So I’m not a kid, and therefore never saw the YouTube videos that are the origin of this whole Backrooms thing. But I am a member of Gen X, and so I’ve played the Escape the Backrooms videogame, and it’s fucking creepy as hell. So I was prepared for a movie that was creepy as hell, but (as the game is story-light) I was unsure what the story would be.

Unfortunately, so was the guy behind this movie (who’s also the kid behind the YouTube videos). When it’s doing atmosphere, it’s on. The opening, which is a POV video camera bit from a guy in the titular backrooms (and — so I’m told — echoes the YouTube videos in style), is intense and scary and disconcerting. And when the movie leans into the setting later, it summons that creepy weirdness again.

But then it has characters, and it’s trying to do something with their personalities, and to give them an actual story to exist within. And this part, seemingly less present in the original YouTube videos, doesn’t work nearly as well. Chiwetel Ejiofor did a reasonable job with his character, but the movie never made me care either way; Renate Reinsve’s psychiatrist was less interesting, and plus had this whole personal backstory that just felt like filler.

It’s still an effectively creepy movie, which is worth a lot. I’m trying to cut down on how often I use the word “vibes” when describing horror movies (particularly gialli), but the reason I overuse it is because establishing vibes is one of the main goals of works in the genre. And I think you can make the case that this movie succeeds in its main goal.

But I was hoping that this was going to be something in the Weapons vein, where it establishes the vibes and the cool opening image but then develops that into a character and a story that genuinely work, and hell, even have some thematic depth to them. Alas, it does not. Ah well, that was a tall ask; this is still worth watching for genre fans, but not a thing I’ll push as transcending or elevating the genre.