The suspense is what kills in Backrooms. I haven’t been that tense and frightened in a while, and it was all in anticipating what I couldn’t see. When the movie finished, I told my wife, “I think I’ve just been through something!”
The cinematography was really well done and has that A24-style textural approach. What stuck with me most is the movie’s use of space. The premise of infinite variations in the backroom spaces presents a lot of interesting challenges. How can they vary the camera angles and viewpoints enough so the spaces don’t get stale? How do they create suspense through the camera angles and how often they are cutting?
There was a mixture of found-footage style POV shots, traditional POV shots and more cinematic third-person shots. All of these worked together in such an organic way and amped up the creep factor in all the right spots. I’m really inspired by the use of space though, and the world-building that was done with relatively few locations.