Backrooms

The Backrooms opened May 29, a horror-thriller written and directed by YouTuber Kane Parsons from the internet myth of the same name: an abstract pocket space where nothing quite tracks. Great premise. Some odd choices in the execution.

Quick origin: a 4chan post with that photo and the bit about noclip, moist carpet, mono-yellow, fluorescent hum-buzz, six hundred million square miles of empty rooms, and God save you if something nearby has already heard you. The idea exploded into videos, games, and stories. Parsons’s Kane Pixels found-footage shorts expanded the mythos, drew real heat, and led here with A24. Cool path, especially since he started as a teenager.

The theatrical version sits in the 1990s and follows Clark and Mary. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect running a pirate-themed furniture store while his life collapses: marriage over, house gone with his wife, store struggling, architecture career stuck. Therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) is not moving the needle. Sleeping at the store after losing the house, he keeps getting weird electricity. One night he messes with the fuse box, the lights die, and a thin seam of light opens in a wall. Behind it: the Backrooms. Curious about the layout and what he has found, Clark goes in.

Visually, they nail it. Aesthetic and design of the set land hard. From what I understand, most of this was a physical build, a 30,000-square-foot replica. When someone tears through the space, the twisted, shifting environments are intriguing and unsettling. Outside shots count too. The sky just feels wrong, which feeds the larger sense that reality is off.

Performances are solid, held back by odd dialogue. A few lines and scenes stick out where it is not bad so much as “what did they just say?” Ejiofor sells Clark. Reinsve feels a little stiffer by comparison. Overall they do the job. The mental-health angle confused me at first, then clicked on reflection. You need someone a little cracked to keep going back into that space. Most sane people phase through a wall once and decide to sell the building or burn it down and never return.

I am not a huge Backrooms lore guy. I watched some of Parsons’s videos around 2022 and liked them. Expedition teams charting an unknown space felt like the alternate path Stranger Things could have taken with the Upside Down, and the found-footage shorts are sincerely good horror: real dread of being trapped in there. I have not stayed current on the wiki. From what I know, the concept thrives on the unknown.

Mystery is the fuel. You do not know what is around the corner. Rules are unclear. Stakes live in that blank space. Stuck in the Backrooms, your brain runs: Where am I? How did I get here? Where is the exit? Is anyone else here? It should feel like a nightmare. This movie has sequences that get there. It does not match the dread of those YouTube shorts. Terror and dread get turned down. Cool factor gets turned up. I was not scared so much as going, ooh, that is interesting.

Spoilers from here.

Clark’s doorway between worlds does not go away. A core Backrooms idea is no clear escape: you were never supposed to be here, arrival is an accident, the exit becomes a fading hope as nothing makes sense and whatever hunts you cannot be explained. A concrete in-and-out shifts the fear from “how do they get out?” to “can they make it back to the door?” Mary’s climax chase taps the first kind of dread: she does not know where she is, something is after her. I wanted more of that across the film.

Then there is what chases them. The monsters are this reality’s copies of people: human-shaped until you look closer, extra eyes, segmented faces, twisted proportions. Unnerving concept. Not scary in practice. I found them kind of funny. They reminded me of Floop’s Fooglies from Spy Kids. Climax: Clark has gone full Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs and wants to stay. Fine as a weird choice. He sits at a table with Mary tied up and a double-eyed, double-nosed copy. He talks about how they do not feel or think, then says, “And you can eat them too,” lifts the copy’s shirt, and pulls a chunk of belly flesh. I laughed out loud. Surreal, not scary, because I was never afraid of the pseudo-people.

We already know the Backrooms can do scary. The earliest monster I remember from those videos was that weird squiggly-guy model. I still do not know what it is, and that works better. An inexplicable thing hunting you in a place that should not exist is terror. A weird fake-person render is unsettling. Not the same level. Ask yourself which is worse: something you cannot read at all, or a twisted person.

Not a bad movie. A weird movie. Some pieces work hard. Others do not. For Parsons’s first theatrical feature, I am more excited about what he does next. The off bits are learnable. He has a real talent for visual storytelling. I had a good time. If the premise hooks you, check it out