Kinolime Fix It: The Ending Backrooms Should Have Had [Podcast]
Where exactly did Backrooms fail as a movie?
Directed by rising filmmaker Kane Parsons, Backrooms delivers one of the most atmospheric and unsettling horror worlds we've seen in years. The first half is tense, mysterious, and full of promise, but for us, the back half loses momentum and never fully pays off the incredible premise it sets up. Kinolime’s creative executive, Danny, breaks down Backrooms’ ending explained, goes through exactly where the story begins to unravel and how a few key structural changes could have transformed the ending into something truly unforgettable.
In this Backrooms review, Danny uses it as a screenwriting case study to explore why second acts often lose momentum and how writers can keep tension building all the way to the climax. He’ll also go through how dialogue can make or break your premise, and how abandoning your main character hurts your story.
This Backrooms analysis is only the tip of the iceberg! If you're an aspiring screenwriter, director, horror filmmaker, or simply love breaking down movies, this series is designed to teach story structure through real films, showing not just what didn't work, but how it could work better.
Full Transcript: Kinolime Fix ItEpisode 3: The Ending Backrooms Should Have Had
Participants
Danny Murray - Creative Executive, Kinolime
Danny: Hey everyone, Danny here with the Kinolime Screenwriting Podcast, and today we're talking about Back Rooms. This is one of the most highly anticipated films of the year for me, largely because it's one of the first real pivot points in the industry where we're letting a 20-year-old filmmaker, largely inspired by YouTube videos and video games, make a big theatrical release that everyone's excited for.
There's a lot to talk about with this story, and this film has been received very well. But there are a few things we could add to make it even better. So today, we're fixing Back Rooms.
Before we get into it: Kane Parson's Back Rooms is a hell of a debut for a young filmmaker. And as I'm about to get into, my only real gripes with this movie are with how subdued and restrained it is in the second half of the film.
What Back Rooms Is About
Back Rooms is the story of Clark - a failed husband, business owner, and architect who stumbles upon a new dimension in the basement of his furniture store and sets out to find meaning within it, while losing all sense of meaning in his actual life. He navigates this liminal world that manifests his memories, trauma, and sense of self into distorted copies he's internally brought with him into this new world.
The story largely asks: will Clark confront his failures and traumas and move forward as a person, or will he refuse to grow, lose his grip on reality, and descend into the nihilistic, purgatorial world he's created in the back rooms?
With an IP that has thousands of pages of open-source lore and is genuinely widespread, I can't wait to see the end result of what really felt like, if executed well, the mark of a new cinematic era centered around young filmmakers and their original stories, in a way Hollywood largely hasn't captured since the '90s.
What Works: The First Half
That's what I felt like I got in the first half of this film. Back Rooms' first half manages to be as terrifying as it is unsettling, through liminal space, bright light, and the meandering boredom of corporate American purgatory — without leaning on the classical tropes you'd expect from a wide-release horror film. There's pretty much nothing I'd change in the first half of this film.
Where It Loses Me: The Second Half
Back Rooms starts to lose me when it stops trusting the audience and begins to blatantly explain the film's motifs directly to camera. This runs through most of Act 2B and long stretches of the third act, culminating in Mary - spoiler alert - literally killing a Still Life Clark with a rock that's a fragment of her repressed childhood trauma. I mean, come on.
Is the back rooms a metaphor for repressed trauma? We see that through the Captain Clark Still Life. Modern workplace isolation through its desolate office spaces. The internet, through its vast, never-ending information replication. AI, when it's described as someone drawing a dog who's never seen a dog, trained on data taken without consent from the human mind.
It's all of these and more, which is what makes this premise so great. It's a setting that thrives on the existential dread we all face just by existing in the modern prisons we've built for ourselves, and it leaves the rest up for interpretation.
For a film about a nightmarish, uncanny empire built from the isolated, deep recesses of human trauma, fear, and suffering, the second half is far too laden with linear exposition to satisfy the potential of its premise. The lack of cinematic influence really shows once we've exhausted the initial allure of the uncanny-valley, YouTube-series, and video-game aesthetics, and we're ready to be immersed in psychological turmoil that can only really be expressed cinematically.
The Lynch Connection
David Lynch once said something to the effect of: there's a field of relativity with a surface and depths, worlds within worlds within worlds. Unbelievable stuff going on, but that's only the marketplace. You go through the marketplace and it's interesting, but there are lots of chances to get waylaid, even go backwards, get lost, get in trouble.
Parsons literally grew up in the Black Lodge. His dad's house was decorated with the black-and-white zigzag floor panels and red drapes that define the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks. But at the time of making the film, Kane hadn't actually seen any of Lynch's work. If he'd listened to his dad as a kid and watched some of those movies, I think he probably would have made a classic.
This film follows most of the themes and structure of Inland Empire, but doesn't quite execute on the dizzying ambiguity of reality that makes that film so strong. Inland Empire's SD cinematography reflects the camcorder aesthetic of Back Rooms. In Inland Empire, the Lost Girl is trapped in a hotel purgatory, forced to relive her traumas - the same way we get lost in the back rooms and have our traumas reflected back at us. Nikki Grace loses herself in the role of Sue Blue, the same way Clark loses himself in the back rooms and is embodied by Captain Clark. Both worlds tell us that the world is as you are, and, at the risk of sounding cheesy, outwardly reflect our inner empires, exploring the back rooms of our minds.
With all these comparisons, the theme I wish Back Rooms had taken from Inland Empire is this: we don't need to understand everything about this world. We just can't be bored. Inland Empire is as baffling and confusing as it is rewarding - a film that holds onto a feeling, a suffocating sense that the structures we exist in are made up, and largely exist to make us go insane. The first half of Back Rooms captures this, but overexplains its themes so overtly that the liminality of the world becomes muted and its structure feels traditional.
At Inland Empire's midpoint, Nikki spirals into a full identity crisis. We plunge into her inner world of ideas, get lost, and can't find our way back. As we dive deeper into her psyche, her identity collapses on itself and becomes further warped and terrifying. While I still enjoy Back Rooms, this structure is a strong blueprint for getting the most out of Clark's character.
Where the Film Loses Its Nerve
The film loses itself at what I believe is its strongest moment. After an Act 2A investigation of the back rooms descends into a nightmare, the cataclysmic moment where we must face the true nature of this dimension, we essentially leave our protagonist and restart the movie from a less interesting character's perspective, watching them run through the same story beats Clark just did, until we reach the third act.
The back rooms have seemingly infinite levels, creatures, and embedded conflicts - we'd have been far better served watching Clark navigate them. Instead of Clark immediately accepting the first monster he sees and befriending it, treating this as a reasonable society where he can be whoever he wants, I'd want to see him get truly lost in the back rooms.
As he looks to escape, he dives deeper and deeper into different levels, more of himself, his trauma, his fears, his thoughts absorbed by the world around him. As he loses hope of ever finding his way out and with it, any path to redemption for his failures in the real world - he digs further into the back rooms to find a world that might not be his own, but close enough to what he yearns for that he can push away his insecurities, his failures, his nightmares, and live with himself within it.
As he goes deeper, the world he inhabits becomes less and less tethered to his reality. The figment of his wife, who we initially see screaming and running from him, begins to follow his orders. Still Lives do as he commands. Whenever he's forced to confront a fault of his own, he can dive deeper, explore new facets of the world, and run away - until he exists in a reality where he never has to face himself, and all of his worst impulses are reinforced.
A Tighter Third Act
A tighter third act would play out similarly to how it does now, culminating with Clark finding, kidnapping, and eventually breaking down his therapist. At the climax, Clark realizes he may be the architect of his own pain, and is quickly consumed by Captain Clark, who is no longer tethered to his creator. With this realization, Mary escapes Captain Clark but is left tethered to the back rooms, and, much like we can assume will be the case for her true character, trapped there forever.
The movie is already great on its own, but letting Clark's madness be exacerbated by the power of the back rooms gives us a clearer protagonist, less exposition, and a deeper understanding, not just of what makes the setting uncanny, but of what makes Kane Parsons so exciting as a young filmmaker, by giving him more room to play in a world he clearly has mastery over - the same world that made us so excited for this film in the first place.
By making the second act less literal, and letting Clark's descent into madness happen on screen, we'd be able to propel Act 2B, currently the one weak point in this film, into what could be the most dramatic, action-packed sequence in the story.
Closing Thoughts
Regardless of me nitpicking, Back Rooms is an outstanding debut, and I can't wait to see what Kane has next, and to watch his growth as a filmmaker.
So that's how we fix Back Rooms. I loved the movie to begin with and I hope this made you love it a little more. There's a lot to pull from with this one. So let me know: what did I miss? What do you think I shouldn't have cut? What do you think I should have added? What was the moment where you thought, "Oh, this guy's stupid and doesn't know what he's talking about, I need to turn this off"? Probably right now, if you haven't already, so stop, drop it in the comments, and tell me what that was.
Appreciate you tuning in. Thanks so much. Tune in for the next one - like, subscribe, comment, do all the jazz. See you next time.
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