Kane Parsons | Backrooms | A24 | May 2026 | 110 minutes

The overall concept of the Backrooms started off as a simple picture with a caption that was posted on 4chan back in 2019. Its placid yellow backdrop has turned into a cultural phenomenon, eliciting unfamiliar curiosity towards the empty rooms and locations that are now stuck forever in nostalgia. Analog horror videos of the Backrooms followed through, bringing their own interpretations of what they might contain; one of the popular examples came from Kane Parsons, using little more than the Blender software and pulling from the topics of science fiction and creature horror to create his own spin on it.

The concept that he brought along from the web series has now expanded further into the Backrooms, where it immediately pulls you in from the world that he crafted right out of the gate. Instead of treating it the way Parsons has done in the web series, he places it in existential territory: uncovering the vestige of places known and unknown that are also taken from the psychosis of the people who visit the space.

It is a thematic core that Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik set up neatly. The film centres Clark (performed by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect and current furniture store owner, and Mary Kline (performed by Renate Reinsve), a therapist he speaks with directly, as the main vessels whose memories and personalities shift as they walk into the Backrooms. Their past traumas slowly tear away as they confusingly walk into the infinite liminal terrains of that locale. The journey they take in the Backrooms can lead one to fight back and return back to the present, or worse, spiral downward and get stuck in their dreadful abyss.

This general throughline amplifies just how the Backrooms can be terrifyingly relevant to the modern age. Our internal curiosity towards the past is vast, so we tend to replicate and see nostalgia with rose-tinted glasses. Yet Parsons’ direction flips that mindset, turning one’s memory into a mutilated nightmare that the Backrooms consume, then dilate it to its most fragile version. As seen through the lens of Clark and Mary, they witness the layers that are stuck in past stasis. Decorations are now misshapen and unkempt, and locations once familiar have now felt like an illusion. Yet the negative experiences that make up the person are perpetually contained, now reminded by misfigured “people” that stroll in the backrooms.

With the ambition that the film is building, Parsons ensures the atmosphere and horrors of the Backrooms gradually engulf the viewer. For the most part, it works. The sickly lighting and claustrophobic set of the liminal space are striking. Parsons and Edo van Breemen’s scoring echoes the film’s disintegrating tone, and the use of Blender VFX, first-person camcorders, and third-person camera shots is neatly incorporated to accentuate the chilling fright coming from the malformed locations and monstrous figures.

Yet the film’s potency gets limited by its unwillingness to delve into deeper territory. The main characters’ overall presence and traumatic dilemmas can feel like detours, setting them up as unwilling pawns whose unstable lives linger, only tying up their psychological fringes in the Backrooms at the end while not exposing how the frantic scars they continue to carry can get worse. This also moves in the direction of the horror as well. While the balanced use of practical set pieces and shaky camcorder footage leads to some compelling tension, the film misses out on bringing out creative scares overall, especially with the liminal space of the Backrooms being presented as immeasurably looming.

Nevertheless, Backrooms is still compelling. Turning the Backrooms into a psychological nightmare where memories live in stagnation is a fascinating concept that Kane Parsons brings to life for the most part, building up the atmosphere as insatiably curious as it is harrowing. But it is locked out of its chilling potential, taking the strangeness of the liminal space and the wandering journey of its protagonists on a surface level rather than submerging into the depths that’d open more evocative details. As a result, Backrooms gets quite lost in itself. Not because of what it opened up to us, but because of what is not shown to us. 

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Louis Pelingen (He/They) is a writer from the Philippines. Currently a staff editor at the Filipino music publication, The Flying Lugaw. His criticism work is also found at The Line of Best Fit, Treble, Northern Transmissions, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, and Listencorp. Spends most of his time engrossed in the arts, alongside curiously surfing on the interwebs.