Backrooms (2026) - 9/10

Expectations are dangerous, but even as the opening titles build with an ominous throb, I’m feeling confident that this will live up to the hype. Thrown in at the deep end in a pre-titles teaser, we wake up in the titular rooms. A POV camera leading us around a maze of yellow walls where things aren’t quite right. This uneasy feeling is felt too in the real world in which we meet Clark (Chiwitel Ejiofor), who is in a rut. Separated from his wife, he’s angry and alone. Frustrated in his work. In his life. The rut is deep. So too, unbeknownst to him is his workplace, a sparse furniture store that’s also sparse on customers and reliable power. Not ideal when he’s living there too. There’s a tangible fabricated eeriness, very Lynchian, but this distinctly builds its own world. It is, quite brilliantly, wonderful. As Clark discovers there’s more to his furniture store than meets the eye, we descend with him into a maddening and traumatic half baked world, filled with surreal nightmare fuel, that slowly unfurls with every corner turned, every door traversed. It could all be a visual metaphor for Clark’s mental state, it could be something else. With something this arresting, it almost doesn’t matter. It looks amazing. It sounds amazing. Ejiofor is amazing. Rarely do I get barely half an hour into a film and already know I love it. Compelled to find out what this weird place is, and to prove to his shrink, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who has some trauma of her own, that he’s not nuts. Clark enlists Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) to delve deep into this yellow void. It’s a simple concept brought to life quite incredibly with a mix of that teased VHS POV and widescreen shots that are wildly disorientating. Every frame is gorgeous. A facsimile world, mis-copied, misremembered and misrendered. A dark looping narrative that’s gloriously loose and where “there’s still something off”. For all its inventiveness, it’s got to go somewhere though right and it doesn’t disappoint. Expectations are dangerous, but I needn’t have worried.

9/10