Review of 'Backrooms'

And the vortex of the digital age

I really enjoyed the newly released ‘Backrooms’ (2026) film, which is based on the 4Chan meme, aesthetic, lore, and webseries of the same name.

The director of the webseries, Kane Parsons, returned to direct this film, despite being only 20 years old. It also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in the lead roles.

This review will also involve some of my own personal experiences, which links to the film itself because, whilst also working as rather surface-level horror, on closer inspection, I believe the movie is actually a profound allegory about the digital age.

Backrooms shows how our current digital era has enabled humanity to retreat into our own created realities, to escape the stress of our real lives, but in doing so, can bring out our worst monsters.

This is something I have seen at play in my own life; online ‘aesthetic worlds’ of both profound beauty, and yet the lurking danger that these ‘other worlds’ will be a substitute for personal growth.

I spoke about some of those experiences in my last article, the curse of being ‘terminally online’ when it came to politics, preventing me from being the best version of myself.

In this movie review/cultural essay, I will try to fit my experiences to a general social observation, that I believe the film tries to warn about, and does remarkably well.

My Viewing Experience

I went to go and see Backrooms with my dad.

He was in a rather depressed mood that day, and he liked the idea of us going to the cinema, which we don’t often do, even though it was based on an internet meme and he admitted to me he still ‘didn’t really know what a meme was’.

He thought the film was good, but ‘so disorienting he couldn’t wait to watch an episode of a series with a linear story’ which he did with my mum and one of my two younger sisters when he got home.

I’m glad he gave the film a chance.

What was interesting however was our differing reference points, him being completely detached from ‘internet culture’ as a 56-year old Gen Xer, and me as a Zoomer for whom it is the water I swim in.

This gave us dramatically different takeaways from the film, though not to say his was any less valid.

Me and Internet Aesthetics

I thought a review of the film would be a topical vehicle to explore my journey with ‘TikTok Aesthetics’ in the year since the end of Anglofuturist.

Even though I did not know much about the specifically ‘Backrooms’ lore before watching the film, the kind of aesthetic the film has completely dominates my TikTok FY page.

This whole ‘scene’, catalogued on the ‘Aesthetics Wiki’, has served as a form of escapism for me. It helped me express my creativity in a way that did not involve obsessing over politics, which I now realise had been in great part aesthetics-driven anyway, and therefore avoid the misery that comes with culture war ragebait.

When it came to dreamcore, weirdcore, liminal spaces, and hauntology media, there was almost something spiritual and transcendent about these visuals and sounds.

A fairly well-known example would be the soundtrack to ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ by ‘The Caretaker’, a musical representation of dementia, which is a staple of the Aesthetics TikTok space and which has clear echoes in the film.

Words cannot quite do justice to how deeply much of this media moved me, how much they piqued my interest in a transcendence and mysticism that I had for so long ignored.

Firstly, it introduced me to the show ‘Skins’ through the algorithm suggesting Effy Stonem edits in a ‘dreamcore’ style.

This had the same kind of mystical aesthetic that ‘conjured up nostalgia’, combining a show from the time when I was growing up, the 2000s, and a kind of ‘anemoia’, which means ‘nostalgia for something you never experienced’.

It got me making my own edits of the show, something I will probably talk about in more depth in another article as it served as a substitute outlet for creative energy since the deletion of Anglofuturist.

But I mention it here because it parallels the sort of yearning for a transcendent inner peace that Clark finds in ‘the backrooms’ in the film, the urge to ‘escape to another reality of beautiful repetition and familiarity’.

Secondly, such transcendent notions also appeal to a deeply unsettled world, where AI is changing the relationship one has with their own sense of individual personhood.

It seems everything can be replicated and nothing is unique or individual, an acceleration of the digital landscape that was already taking place.

It was this angle that made ‘Backrooms’ such a special film to me.

‘The Backrooms’ as Allegory for the Internet and AI

AI Model Collapse

But more than just being a well-made film, I think it hit on something about the modern world.

It is set in 1990, right at the start of the computer revolution, which is arguably, and I interpret, as a kind of dramatic foreshadowing.

If this was just a low effort capitalisation on the meme, I would have expected a present setting with the ‘eerie’ element being footage and technology from the late 20th century.

But I think, by setting it at this exact moment, the film had a deeper message it was trying to portray; the promise and terror of the digital revolution that people living in that year, were to spend the rest of their lives witnessing if they were still alive today.

The whole idea of the ‘Backrooms’, being based on an online meme, signifies the void of being that is the online space, accelerated with the development of AI.

It is something that can only be seen in hindsight, but from 2026, it seems like people in 1990 were blissfully unaware of how the rest of their lives would be like an eternal ‘Backrooms’ within cyberspace, which is why the phenomena is so horrifying to the people in the story.

It’s hard not to see parts of the film as alluding to one getting absorbed into the promise of AI, endless stimulation in a void, but the price being that the individual self is dissolved, there is no recollection of authorship or originality.

Indeed, there are many eludes to AI in the film, like the rendering of people that are just ‘not quite right’, which reminds one of the early AI models, as well as Clark saying that the more one thinks about an image the more distorted it is in the backrooms, echoing the asking of AI models to regenerate images and them slowly degrading in quality, a phenomenon known as ‘Model Collapse’.

What I loved about the film was that it accepted there was something quite beautiful, quite calming, about the ‘liminal space’, that Clark is happy in this reality and doesn’t want to leave.

I related to it so much because that is how ‘I’ feel when viewing this aesthetic and those adjacent to it.

It calms me, allows me to escape into another world, where there are no demands placed upon me, but one that I don’t want to come out of.

The political angle of this ‘online absorption’ was most damaging, and the merely aesthetic expression relatively benign. I still enjoy this sort of ‘cyber-dreaming’ I experience on TikTok.

But when is a retreat from reality what brings out your worst demons? Even the most benign uses of the internet can become all-encompassing.

I’m not saying I have the answer, and if I claimed to I certainly don’t practice what I preach, but the film forces us to reflect on our terminally online ‘escapism’ culture in a way that the majority of us are almost certainly guilty of.

Concluding Thoughts

The film also shifts awareness quite a lot, so you lose a sense of your own individuality. You don’t know who’s perspective you are really following, and in this, the film is subtly telling you, ‘if you were stuck in an eternal void of consciousness like The Backrooms, how would you know?’

My dad had quite a different takeaway from the film not being familiar with the kinds of internet circles I am.

My dad said he found my reading that it was about AI and internet culture interesting, and probably right because I was the target demographic, but for him it was merely a psychological thriller, and more about Clark’s specific mental problems, than a broader message about the meaninglessness and neverending nature of cyberspace.

The fact he liked it shows that it was a film that stood on its own, and didn’t require familiarity with the source material. However, I think there is a more ‘esoteric’ reading of the film, illuminated by the mostly Gen Z and Gen Alpha spaces of this ‘aesthetics internet’, that I have outlined and have attempted to justify.

The film never gives you too many details about what ‘The Backrooms’ is, and that is part of the magic of both the film and the aesthetic it is based on.

You can definitely see influences from classic horror films like ‘The Shining’ (1980), indeed the whole liminal space aesthetic, as well as soundtracks like ‘Everywhere At the End of Time’ hauntology, was based on that film. A film influenced an online aesthetic that influenced a film. One can also unquestionably see echos of David Lynch.

But it also shines a spotlight on our digital age, and particularly its current AI iteration, whether we are at risk of getting lost in a never-ending void of unoriginal ‘nothingness’ that provides enough superficial comfort that we don’t want to escape.

I would highly recommend you watch the film if any part of the idea resonates with you.