Backrooms ★★★½

In 2022, the 16-year-old Kane Parsons uploaded an analog horror video to YouTube titled The Backrooms (Found Footage). Over the next four years, the video garnered over 80 million views and unforeseeably widespread internet discourse surrounding the lore and mysteries of the Backrooms. Now 20 years old in 2026, Parsons makes his feature film directorial debut with Backrooms, making him the youngest filmmaker ever to open a film at No. 1 in North America. Backrooms is a modern horror labyrinth. It’s a dreadfully unnerving feat of suspense set in a liminal space, one that combines an excitement of discovery with the dread of what the discovery may entail.

The film primarily follows a struggling furniture store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his sympathetic therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). In a therapy session, Clark laments his alcoholism, his recent divorce, and his failed career aspirations as an architect. Clark is the type of man to blame the world and others for his problems, never accepting responsibility for his actions. While Mary tries to help him, she carries her own burdens from neglect by her mother with schizophrenia. Because Clark’s wife kicked him out, he sleeps at the furniture store. One night when lights at the store flicker, he goes down to the breaker and sees a slim line of light shining through a crack in the wall of the subfloor. As he approaches, he can hear the buzz of fluorescent lights beyond the wall. Leaning in to investigate, Clark falls through the wall and into the Backrooms.

Upon entering the Backrooms, Clark sees a pile of furniture in a fluorescent-lit yellow room. The random assortment of furniture looks vaguely like items he’d sell in his store, but slightly off. Upon closer examination, he sees that two stacked chairs are inexplicably fused together. He explores the maze until the sound of something approaching makes him flee to the safety of his furniture store. The next time we see Clark after this excursion, he’s consumed with the labyrinth of the Backrooms and its mysterious allure. When he tells his therapist about the place, she’s concerned he’s lost touch with reality. He promises to prove the reality of the Backrooms to her and storms out to return to his eerily empty yellow maze.

The Backrooms are a uniquely terrifying place. Rarely can a location conjure dread and unease in the same way the hallways of the Backrooms can. From a distance, the Backrooms may look vaguely human, but upon closer inspection its nonsensical designs become jarringly apparent. It’s quite an accomplishment that the film’s atmosphere can elicit feelings of dread at a pile of clothes, a room with a lone Christmas tree, or a bathroom that would be impossible to use. It’s like a place that resembles reality, but doesn’t understand it. It’s a place that replicates creation, but is unable to capture the human intention behind designs. The film analogizes the Backrooms through the idea of describing a dog to someone who has never seen a dog before and asking them to draw it. From a distance it may look like a dog, but up close you’d see that they’d get things wrong. Backrooms takes these small wrongnesses and amplifies them to the level of horror, playing on the deep discomfort that comes with the uncanny valley.

While the movie sparingly reveals details of its lore, it also brilliantly obscures details of the horror, amplifying fear that comes from what is hidden. When the film uses a found-footage perspective, it hides details behind the ’90s VHS-style filter, which heavily contributes to the horror. There are moments in these sequences where the eyes have to adjust to a new area, and new details can be made out slowly rather than all at once. Additionally, without ever becoming overly shaky, the camerawork lends itself to quick frights in which the audience isn’t allowed to become comfortable with jarring images. Some frightening images pass so quickly that the memory of them feels more frightening than the images themselves. The film loses some of this momentum in the final act when it decides to show some of these terrifying elements in greater detail outside of the found-footage format, but the memory of the scares in the earlier segments remains.

The Backrooms began as a post on 4chan from a user asking for pictures that feel ‘off’. From that original post, the concept gradually gained momentum and took off after Kane Parsons’ YouTube series went viral. Parsons’ series generated a wave of engagement with his videos, especially speculation about the meaning behind its mysteries and lore. Backrooms, the film, ties directly into this existing series, but you don’t need to have seen any of the online found-footage series for it to make sense. But the elements that made the online series so successful are also present in the film. Part of the allure of Backrooms is the mystery. The film asks many questions about the origin and nature of the impossible extradimensional place, but it sparingly reveals any truths. The real horror of the Backrooms lies less in what is shown than in knowing that there is something more unseen. Either something creates the bizarre liminal space or it is alive itself. Either possibility is equally disconcerting.

The characters in Backrooms are mostly effective at giving the audience an emotionally grounded viewpoint into the Backrooms, but it is unsuccessful at creating characters that would stand up without the novelty of the setting. Clark has a strong external locus of control, blaming others for everything wrong in his life and never taking accountability for his own mistakes. He’s an interesting character to watch fall apart completely, but the writing feels jarringly abrupt in his progression. He goes from wallowing in his sorrows alone to frantically obsessive in the Backrooms much too quickly and at a certain point the audience’s emotional investment shifts entirely from him to Mary instead. Mary is a more interesting character. Because of her mother’s schizophrenia and the neglectful confinement she endured as a child, she knows firsthand the horror of being trapped in a frightening place. Clark’s failed architectural dreams and Mary’s traumatic neglect and confinement both seem to mirror the Backrooms, but the film fails to develop these ideas into satisfying character arcs.

Backrooms is an accomplishment in novelty and uncanny atmosphere. The 2020s have been a big decade for independent content creators making horror films. This year Obsession was a box-office and critical hit and was directed by an internet content creator Curry Barker. The Australian YouTubers The RackaRacka brothers have made two successful horror films, Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. Now, Kane Parsons takes it to another level with a wildly unique entry into the horror genre. Where many contemporary horror films rely on jump scares, Backrooms creates dread and unease from the seemingly mundane: nonsensical hallways, misremembered objects, and the mystery of their existence.