There are mysteries we pursue because we believe they can be solved. Others because they cannot: questions of consciousness, meaning, reality, purpose, the things that have occupied philosophers, scientists, artists, and theologians for millennia. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms understands this distinction and uses it to tell a story about humanity’s endless search for understanding.
Backrooms is ostensibly a science fiction horror film. The environments are unsettling, the imagery often disturbing, and the underlying premise taps directly into the modern fascination with liminal spaces: hallways without destinations and rooms without occupants stripped of obvious purpose. Yet reducing the film to horror feels incomplete. The dread is real, but it functions as atmosphere. Backrooms is ultimately about exploration. More specifically, it is about humanity’s persistent drive to explore mysteries larger than itself.
The film succeeds largely because its craftsmanship consistently serves that goal. The performances ground material that could easily become abstract or bombastic. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, and the rest of the cast treat the impossible with sincerity, allowing the audience to invest emotionally in ideas that are metaphysical in nature. The camerawork is equally effective. The handheld footage, used with considerable restraint, creates the sensation of discovery rather than spectacle. We move through these impossible spaces alongside the characters, sharing their uncertainty and curiosity. The visual design deserves similar praise. Parsons understands that liminal spaces are most effective when they remain recognizable yet uncanny.
The result is a world that invites interpretation without demanding a solution. Many films construct mysteries as puzzles. The purpose is to reveal the answer through some keen observation or roundabout explanation. Backrooms appears interested in something else entirely. Again and again, the film points toward explanation only to redirect our attention toward the act of searching itself.
The scientists at the end of the film provide the clearest example. At one point, Mark Duplass’ character explains that the Backrooms feel like the most important thing humanity could ever learn. The line is revealing because it transcends science entirely. He isn’t describing a technological breakthrough or a scientific discovery. He’s describing revelation, the answers to the oldest questions humanity has ever asked. He doesn’t know how or why, he just knows that the importance is immeasurable.
Of course people keep going deeper.
The film repeatedly emphasizes that everyone understands the danger. The Backrooms are vast, hostile, and fundamentally incomprehensible. Yet the explorers persist. In a lesser movie, curiosity would be treated as hubris and punished accordingly. Backrooms treats curiosity as something nobler. And this idea extends into the film’s symbolic landscape.
Signs appear everywhere, backwards text that feels as though it is being viewed through a mirror. Data is scattered throughout, floppy disks or journals or A/V equipment meant to classify and codify. The Backrooms are saturated with meaning and yet remain resistant to interpretation. They feel less like a place than a mind attempting to communicate through symbols. Even the film’s “monsters” seem to operate according to this logic. The pirate figure in particular never functions like a traditional antagonist. He feels closer to a recurring memory, or a psychological shadow, a fragment of consciousness made manifest. The participation of the denizens in the mystery.
Which brings us to what may be the film’s most revealing detail.
At one point, a Duplass’ character is watching The NeverEnding Story with his family. It’s the climactic scene, when Bastien is giving the Childlike Empress a new name: Moonchild. This one act of imagination is sufficient to save Fantasia from The Nothing, and birth an entire new world of dreams and stories.
The reference is too specific and too central to dismiss as decoration. Michael Ende’s novel and Wolfgang Petersen’s film adaptation are fundamentally concerned with the relationship between imagination and reality, with stories and how they create meaning through the participation of the audience. Both works are self-referential and metatextual, the boundary between observer and participant gradually dissolving.
Backrooms seems fascinated by similar ideas. The symbols scattered throughout the film never fully resolve because resolution is not the point. The Backrooms are not communicating answers. They are generating questions. They invite participation rather than explanation. In this respect, Backrooms belongs to a surprisingly rich cinematic tradition.
The most obvious comparison is Tarkovsky’s Stalker, another film about characters drawn toward a mysterious place that may contain profound truths. Like The Zone, the Backrooms resist reduction. Their importance lies not in what they are, but in what they do to the people who encounter them. More recent comparisons emerge as well. Annihilation explored the terror and beauty of confronting a phenomenon beyond explanation. Coherence used fractured reality to investigate identity and possibility rather than physics. Backrooms sits comfortably among these films. Like them, it understands that the mystery itself is of less consequence than the human response to it.
The characters learn enough to realize how little they truly understand. The mystery expands rather than contracts and questions multiply as explanations remain partial. There’s deep personal psychology, yet a feeling of universality, that the vast expanse of the Backrooms are mechanistic and indifferent. Yet the film never collapses into nihilism. The unknowable does not become evidence that meaning is absent. Instead, it becomes evidence that meaning is larger than we imagined. There is something deeply optimistic about that conclusion.
The film’s greatest achievement is transforming existential dread into something closer to wonder. By the time the credits roll, the Backrooms no longer feel like a prison or a nightmare. They feel like a metaphor for existence itself. We inherit a reality we did not create and are thrust into, grasping for understanding from our earliest memories to our dying days. We search for patterns, construct stories, and continue moving forward despite our uncertainty.
Because the search itself is part of what makes us human.
