Backrooms' Ending, Explained: Who Escapes the Liminal Maze?

Directed by the enviously young Kane Parsons (or Kane Pixels, as per his YouTube persona), Backrooms is the latest high-concept horror film from A24. 

Drawing on the subgenre of liminal horror, which derives its scares from the eerie emptiness of transitional or ‘soulless’ locations, like offices, airports, shopping malls, etc., Backrooms takes place in a furniture warehouse in 1990. The owner, wannabe architect Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is going through his own transitional period: through therapy sessions with Renate Rensieve’s therapist, Mary, we learn his marriage has dissolved, and he’s now living in his furniture store. All of this is adding to a midlife crisis, in which he feels trapped in an endless loop.

Clark then finds himself in an actual endless loop in the 'Backrooms,' a surreal liminal space he enters through an invisible portal in his store’s basement. When he and his two employees go missing within the Backrooms, Mary enters as well and soon runs into a lot more than she bargained for.

Here’s what happens and who survives by the end of Backrooms. And a warning that, as you’d expect, there will be major spoilers from this point on.

What Happens to Clark and Mary In the Backrooms

After wandering aimlessly through the creepily empty corridors looking for Clark, Mary hits a dead end – a wall covered by a strange mural depicting a giant monster and a person escaping through a trap door above them. It appears to have been painted by Clark, who has by now been in the Backrooms for an unspecified amount of time, and, as you'd expect, has completely unravelled.

Mary also realises that something else is the Backrooms – a large, murderous entity that hunts everyone who enters. This is when Clark appears and assures her she doesn’t need to worry about the monster… Right before choking her unconscious.

This is when Backrooms morphs into Misery for a beat: Mary comes to, tied to a chair in front of a kitchen table set for dinner. Three malformed Backrooms entities (“memories” of people remembered by the Backrooms over and over, their original forms deteriorating over time, Clark explains), and Clark, are with her. The severed head of Clark’s assistant store manager is also revealed to be in a fridge, and it’s unclear who is responsible for her death - Clark or the monster. 

As Mary desperately tries to persuade Clark to free her, he jumps into the role play she’d encouraged in their therapy sessions – replaying an argument between him and his wife. Finally snapping, Mary is brutally honest with her client, telling him his problem is that he blames everyone else for his issues and never takes responsibility himself. It’s just how he’s “wired.”

To illustrate this point, the Backrooms monster enters the scene, and this is the first time we see what it looks like: a giant, lumbering version of Clark in his pirate costume – the get-up he uses for his furniture store adverts. The implication is that the Backrooms have ‘remembered’ Clark, but only his self-loathing, aggressive side, with no impulse control. The real Clark once again insists to Mary that it won’t hurt them, only to quickly be proven wrong as Backrooms Clark lifts him for a deadly bite.

Mary is chased through the Backrooms by this twisted version of Clark until she finds the trapdoor from the mural. It leads back to the furniture store basement, but she’s not safe yet – the outside has been blocked off, and the monster pursues her up to the shop floor, where a trap involving knock-out gas has been laid for both of them. They fall into a mad scramble on the floor, with Mary splintering the being’s peg leg and clobbering the side of its head with a piece of cement she kept from her childhood home.

She wriggles free and down a narrow crawlspace to escape. Unlike Clark and the two unfortunate people he dragged with him, Mary survives the Backrooms, but the film doesn’t end there.

How Backrooms Ends - and ASYNC’s Role

Mary is immediately taken into the custody of ASYNC Research Institute. The company is introduced at the very start of the film through first-person footage of one of their members fleeing from the monster (Backrooms Clark) to a control centre, dressed in a hazmat suit. 

We get a glimpse of the monster trussed up on a slab in a laboratory before Mary is debriefed by an employee called Phil (played by Mark Duplass). The only thing we find out about ASYNC during this conversation is that they used to manufacture MRI machines before discovering the Backrooms, implying an electromagnetic component to the mysterious dimension. Now, their sole purpose is to explore and research the realm. The furniture store appears to be a new or previously undocumented portal to the Backrooms, which Phil says is happening more and more.

In the last shot of the film, we see Mary’s Backrooms version slumped on a chair, her features slightly distorted, in the pose that Clark had imprisoned her in. Will she become the next monster to stalk its endless corridors? Backrooms ends neither totally ambiguously nor laying all its cards on the table, and will doubtless have audiences debating what it all meant long after leaving the cinema.