Backrooms

What’s it about?

Two people who discover a place beyond a furniture showroom – and seemingly beyond our known reality.

The facts

• Directed by Kane Parsons
• Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value)
• English language
• Runtime: 105 minutes
• An original film from debut filmmaker inspired by a Reddit thread, and YouTube series by the director.
• An A24 production

Why did it get this rating?

This film was cross-rated by the Film and Video Labelling Body. You can find out more about cross-rating here.

Horror

The film uses clever horror tropes to invoke feelings of unease and terror, such as jump scares, an eerie soundtrack, flickering lights and first-person footage including found handycam footage.

There are brief glimpses of monsters or creatures, including characters with facial deformities. The deformities are surreal rather than scary.

Characters are stuck in a confusing maze-like series of rooms with no apparent way to escape. Sometimes combined with first person camera footage it can create a feeling of claustrophobia and is designed to create a heightened sense of fear.

Violence

A character is dragged away by a creature, leaving a trail of blood. The scene is very brief and due to the dim lighting not much detail can be seen.  We briefly see a severed, decaying head from a distance. The moment is shocking.

A character demonstrates that the creatures in the ‘dimension’ don’t have feelings and don’t bleed by carrying out some shocking moments of violence:

• Stabbing a creature in the neck,
• Scalping a creature with a large knife. We don’t see the act close-up but can hear it and briefly see it happening from a distance,
• Another character is then made to wear the hair that has been freshly scalped. It is a shocking and disturbing moment, lessened by the earlier demonstration that the creature(s) don’t have feelings.
• A character bashes a creature in the head with a rock, we see some blood and hear sound effects but don’t see graphic detail of the injury.

A monster bites a human in the neck, we see blood and hear screaming, but we don’t see the resulting injury.

Another character is strangled unexpectedly and made unconscious.

Offensive language and content that may disturb

There is occasional strong language at moments of high tension. Swear words such as ‘f*ck’, ‘sh*t’, and ‘b*tch’ are most frequently used.

There is a conversation between a therapist and patient where they re-enact a domestic argument. The patient becomes angry as he reenacts out his side of the historic fight, and uses derogatory terms like ‘lazy’ and ‘get off your fat arse!’.

Mental illness

There are several flashback sequences to a childhood memory of living with a parent with mental illness. We see a child living indoors and not being allowed to look out the window or leave the house. We also see the parent being committed to an institution in one of the flashbacks.

When content stays with you:

We all have our boundaries, and it’s completely okay if something you’ve watched is weighing on your mind. If certain content lingers with you, consider having a chat with friends or whānau to debrief about what you’ve just seen. But if you’re still feeling affected, please reach out to any of the following helplines for support.

• 1737
• Safe to talk
• Lifeline
• Youthline

Further information

• Why are ratings and content warnings important for me and my whānau?