What is it that you most fear? For many, the answer might be heights, clowns or the dark; external threats that endanger our sense of safety. But what if the greatest threat is not something outside of us? What if it lives within us, buried in the crevices of our minds? Our dreams, memories and perceptions of reality can offer moments of clarity, but they can also become our greatest sources of fear. The Backrooms explores this possibility by turning the subconscious into a physical space where insecurity, isolation and self-perception become impossible to escape.
Clarke enters this space already struggling to control his life. He is a Black, working-class man whose identity seems increasingly defined by circumstances beyond his control. He did not achieve his dream of being an architect, his wife has left him and his store is struggling. Even his attempt to present himself as a successful businessman ends in humiliation when he hires two teenagers to film a commercial and finds himself dressed as a pirate. Clarke wants to control how others see him, but the performance only makes his lack of control more obvious.
That humiliation becomes more disturbing when Clarke falls and tells one of the teenagers to stop recording, yet the camera keeps rolling. The moment is particularly ironic because the teenager wears an “End Apartheid” shirt, suggesting solidarity with oppressed people while simultaneously finding entertainment in Clarke’s humiliation. The contradiction reveals something uncomfortable about the way people can sympathize with oppression in theory while failing to recognize another person’s dignity in practice. Clarke cannot even control the image of himself when he is explicitly asking someone to stop filming.
The Backrooms offer the opposite. Once Clarke enters, there is no audience to impress and no society to judge him. The space resembles an office with its fluorescent lights, repetitive architecture and institutional yellow walls, but it stretches endlessly without employees, customers or work. The architecture of labor remains after labor itself has disappeared. Offices normally represent productivity, hierarchy and conformity. Here, those expectations have been stripped away. Clarke is finally separated from the roles that have defined him.
Sound makes that separation even more unsettling. The persistent hum of the fluorescent lights fills the emptiness without ever providing comfort. There is no conventional soundtrack telling us what to feel. Instead, the space itself creates anxiety along with the ghastly murmurs and repetitive echoes that make the Backrooms feel simultaneously enormous and claustrophobic. It creates a specific atmosphere of a place where time and identity have stopped functioning normally.
That is what makes the Backrooms so appealing to Clarke. They are a detachment from society and, therefore, from the conditions that have shaped his perception of himself. He no longer has to be a failed businessman, a divorcee, an architect or even a Black man navigating other people’s expectations. He can simply be. Yet the film refuses to let him escape completely because he has brought the most important thing with him: himself.
The entity makes that idea literal. The Backrooms are filled with fragments of memory, but no one remembers Clarke enough to make him into another memory. Only Clarke can create his own reflection. The monster therefore becomes an embodiment of his anger, insecurity and self-loathing. It is the part of himself he cannot outrun. When Clarke finally begins to accept himself, the entity takes over. It’s ironic considering that once Clarke stops rejecting the parts of himself he hates, the force built from that hatred no longer needs to remain separate from him.
Clarke is flawed, angry and careless, but those flaws make his struggle recognizable. His desire to disappear from the expectations of ordinary life is something many people can understand. There is a strange comfort in imagining a place where nobody expects anything from you. The Backrooms turns that comfort into horror by asking what happens when escaping society means being left alone with your own consciousness.
The film’s main weakness is its dialogue. At times, it explains its ideas too directly, breaking the atmosphere that the sound and imagery have carefully constructed. The film is strongest when it trusts its spaces to communicate what Clarke cannot.
Ultimately, The Backrooms is eerie, haunting and deeply human. Its greatest horror is not the monster waiting in the yellow corridors. It is the possibility that when we finally escape everyone else’s perception of us, we may have no choice but to confront our own.