings 'glitch' through the architecture like a buggy first person game. The makers of backrooms lean into this sense of unease completely and wholeheartedly, basing everything around the feeling that something isn't quite right.
This extends to the lives of the characters. Both Chiwetel Ejiofor's Clarke (who finds the near infinite backroom) and Renate Reinsve's Mary (his therapist, who sets out to find him and bring him back) have lives that are holding patterns, going nowhere. They both look like one thing, but something isn't quite right. They're the space where a person should be, a gap in the shell of a life, missing the purpose that would fill their shape.
The result is not only a sense of profound dread, but also one of comfort and familiarity. Nostalgia, almost. As I say, I'm familiar with these spaces, or at least the concept of them. I'm familiar with these lives. Most of us have been in a dead end job, or without a job at all, lacking purpose or direction. The trap with these situations is how easy it is to stay in them. How comforting it is to sit still in our own entropy. How still and peaceful that empty space is.
This, along side We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow have created a genre of modern horror where the terror is as comforting and beguiling as it is horrifying.
Maybe this means that even the most existential dread we can conjure still feels strangely personal and comforting, compared to the impersonal, planet-burning reality we actually live in. Or maybe it's about the way that algorithms and marketing constantly try to personalise, tailor and individualise our experiences but never do so in a human way. The 'uncanny valley' gap between a person enthusiastically recommending their new favourite thing, and an algorithm constantly trying to sell you whatever slop it thinks will keep you on a platform for thirty seconds longer. The latter mimicking the former, creating a slick, grotesque simulacrum of culture.
Either way, Backrooms contains enough ambiguity to allow anyone to pour their own thoughts into the movie. It invites the viewer to stare at it. To look hard at the monsters we create, and not just sit passively in their view.
