‘Backrooms’ beckons you into a twisted and otherworldly quest
2026 / Dir. Kane Parsons
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: The Blair Witch Project, Skinamarink, House of Leaves, Vaporwave remixes of Creepypasta YouTube lore videos, David Lynch redesigning your suburban corporate office space, the sweet surrender of leaving your failed life behind to wander the secret, endless liminal space inside your furniture store basement.
If you’ve never seen any of the dozens of Backrooms YouTube short films Kane Parsons started making as a teenager, the start of his feature-length adaptation will give you a primer.
Shot in first-person POV with a grainy VHS camcorder, a man in a yellow hazmat suit becomes lost in a series of seemingly never-ending corridors and rooms that resemble bland corporate offices before tech bros tried to pretend work was cool by adding swing sets and table tennis. Except everything is off. Cheap furniture is stuck in the ceiling, a seagull is flying around, and there’s something ominous chasing him.
We then transition to Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect whose wife has thrown him out for his drinking and complaining, now living in his also-failing, pirate-themed discount furniture store. Ejiofor’s talents have been largely wasted in the years since 12 Years a Slave, a fact very apparent in an impressive scene early on where Clark visits his new age-y therapist, Dr. Kline (Joachim Trier mainstay Renate Reinsve), who asks him to roleplay the night his wife threw him out. Clark, initially unwilling, drops a mask of civility to unleash years of pent-up rage. Though a pretty thin character on paper, Ejiofor’s able to make us imagine this man’s years of failure, and then the manic curiosity he develops once he finds an ordinary wall in his furniture store transports him into the “Backrooms.”
Parsons designed the backrooms space, of which 30,000 square feet were actually built. The visual language of the space is the biggest success here, and I found each part of Clark’s exploration exhilarating the further I went into it. This is slow-burning, “ambient” horror that won’t be for everyone, but I loved the thrill of never being sure what lay around each corner. What starts with stacks of furniture, stop signs, and creepy cardboard cutouts gets even stranger the further into the rooms, until it becomes truly twisted and otherworldly. Brace yourself for when he encounters the Christmas tree room.
After his first encounter in the Backrooms, there’s a large gap in time seen offscreen where Clark has gone in many, many times to the point where he’s created a huge map that he shows Dr. Kline, desperate for her to believe him, and recruits two employees to go back in with him with a camcorder to investigate a lower floor. While that seems like a great setup for a Moby Dick-style misadventure where a guy loses it over becoming obsessed, screenwriter Will Soodik spends little time on this trio before jumping to Dr. Kline entering the Backrooms herself to look for Clark.
There’s a strong intent to focus on character psychology and its relation to the Backrooms, between Clark’s crumbling life and Dr. Kline’s own struggles with her childhood growing up with an unstable mother in a hoarder’s home, but Soodik’s script makes it both underdeveloped and overcomplicated and, ultimately, unsuccessful. It’s an intriguing idea to have this woman, who grew up amid a hoard of garbage and stuff, enter the space, but little comes of it. Clark, aside from being played by Ejiofor, isn’t a very interesting character, but seeing a down-on-his-luck guy gradually lose it the further he gets into the Backrooms would have been compelling. Instead, by continually jumping ahead in his Backrooms quest, we’re robbed of his character psychology and any true development.
A weaker script keeps Backrooms from being as accomplished as another young YouTuber’s film, even as I still found Parsons’s debut to be deeply compelling. Coming from a visual, graphic-design internet background, rather than the comedic sketch arena most YouTube-turned-filmmakers emerge from, gives him a unique footing in the current horror landscape. There’s no blend of comedy and horror or haunted-house jump scares, only a creeping dread created by the incredible attention to detail and craft layered with a ‘90s-internet-vaporwave aesthetic. I’m excited to watch this film again to travel back into this world, even if the people that reside in it are easy to forget.