My Backrooms (Kane Parsons) Review as someone not familiar with the franchise (spoiler free)

hi all, I saw the movie yesterday and thought about dropping my two cents here. For context: I’m 33 yo and I consider myself to have a good knowledge about a psychological horror in general, but I'm not really familiar with Backrooms and I've never seen the youtube series. Nevertheless, I was very excited for it and although I did like it quite a bit, I have mixed opinions.

I thought the movie is an original take on psychological horror. I saw a film critic using the term "architecture horror" to describe it and it's right on point, the architectural elements develop tension in a very effect and enthralling way (for me at least). I also love me a slow burn film so it's right around my lane. It's genuinely impressive what Kane Parsons achieved at such a young age.

But his lack of experiene is clear when comparing the "outdoor" (i.e. non-analogue, or outside of the backrooms) parts of the film and the "indoor" (more traditional filmaking) parts. The sound design and cinematography in the backrooms are really top-notch (the analogue parts remind me a lot of Inland Empire, by David Lynch, which is one of my absolute favourite movies ever), but there's a noticeable decrease in quality anytime we step away from it.

The script and dialogues are also pretty bad. Some lines about the backrooms in particular felt cheesy to me but I can understand that they took it from the original material. And boy, the first half is really, really bad. Not because it’s slow (I’m fine with a slow burner as I said), but because it has no rhythm and the movie makes a very conscious effort of preemptively explaining and making it clear its themes. This really affects the tension building and the development script in advance, even though explaining things is kinda of a necessary evil for a movie to have mainstream success nowadays, so I can understand the reasoning.

The movie kinda picks up after the first half (when the actual backrooms part start) and I was suprised by how involved I got despite the very weak first part. I really, really enjoyed it and I could tell Kane knew what he was doing there. Then, at the ending, again, everything is explained in an unnecessary way.

I think the concept is really strong, but the movie tries to ride this weird line between being accessible to its mainstream/younger YouTube audience, and thus explaining a bit too much, and also portraying its trauma-based concept in an elevated way. But I don’t think these two go well with each other. Younger audiences might find the movie too slow and horror fans not familiar with its theme (like me) might find it too "accessible". And given the top notch acting (unusual for an early career horror) we kinda have glimpses of what the movie could've been. Better tension building in the beginning would've done wonders to it imo.

But overall it’s a movie I enjoyed, and its strong parts were really strong to me. and I rally hope it paves the way for more projects like that.