The Emptiness of the Endless Maze: Why A24’s "Backrooms" is a Massive Waste of Time

 It was bound to happen eventually. Hollywood has officially run out of comic books, board games, and nostalgic toy lines to adapt, so they have turned their attention to internet creepypastas. The latest result of this desperate mining of internet culture is A24's Backrooms, directed by viral YouTube creator Kane Parsons.

Let’s be completely fair: when the original short videos dropped on YouTube, the concept of "liminal spaces"—endless, eerie, fluorescent-lit office corridors with moist yellow wallpaper—was a genuinely unsettling visual experiment. It worked perfectly as a bite-sized, lo-fi internet mystery.

But stretching that exact same 10-minute visual gimmick into a nearly two-hour theatrical feature film? It is an absolute, mind-numbing disaster. Despite crossing massive box office milestones and tricking audiences into thinking it’s a deep psychological thriller, Backrooms is an incredibly overrated, boring, and utterly hollow movie about absolutely nothing.

A Masterclass in Doing Absolutely Nothing

The core flaw of Backrooms is that it mistakes an aesthetic for a narrative.

The plot follows Clark (a paper-thin furniture store owner) who discovers a portal in his basement, goes missing, and forces his therapist (played by a drastically overqualified Renate Reinsve) to venture into the yellow maze to find him.

Once they enter the Backrooms, the movie completely grinds to a halt. For the next hour and a half, you are subjected to characters walking down identical hallway after identical hallway. They turn a corner. It’s a yellow wall. They turn another corner. It’s an empty room. They stare blankly at a deformed facsimile of a table. Occasionally, a loud bass drop rattles the theater speakers to remind you that you are supposed to be scared, but there is zero actual tension.

[The Backrooms Formula]
Walk down yellow hallway ➔ Stare at a wall ➔ Hear a loud hum ➔ Repeat for 111 minutes

A movie needs stakes, conflict, and momentum. Backrooms replaces all three with a monotonous, ambient hum. It isn't atmospheric; it is actively sleep-inducing. You aren't watching a horror film; you are paying to watch a screen saver loop in a dark room.

Feigning Depth While Floating in the Shallows

What makes Backrooms truly infuriating is how hard it tries to pretend it is a profound, elevated masterpiece. It desperately drops heavy-handed metaphors, trying to analogize the endless, chaotic layout of the maze to the fractured architecture of the human brain.

The screenplay acts as if it is exploring deep existential dread, isolation, and the breakdown of reality. But scratch just a millimeter beneath that yellow wallpaper, and there is absolutely nothing there. The dialogue consists of characters stating the obvious or shouting into empty rooms. The emotional backstory given to Clark—a vague, shoehorned plot about being an alcoholic who fought with his wife—is so utterly thin that by the time the film reaches its chaotic, unearned climax, you couldn't care less whether he gets out or rots in the carpet.

The film relies entirely on the audience to do the heavy lifting. It leaves its rules, its monsters, and its conclusion so deliberately vague that pseudo-intellectual film bros can spend hours online inventing theories about what it "means". But let’s call it what it is: the filmmakers didn't leave the ending ambiguous because they wanted to provoke deep thought—they left it vague because they didn't have an actual story to tell.

The Ultimate Cash Grab

To add insult to injury, the studio has already announced a cash-grab extended cut titled Backrooms: Everything Must Go, promising an extra 16 minutes of "lore" and Easter eggs. If a movie couldn't manage to deliver a coherent or engaging narrative in its original runtime, throwing more empty hallways at the screen isn't going to fix it.

Backrooms is a definitive proof that what works as a creepy 10-minute conceptual video on a computer monitor does not automatically translate to a compelling cinematic experience. It is a shallow, boring endurance test that wastes its talented cast, wastes its audience's patience, and values online lore-building over fundamental filmmaking.

Save your money, skip the theater, and stare at a blank yellow sticky note for two hours instead. You’ll get the exact same emotional payoff.