[You can watch our analysis of Kane Parsons’ BACKROOMS here.]
Kane Parsons’s Backrooms is the first mainstream film that I’m aware of to have been inspired by, of all things, a 4chan post. Chances are you already know about the Backrooms, especially if you’re Gen Z or a millennial or have spent any significant amount of time memeing on the Internet. If you don’t, then it’s a simple enough concept to explain. Imagine a dank, yellow-wallpapered office space, empty of all features save the blank angularity of walls and a vaguely unsettling openness. Now imagine that going on and on, forever.
It’s a weird alternate take on our reality, as if the universal software had glitched and copy-pasted this uncanny liminal space into its own pocket dimension. An anon on the original 4chan post (which featured on one of the site’s forums dedicated to paranormal phenomena), however, explains it more evocatively:
If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
—Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019)
There’s tons of creepypasta on the Internet, many of which are destined to fester in obscurity; but for whatever reason, this one image of the interior of a hobby store stripped down for renovation in the early aughts caught on like wildfire, inspiring waves of fanfiction and subreddits and video game adaptations by devotees obsessed with expanding upon the idea’s inherent eeriness.
One of these devotees was Kane Parsons, who as a teenager in 2022 created a series of shorts on YouTube based on and named after the Backrooms. Ranging from one and a half minutes to almost an hour, these videos were characterized by a low-res DIY production value (and much of it done with CGI) typical of the contemporary analog horror, though Parsons’s take on the phenomenon more or less forms the basis of how the Backrooms exists in popular imagination—right down to the 90’s shaky-cam POV wandering breathlessly through those yellow halls.
It’s no wonder, then, that Parsons himself was tapped to direct a film adaptation once the meme went sufficiently viral. An uncommon achievement for a twenty-year-old, to be sure; but even if you’re backed by distributor-of-the-moment A24 and have big-name stars like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve playing the leads in your film, these are no unquestionable guarantors of quality. Feature-length films, after all, are entirely different beasts from YouTube videos.
Curiously enough, the decision taken by the production (a bevy of studios financed this project, along with A24), it seems to me, to mitigate Parsons’s inexperience ended up being its weakest link: that is, television writer Will Soodik’s script.
For the best thing about Backrooms is that evocation of the concept’s uncanniness; which Parsons, already having developed such in his prior work, is able to capture here to convincing effect. In fact, the opening scene of the film is a sequence stylistically lifted straight out of the director’s web series: a first-person-POV of a Backrooms researcher attempting to regain contact with headquarters whilst being pursued by some unknown threat. It is an increasingly kinetic and entirely absorbing few minutes that mixes in world-specific visual oddities with good old fashioned thrills. Video-game-level immersion meets cinema.
And the main plot thereafter, to Soodik’s credit, is not very hard to follow: Clark (Ejiofor) runs a failing furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire in an undisclosed American suburb. Recently separated from his wife, and kicked out of his own home, due to problems with alcoholism and an evaporated career as an architect, he attends therapy with counselor and published author Dr. Kline (Reinsve) in order to resolve these issues. Clark is a textbook case of throttled aspiration, and he has been reduced to filming goofy pirate-themed commercials in order to stay afloat, with only his deadpan younger employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) as company/assistance.
After experiencing strange issues with the store’s power (new switches have been mysteriously added to the breaker box), and a particularly difficult session with Dr. Kline, Clark discovers a portal to the Backrooms in the sub-floor of Cap’n Clark’s which can be accessed by phasing through a blank wall. Detritus from the real world–such as furniture, shoes, and a stop sign—litter the rooms seemingly at random, and weird noises echo throughout.
It doesn’t take long for Clark to become fascinated with this newfound space. He tries to convince Dr. Kline of it, but her skepticism drives him towards Kat and Bobby, whom he enlists to help him explore the Backrooms further. During their trek, however, the same threat that hunted the researcher in the film’s opening attacks, killing Bobby and separating Kat from Clark. There is another frantic chase sequence, and more abnormalities abound, including zombie-like personas and dank swimming pools; Act Two ends with the entity finding Clark and lifting the camera that the trio have been utilizing for their research.
Act Three signals a perspective-switch, and the rest of the film follows Dr. Kline as she tries to locate Clark after he sends her a cryptic voice mail. And while this section wraps up a couple storylines (Clark’s, as well as disclosing the identities of certain lab-coated individuals who have been secretly watching the characters throughout the film), it is here that Backrooms totally surrenders to conventionality, with the climax featuring yet another chase sequence, this time with the Monster unmasked and revealed to be a kind of grotesque projection of Clark’s insecurities, pirate hat and all.
And this is related to what might be the film’s biggest weakness, which is its attempts to “explain” what the Backrooms is and does, either through the involvement of the Async corporation (those aforementioned lab coats studying the Backrooms) or how it connects the characters’ psychological issues/histories to what occurs in them. It’s typical A24, of course: What if the real horror all along was your undealt-with trauma? Clark’s troubles are obvious, but also at play are Dr. Kline’s, with flashbacks involving a squalid home and an institutionalized (possibly schizophrenic) mother interpolated throughout.
The idea of the Backrooms being an extremely reduced simulacrum of our reality—complete with their own “misprinted” human copies—isn’t uninteresting, per se, but instead of exploring the utter strangeness of what that might entail, the film instead contents itself with the tired therapy-angle, turning Clark into a stereotypically deranged villain who much prefers this emptied hellscape to his dead-end real life, and Dr. Kline into a Final Girl harried by the anthropomorphized toxicity of her client. A toxicity which she must destroy using an artifact from her own troubled past, re-purposing one’s trauma for the sake of progress, etc. You get the picture. It’s just a little too obvious, as if the studios were afraid that audiences would not follow along without the inclusion of these all-too-contemporary themes. Perhaps they were right to be—though this is not always a preferable concession.
Thankfully, such demerits do not totally rob the film of its intrigue. The acting, overall, is uniformly good, which is to be expected from the always trustworthy Ejiofor and rising star Reinsve. Noted indie filmmaker/actor Mark Duplass is somewhat wasted in a very small role as an Async scientist, and the two younger supporting cast members are perfectly serviceable.
The production design, led by Danny Vermette, is a faithful recreation and sizable expansion of Parsons’s own designs from the web series, showcasing the off-kilter nature of this domain: Its featurelessness confuses (apparently crew members would get lost on the, in total, 30,000 square foot set, so disorienting was its lack of variety), and whatever random items/objects that do appear are spaced oddly, jumbled together at random, or halfway phased through surfaces. It really does give off the impression of an exaggeratedly simplified yet buggy version of our universe. And even the “real world” is stylized to a degree, with many of the environments hinting at the Backrooms with weird symmetries and stark angles in office spaces or the courtyard of an apartment complex.
The cinematography by Jeremy Cox is very nice, with a good portion of it also utilizing Blender, which is the software Parsons used for his YouTube shorts. In fact, whenever the film reverts to first-person handheld, it’s a reminder of how cutting edge the project truly is, and could even represent a shift in how traditional media incorporates ideas and/or techniques birthed in up-and-coming mediums.
Similar to the other breakout hit of 2026, Obsession, Backrooms is a work of art that takes convention (a narrative trope, in the case of the other film, and for Backrooms a now ubiquitous Internet meme) and makes it feel fresh and exciting. Both have made oodles of money, with Backrooms now A24’s biggest release, surpassing previous record-holder Marty Supreme by a considerable margin—not a bad feat for a guy who isn’t even old enough to drink yet. Here’s hoping the success of these two features signals an influx of talented and hungry young filmmakers into the industry, and is no mere glitch in the matrix.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Why Don’t You Love Me: Reviewing Curry Barker’s “Obsession” (2025), Rude Awakening: On Ermanno Olmi’s “Il Posto” (1961), Remembered Depths: Reviewing Orson Welles’s “The Immortal Story” (1968)