Quiet. Tense. Creepy. And not overstuffed with lore or exposition. One of my favorite genres of film isn't a real genre, though if it was it'd be called "survivalone." It's when one person winds up in a dangerous environment and pretty much spends the whole movie alone trying to escape it. In this genre there's very little talking or exposition, you only know as much as the main character does, and instead of being told what's happening with dialogue or voiceover, you're simply shown it in long stretches of unbroken film: the "show, don't tell" rule writ large. This genre includes survival films like Cast Away or All is Lost, and lately, much to my satisfaction, some videogame-adjacent horror movies. Earlier this year it was Exit 8, based on the game The Exit 8, where a man finds himself trapped in a repeating series of subway tunnels. And this week it's Backrooms, where a man finds himself trapped in an endless maze of dingy yellow offices. I know Backrooms isn't, technically, a videogame movie. There have been a bunch of backrooms games—dozens of them, in fact—but A24's Backrooms movie that's out today isn't based on them, it's based on director Kane Parson's own Backrooms YouTube video series, which was in turn based on the anonymously written 4chan creepypasta from 2019—which all those Backrooms games are also based on. I think that's close enough to claim as a videogame movie. I saw Backrooms last night and it's pretty good, especially the first half. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a man whose life has hit the skids: his marriage has failed, he's lost his job as an architect, and he now works (and sadly lives) in the least popular furniture store in town. One night he spies a crack of light in the basement wall that leads him to discover the Backrooms, a bizarre labyrinth of unending corridors, and becomes obsessed with unraveling their mystery. Ejiofor is very good, as is Renate Reinsve who plays Mary, Clark's therapist, who winds up lost in the labyrinth,