The journey that led to the release of Backrooms began in May 2019 with the now-famous 4chan photo of a dingy, bare office space with faded yellow wallpaper and creepy fluorescent lighting. Yet it could be argued that the photo’s vague sense of unspoken danger lurking just beyond our perception didn’t fully take hold in the public imagination until COVID-19. For many in the online generation, the pandemic intensified and mainstreamed the photo’s sense of emotional disconnect, as every abandoned mall, vacant office, and empty school hallway became its own liminal space. Living through the dread and loneliness of lockdown meant navigating an environment that felt recognizable yet soulless, deserted yet threatening, real yet unreal.
The liminal concept’s accelerant was Kane Parsons, who was only 16 years old when he taught himself the open-source 3D modeling software Blender and began creating the creepy Backrooms YouTube series that established the budding franchise’s lore. Its almost two dozen episodes introduced a lot of questions and answered almost none of them, yet they became wildly popular and deeply unsettling expressions of our COVID-era unease. Cut to today’s post-pandemic Hollywood, where studios are looking to YouTube creators to bring internet natives — and almost-natives — back to theaters. Under these desperate conditions, cool-kids mini-major A24 handed Parsons about $10 million and two Oscar-nominated performers to turn Backrooms into a feature-length film. The result amplifies everything that works — and doesn’t quite work — about the whole liminal-space concept.
One’s reaction to Backrooms depends almost entirely on whether you’re creeped out by watching characters gingerly skulk around empty spaces. Because there’s a lot of it. It also depends on whether you’re comfortable lingering in uncertainty. Because there’s a lot of that, too. Backrooms is a vibe movie that tries to tap into complex feelings that, by design, cannot be fully understood. We’re fairly certain that Parsons knows what’s going on, but as any interview with the grandiloquent young director would have predicted, he has instead crafted an over-intellectualized and under-articulated mood board of a horror film.
There is no doubt that Parsons knows how to cast an eerie spell. The movie, like the YouTube series, takes place in the ’90s, a canny choice that forces us to view some of the Backrooms footage in an ominous, fuzzy, pre-internet past devoid of digital sheen. Production designer Danny Vermette delivers an endlessly fascinating, off-kilter environment in which each room could resemble the previous room or be completely different. Items are half-buried within walls, entryways have three doorknobs, stop signs are backward, and an otherwise barren room contains a power cord leading to who knows what. Even if editor Greg Ng can’t always gauge when all that walking is starting to dissipate the tension, you still may find yourself nervously craning your neck to see what’s around the next corner.
Parsons knows how to turn the screws while also being smart enough to know that a feature film needs to focus less on world-building and more on people, lest Backrooms be the equivalent of watching someone else play a first-person shooter. But the script, written by Will Soodik, is filled with dialogue that can sound awfully intelligent and often mysterious but is ultimately too opaque and distancing. For those not steeped in the Backrooms mythos, all signs point to the Backrooms being a weaponized manifestation of the subconscious traumas and memories of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of a pirate-themed furniture store. With his wife having recently left him, thanks in part to his drinking, Clark is so consumed by rage that he seeks the help of therapist Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve, great as usual). Their initial, lengthy session lays the foundation for everything that is to come, which would have set a better table had Soodik (who previously wrote on HBO’s convoluted Westworld) not relied on labored psychoanalysis. Mary tries to help Clark while also dealing with her own trauma involving the demolition of her childhood home to make way for a new housing development.
Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), who is terrific in everything, carries the burden of keeping us invested not only in Clark’s fate but also in hanging on long enough to take a wild stab at what the heck is happening. When the flickering lights and the oddly arranged fuses in the store’s downstairs fuse box lead Clark into the Backrooms, Ejiofor uses his expressive face to convey — without overdoing it — a sense of fear and gradual disconnection from the physical world. As Clark becomes more obsessed with mapping out the Backrooms, he ropes in his employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell from Shrinking) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), leading to one of the film’s scariest moments.
Director of Photography Jeremy Cox’s follow shots accentuate the Backrooms’ vast empty spaces, made even spookier by the bile-yellow walls and carpets. Even Clark and Mary’s therapy scenes, with their slight wide angles and excessive headroom, keep us off balance. Equally effective are the sound design and score, both co-created by Parsons and Canadian composer Edo Van Breemen. A heady mix that seeps into your brain, the soundscape further proves that Parsons is a promising new multi-hyphenate. The 20-year-old may live in his head a little too much, but his instincts are often right on target. There are precious few jump scares in Backrooms. Parsons admirably takes the harder road, sticking to tension and dread as delivered through spatial anxiety and sound. The more traditional horror-movie weirdness comes later. When Mary enters the Backrooms to look for Clark, their confrontation may go around in circles, but David Lynch would be proud of the moment when she uses an object of her trauma to fight off a projection of his trauma.
Backrooms plays more to the converted than it realizes. Those who don’t find liminal spaces unnerving will stay awake only by virtue of the film’s craftsmanship, which is even more impressive considering the filmmaker’s youth. Parsons is the most original and intellectually inclined of the growing list of directors who cut their teeth on YouTube, including Curry Barker (Obsession), Markiplier (Iron Lung), and Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me). Still, for those whose formative movie-going experiences were Jaws and Star Wars, seeing the multiplex overrun by horror-loving YouTubers may force them to unpack their trauma inside their own personal Backrooms.
- Release Date
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May 27, 2026
- Runtime
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110 minutes
- Director
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Kane Parsons
- Writers
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Will Soodik
- Producers
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Chris Ferguson, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, James Wan, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson, Michael Clear, Osgood Perkins, Peter Chernin, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy
