This Movie Didn’t Scare Me. It Reframed Me!!

Harish Bilgi
2 days ago
2 min read

This Movie Didn’t Scare Me. It Reframed Me. : My quick take on spooky movie “Backrooms” (Theatrical release)

Backrooms Or When Your Subconscious Hires an Interior Designer With Commitment Issues

I walked into Backrooms expecting a horror film.

What I got instead was a full-blown NLP workshop conducted inside an abandoned office building designed by anxiety itself.

And honestly?

I loved every bizarre fluorescent-lit minute of it.

First things first: this is not your regular popcorn horror where a ghost appears every 11 minutes because the screenplay has EMI obligations.

Backrooms operates on atmosphere, perception, discomfort, symbolism, and psychological immersion.

The film beautifully explores the mind like a labyrinth of compartments. Every corridor feels like a suppressed memory. Every looping hallway resembles those mental patterns we keep revisiting despite promising ourselves, “Bas, from Monday new mindset.”

As someone fascinated by NLP and reframing, I found the metaphors deliciously unsettling. The film practically whispers:

“What if the real maze is not the building… but your own subconscious running background applications since childhood?”

Now coming to the biggest surprise: Kane Parsons.

This young director enters cinema the way Vaibhav Suryavanshi walked into IPL cricket. No nervousness. No overthinking. Just casually hitting cinematic sixes into the psychological upper deck as if he’s been directing for 30 years.

The confidence is staggering.

He doesn’t spoon-feed the audience.

He traps them. Politely.

The camera work deserves special applause. It instantly reminded me of The Blair Witch Project, where the lens stops behaving like a camera and starts behaving like your own eyes. At several moments, I genuinely forgot I was “watching” a film. My eyes had unofficially resigned and outsourced their duties to the cinematographer.

That immersive.

And the BGM?

Brilliantly eerie.

Not loud. Not manipulative. Just a constant unsettling hum floating around your brain like an unfinished thought during insomnia at 2:47 AM.

The sound design doesn’t scream.

It stalks.

What fascinated me most was how ordinary everything looked. Yellow walls. Empty rooms. Endless carpets. Corporate-looking spaces so generic they resemble the waiting area of every government office where hope goes to renew itself annually.

Yet somehow, the film converts familiarity into terror.

That’s artistry.

Also loved how the movie avoids unnecessary exposition. Modern cinema often behaves like that overenthusiastic relative who explains the punchline before finishing the joke. Backrooms trusts the audience to feel rather than merely understand.

Refreshing.

Calling this movie “horror” is honestly inaccurate.

This is psychological architecture.

A cinematic maze.

A subconscious escape room with fluorescent lighting.

Some viewers may complain:

“Nothing happens.”

Exactly.

That’s the genius.

The film slowly hypnotises you into confronting emptiness, repetition, perception, and identity. By the end, you don’t feel scared of monsters.

You feel scared of hallways.

And frankly, after watching this film, even walking into an empty office corridor feels like entering Level 3 of my unresolved emotions.