One of my favorite genres of film isn’t a real genre, though if it was it’d be called “survivalone.” It’s when one person winds up in a dangerous environment and pretty much spends the whole movie alone trying to escape it. In this genre there’s very little talking or exposition, you only know as much as the main character does, and instead of being told what’s happening with dialogue or voiceover, you’re simply shown it in long stretches of unbroken film: the “show, don’t tell” rule writ large.
This genre includes survival films like Cast Away or All is Lost, and lately, much to my satisfaction, some videogame-adjacent horror movies. Earlier this year it was Exit 8, based on the game The Exit 8, where a man finds himself trapped in a repeating series of subway tunnels. And this week it’s Backrooms, where a man finds himself trapped in an endless maze of dingy yellow offices.
I know Backrooms isn’t, technically, a videogame movie. There have been a bunch of backrooms games—dozens of them, in fact—but A24’s Backrooms movie that’s out today isn’t based on them, it’s based on director Kane Parson’s own Backrooms YouTube video series, which was in turn based on the anonymously written 4chan creepypasta from 2019—which all those Backrooms games are also based on.
I think that’s close enough to claim as a videogame movie. I saw Backrooms last night and it’s pretty good, especially the first half. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a man whose life has hit the skids: his marriage has failed, he’s lost his job as an architect, and he now works (and sadly lives) in the least popular furniture store in town. One night he spies a crack of light in the basement wall that leads him to discover the Backrooms, a bizarre labyrinth of unending corridors, and becomes obsessed with unraveling their mystery.
Ejiofor is very good, as is Renate Reinsve who plays Mary, Clark’s therapist, who winds up lost in the labyrinth, too. But the backrooms themselves are the real star of the film. The pre-title found-footage sequence of someone exploring the backrooms is gripping, and Clark’s first excursion is utterly engrossing: a long, slow, unsettling journey deeper and deeper into the maze of rooms and hallways.
Everything in the backrooms is just slightly askew, slightly wrong, and your eye can’t help but be drawn to all of the unintuitive architectural choices: that wall shouldn’t end there, that door wouldn’t be hung like that, these angles don’t quite fit together. The buzzing and blinking of the fluorescents, the stale mustard-colored walls and carpeting, the distant (and sometimes not distant enough) muted sounds behind the walls, and the deep unease when you spot a corridor is so poorly lit that you can’t see the end of it.
It’s a weird mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia: you’re surrounded by walls but can also sense just how large, terrifyingly large, the backrooms beyond them really is.
As a space, it’s brilliantly constructed and utilized. The sets were apparently mostly practical: 30,000 square feet of stage was built for the movie, though I’m sure plenty of CGI was used to enhance it. The sets are so well-designed and effective it makes me wish they’d turn it into a theme park or escape room. I want to wander around there and explore those halls myself.
As you might suspect of a film based on a two-sentence creepypasta, it doesn’t quite manage to remain intriguing or eerie throughout its nearly two-hour running time. After Clark’s first, gloriously slow and tense excursion, it switches back to found-footage for a while with diminishing results, and when it slips into full-on horror instead of slow-burn dread it starts to tread water a bit. But it’s still a good movie and I’d easily be down for a sequel.
Similarly, Exit 8 is about someone alone and lost in another bizarre pocket universe. In the game, players walk down the corridor in a subway station in Japan looking for “anomalies”—things that have changed since the last time you walked down the hall. Each time you correctly spot a difference (or the lack of a difference) you advance closer to the eighth exit, the only way to escape. Make a mistake and you’re back to square one.
The film is about as close to the game as any adaptation could be. Kazunari Ninomiya plays a character only known as “The Lost Man” who finds himself in this maze, slowly figuring out how it works on his own, though never quite discovering why he’s stranded down there. Again and again, we slowly walk with him down this corridor, looking, as he does, for anomalies, gritting our teeth when he misses one and has to start over.
It’s like we’re playing the game along with him, and it’s great, tense fun.
Exit 8 is also technically brilliant, with exceedingly long “oners,” unbroken shots that can last for minutes at a time as Ninomiya wanders through the subway corridors and tries to put the puzzle together. It, too, switches focus between Ninomiya and one or two other characters trapped down there with him. Both films also subtly explore the feelings that being lost in these blank, directionless spaces embodies: trauma, fear, guilt.
Like Backrooms, Exit 8 can’t quite sustain its running time. The game can be played in under an hour (depending on how good your memory is) and while the film never gets boring, the creepiness of the corridor does lose a bit of its impact after a while. A dive into more blatant horror doesn’t hit as hard as it might.
But Backrooms and Exit 8 are both well-worth watching, and make a great double feature for game-adjacent “survivalone” psychological horror movies. I know The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made a billion dollars this year, but these smaller, quieter, more thoughtful films are doing a lot more with a lot less to bring games to the screen in a satisfying way.
Backrooms is in theaters now, and Exit 8 is streaming (for rent) on Prime Video and Apple TV.
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