Summary — Longtime web series fan, braced for A24 to ruin it — instead it's a five out of five. The doorway change I'm still turning over; the gore was unnecessary.
I've loved the web series for a long time, so when Kane Parsons got the A24 deal I was thrilled for him — and worried the movie would ruin the whole series. It didn't. I loved it. Five out of five.
The lore change I'm still turning over: in the series you get in through a portal; here the Backrooms open up through doorways scattered around the world. I genuinely can't tell if I like that more or less. A portal probably would've been too much for a wider audience, so I get why they did it.
What I didn't need was the violence. It didn't have to kill characters off — it felt grim in a way the source material isn't. The Backrooms are interesting and weird and unnerving on their own; the gore was the one place the movie stopped trusting that. Maybe that's what Hollywood demands, but it made it worse for me.
None of that changes the verdict. He got his shot, and he didn't waste it.