Why The Backrooms Feels Like Annihilation Meets Solaris
Stepping out of the theatre, the sensory hangover is hard to shake. The high-frequency hum of fluorescent lighting and the disorientation of non-Euclidean spaces folding on screen linger long after the credits roll.
What makes the feature film adaptation of The Backrooms so effective is that it refuses to settle for the internet legend’s original premise of a simple “endless yellow hallway.” As the camera pushes deeper into the anomaly, the film brings creator Kane Pixels’ YouTube universe to life with unsettling precision: drywall breaks open to reveal a fully intact 1980s suburban home sitting in a windowless void, flickering CRT screens hum in abandoned living rooms, and distorted humanoid silhouettes echo faint, looped cries for help down empty corridors.
This visual strategy taps directly into director Kane Parsons’ core thesis: The Backrooms isn’t just a maze filled with monsters but an unfeeling, inorganic system attempting to “render” and “replicate” human reality. Because this entity lacks any genuine understanding of human life, its reconstruction of our world arrives glitched, fractured, and deeply uncanny.
Watching these warped iterations of everyday spaces on the big screen instantly brings to mind two sci-fi masterworks: Alex Garland’s Annihilation and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
Beneath its bland, corporate facade, The Backrooms operates on the exact same philosophical frequency as those classics: the breakdown of logic through spatial mutation, and the cold, imperfect materialisation of the human subconscious.
The most visually arresting sequences in The Backrooms occur when the yellow wallpaper breaks down, exposing an uncontrolled proliferation of modern infrastructure. Corporate office suites, suburban homes, and indoor swimming pools are stitched together like cancerous tissue within an impossible geometry.
This visual shorthand for an unspooling reality directly mirrors “The Shimmer” in Annihilation.
In Garland’s film, The Shimmer acts as a mindless prism that refracts light, radio waves, and genetic code alike. It forces disparate species to cross-breed, causes trees to grow into human skeletons, and blurs the boundary between life and death.
The Backrooms functions as an architectural equivalent. It takes the most mundane artefacts of contemporary civilisation such as fluorescent-lit cubicles, drop ceilings, cheap drywall and subjects them to exponential, chaotic mutation. In both worlds, the laws of physics and cause-and-effect cease to hold. The terror builds through a slow, suffocating dread as human reason dissolves against an incomprehensible anomaly.
If the spatial folding echoes Annihilation, the film’s rendering of domestic interiors, human voices, and eerie figures reaches straight into the psychological territory of Solaris.
In Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, the sentient ocean covering the planet Solaris reads the deepest memories and buried guilt of the scientists aboard the station, physically manifesting those memories into tangible form such as the living, breathing projection of the protagonist’s deceased wife. The ocean simply reflects our inner psyche with absolute indifference.
The Backrooms mirrors this exact mechanism: The suburban living rooms, nostalgic childhood spaces, and distant cries for help aren’t random glitched assets. They represent an unfeeling system reading humanity’s collective memory and trying and failing to construct a believable reality. The protagonists are also trapped inside an automated system that uses human history, nostalgia, and forgotten spaces to construct a vast monument to our own isolation.
Annihilation concludes with a sublime, breathtaking genetic transformation. Solaris ends with a poetic, tragic return to a home materialised on an alien sea. Both films grant their cosmic dread a sense of grand, melancholic beauty. However, The Backrooms strips away that romanticism entirely, locking us inside cheap, mass-produced modern architecture.
It uses the spatial decay of Annihilation to break our hold on physical reality, and the psychological mirroring of Solaris to expose our deep-seated modern loneliness. The ultimate horror is falling through the floorboards of everyday life, landing in a room that looks just like your childhood living room, and realising from the hollow echoes and glitched textures that reality has been copied.
And you can never go home.