Clark, an angry architect, chases the source of impossible power failures when a glowing gap opens in his basement, but the yellow maze beyond it threatens his sanity, his friends, and Mary.

This one really might just be Things Happen: The Movie. Everything is just so ill-defined and abstract—to a fault. I get that the abstract surrealism is a large part of what appeals to people about the original Backrooms shorts, but the approach taken here doesn’t make for a good 100-minute film.

Visually, the surrealism works. It’s an abstract nightmare of liminal spaces and uncanny valleys and some of those visuals are so striking they’ll stick with you long after the movie ends. But there’s no meat to these bones.

It’s as though the movie has no clue what it wants to be about. On the one hand, you’ve got this mysterious extradimensional conspiracy; a team of researchers looking into this unknowable threat. And on the other hand, you’ve got the makings of an emotionally driven, metaphorical nightmare. But as the movie tries to combine these two throughlines, it descends into complete nonsense.

The emotional stakes feel extremely hollow, especially in the third act. And since you never really understand what’s going on, it’s hard to be invested in it emotionally. Things are just happening with no real explanation. And, again, that’s fine. But the movie seems to want there to be an emotional explanation; it seems to want the Backrooms to function as this emotional response to whoever’s inside them. But it doesn’t commit to that idea in any meaningful way, so it just falls apart. 

And that’s really the gist here. It exists in this sort of in between place. The emotional stuff would’ve probably pissed off longtime fans for being too traditional a way to explain such a strange concept. So the movie doesn’t fully commit to that. But then it also doesn’t fully commit to just being this weird thing a bunch of scientists are investigating (which is what the YouTube series is). So it’s simultaneously both and neither and kind of nothing as a result.

Put simply, there are a bunch of good ideas here, but the movie’s too scared to commit to any of them and hopes it can bank on goodwill and ambiguity. And maybe that’ll be enough for a sequel that’ll maybe do something with these ideas. But as a movie in its own right, it’s very…nothing. Cool visuals with no point of view.

2.5 out of 5 wands.

Backrooms is now playing in theaters nationwide.