Kane Parsons’ feature debut is fascinatingly caught between two generations’ instincts for what frightens us
Much like the fictional liminal location itself, the Backrooms mythos seemed to manifest out of nowhere—arising in 4chan posts in the 2010s before taking on a viral life of its own. It’s a simple setup: people randomly find themselves inside a drab, fluorescent-yellow empty office building with endless hallways. Each space’s random architectural features—including protruding half-walls, oddly placed doors and windows, and piles of abandoned furniture—are at once familiar yet completely alien, all alluding to some long-forgotten or forbidden purpose. And the deeper one wanders into this inescapable space, the more surreal and malevolent its unseen forces become.
As users across the globe contributed piecemeal to the Backrooms’ ever-expanding lore, then-16-year-old Kane Parsons’ YouTube adaptations turned this open-source mythology into a cornerstone of both the liminal and analog horror movements. A warped mirror of the 80s and 90s nostalgia boom, Parsons’ Backrooms series uses the decorative and technological trappings of those decades to capture eldritch horrors lurking beneath insistently ordinary spaces. Rejecting sleek modernity for something more arcane and obsolete, the tape decks, camcorders, and static-ridden images of Parsons’ restrained, dread-soaked videos bring their cosmic frights terrifyingly close to home.
With Backrooms lore so deeply rooted in a zero-budget sense of self-discovery, a big-budget A24 adaptation starring Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve seems completely at odds with its homegrown origins. Yet Parsons’ high-profile feature debut—a source of internet scuttlebutt among skeptics and diehards alike since its announcement—packs enough exciting ambition to thrill the faithful and enough flawed execution to validate the doubters. Parsons draws on his expanded resources and the talents of his seasoned collaborators to translate the intimate terror of his original videos into something genuinely jaw-dropping and visceral on the big screen. While Backrooms occasionally trades the eerie intimacy of the original YouTube videos for a strain of lead-footed literalism better suited to older studio horror, Kane Parsons’ assured command of the film’s bone-chilling dread and sprawling thematic ambition more than justifies the leap from viral curiosity to prestige production.
After a pulse-pounding prologue rooted in the gritty VHS-thetic of the OG Backrooms videos, Parsons pulls us out of the anonymous screen and into a traditional 1990s setting polished to an uncanny, almost sitcom-like artificiality. Ejiofor’s Clark is a bitter, down-on-his-luck salesman, reduced to hawking furniture outdated even for the early 90s in a cavernous, barely stocked warehouse. His professional prison is also a personal one: when he’s not working, the store doubles as his makeshift home, his wife having kicked him out over his emotional detachment and violent temper. As he struggles to open up to therapist Mary (Reinsve) in a last-ditch bid to change his life, Clark’s emotional liminality dovetails with a terrifyingly tangible one: he discovers that a wall in the store’s basement is a hidden portal to the endless, mysterious Backrooms.
Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik are surprisingly adept at expanding the Backrooms mythos beyond its found-footage origins without sacrificing the intimate dread those videos cultivate. Ejiofor’s and Reinsve’s characters are rooted in complementary states of traumatic transition, and the bizarre fabric patterns and glossy metal accents of their surroundings become the armor they hide behind. But this gaudy protection can only hold so long against looming physical and emotional horrors. As it gives way, the Backrooms’ alienating production design emerges as a striking externalization of just how warped this broken pair has become, and how hard they work to avoid confronting their inner demons. Ejiofor’s manic stoicism plays remarkably well against Reinsve’s eroding sense of empathetic certainty, with Parsons paying as much attention to his actors’ distinct vulnerabilities as to the combative chemistry they share.
Key to how uncannily real Parsons’ Backrooms feels is the way its objects and spaces carry different weights for the film’s young director than for his veteran creative team—including production designer Danny Vermette and cinematographer Jeremy Cox, both reuniting from Oz Perkins’ NEON run of Longlegs, The Monkey, and Keeper. Even before the Backrooms’ magpied clutter sinks into the floor like quicksand, its placement and design feel viscerally wrong. These obsolete objects still hold a remembered significance for the cast, crew, and audience members who lived through their faded heyday; for Parsons and his contemporaries, they’re closer to cultural curios studied from the outside. A metaphor the film returns to is apt here: the Backrooms as the architectural equivalent of a dog drawn by someone who has only ever had a dog described to them. The yellowed wallpaper, scattered office chairs, and doors to nowhere are as alien to Parsons as the space’s unknown, malevolent architects. That generational game of aesthetic telephone gives the film’s nostalgic feel its overwhelmingly uncanny charge. Epitomized by how the spaces begin populating with ersatz versions of the characters’ own clothing and mementos, the Backrooms feels like a magnet for degraded memory. The further the copy drifts from the thing it imitates, the more monstrous the space and its skeuomorphs become. The A24 budget only sharpens the effect: with the resources to raid every Goodwill in a tri-state area, Parsons can weaponize the nostalgia these objects evoke at a scale only previously teased at in his original YouTube videos.
Backrooms reaches its horrifying heights when, much like its source material, Parsons and Soodik let their characters explore the vastness of this space at their own pace rather than pursue a traditional plot or scares. There’s a measured confidence in Parsons and Cox’s unsettling steadicam shots following Reinsve and Ejiofor, either stalking Clark and Mary from behind or pulling them forward into unknown territory. And for all of the Backrooms’ shadow-eliminating fluorescents, Parsons and Cox are equally skilled at scaling that lighting back into demonically dark shadows. That eye for dreadful detail and composition makes Backrooms one of the rare films that can wring more blood-curdling terror from suddenly encountering a flashing Christmas tree or a cardboard standee looping recorded messages in a dozen languages than from any conventional monster.
Where Backrooms falters exposes not just its shortcomings but the way it feels caught between two generational tastes in horror. As some might fear, the weakest stretches of Backrooms are the ones that make the characters’ experiences frustratingly literal—sequences that hand monstrous physical form to creatures and inner conflicts far more frightening when left implied. At times, too much context is handed to us, even if only across a few minutes of the film’s already lengthy runtime. It’s as if the creative team—or those backing it—didn’t trust the ambiguous anxiety that drew viewers to Parsons’ YouTube shorts to sustain a feature, and gave in to the temptation to wrestle that dread into something tangible, something for characters and audiences to confront and overcome. These choices exhaustingly spend the goodwill earned by Backrooms’ strong performances, pacing, and production design, exposing the limitations of its rushed plot and thin character work. To be fair, a degree of that narrative opaqueness is the point Parsons and Soodik reach for—though not every gap feels deliberately mysterious rather than merely underdeveloped.
Backrooms could easily have manifested as another “the real monster is trauma” horror film, and at its lowest moments it gives in to that genre stalwart. But Parsons seems less interested in trauma as an external parasite to be confronted and purged than in how trauma becomes its own familiar emotional home turf—and that interest reframes the film’s worst instinct as its paradoxically truest one. Without delving into spoiler territory, a climactic confrontation in the Backrooms plays like the film openly wrestling with its own competing impulses: the desire to transform pain into something monstrous and external, and the simultaneous refusal to let its characters evade responsibility by doing so. The drive to make our intangible inner monsters into something we can physically confront is itself a flawed comfort: a nostalgic impulse toward legibility and resolution as obsolete as the objects cluttering the Backrooms, clung to in the face of a fresher, more genuinely unsettling unknown. It’s a kinship that reaches beyond the Backrooms itself, as the same reluctance to leave a fading, self-destructive familiarity for uncharted emotional territory governs the supernatural space, its memory-born ephemera, and the mundane trappings of the outside world its explorers will return to. Parsons may not fully reconcile those tensions in the film’s messy-as-hell execution, but the fact that Backrooms remains so tangled up in them is precisely what gives it such an unnerving afterlife. I’d much rather see that kind of ambitious curiosity rewarded with A24 resources than another paint-by-numbers studio horror film wearing Backrooms cosplay.
Whether intentionally or not, this thematic clarity allows Parsons to circle back to the film’s awkward, overly literal moments and recontextualize them with a redeeming, retroactive grace, lending these rough patches an unexpected profundity that crests in a mesmerizing, haunting coda. It’s the kind of overstuffed ambition expected from a debut feature—but even the messier elements I’d happily see jettisoned are charged with the experimental energy that makes the rest of Backrooms so magnetic.
A24 and Chernin Entertainment will release BACKROOMS in theaters on May 29, 2026.
