Backrooms began as a creepypasta posted to a 4chan thread in 2019: a simple, slightly tilted image depicting a yellow-soaked, carpeted room that felt both uncanny and detached from reality. After years of forum discussion and lore-building came Kane Parsons, a YouTuber who, in early 2022, began a semi-anthological web series expanding on the extradimensional mythology of the Backrooms.
Set in the 1990s, the series followed members of the research institute Async as they attempted to document and understand these liminal spaces, featuring never-ending rooms, boundless layers, and hostile entities lurking within them. Roughly $10 million and an A24 contract later, Parsons (known online as Kane Pixels) crafted his first feature film remarkably before turning 21.
There is a certain terror in exploring a world that seemingly has no end. An additional layer of horror emerges when that dimension appears not of this world, populated by unknown entities lurking at the edge of the frame. Backrooms’ high-concept premise: a furniture store owner discovering a doorway to an inexplainable space of endless backrooms and becoming lost to it – is intent on amplifying that dread. With impressive production design, an eerie and unsettling soundscape, but an underdeveloped central story, Kane Parsons’s first film is both chilling and structurally inert.
The film predominantly follows two protagonists who are consumed by their own demons – a vessel for Parsons to adapt his web-series into an accessible, yet frustrating cinematic feature. First there is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an angry and alcoholic furniture store owner who laments both his marriage and failed career aspirations as an architect. Clark is extremely lonely, sleeping in his furniture store and attending increasingly intimate therapy sessions that often re-enact the breakdown of his marriage.
Alongside him is Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), Clark’s always-on-edge therapist who lives in constant rumination over her childhood experience with a mother exhibiting extreme paranoia and psychosis. The film shows her repeatedly haunted by this, carrying with her a concrete cast of her hand made in their now-demolished family home. Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett appear in brief and underused supporting roles as Clark’s assistant manager Kat and her boyfriend Bobby, while Mark Duplass occasionally observes the proceedings as a mysterious Async scientist.
Clark’s discovery of an invisible doorway into the Backrooms attached to his furniture warehouse sends him on an obsessive spiral, where he attempts to become both an explorer and a cartographer of the alien surrounds. Clark goes missing and Mary sets out to find him, leading both mentally unstable protagonists to be forced to reckon with the Backrooms, as well as their own anxieties.
While the setting is comparable to The Shining, Skinamarink, or even the more experimental episodes of Apple TV’s Severance, there’s no question that Parsons has crafted an environment that feels distinctive and unnerving. Rooms appeared to have shrink in on themselves, inanimate objects have melted into the ground, and memories of the real-world have fractured and distorted.
The initial exploration of the Backrooms is filled with uncanny unease bolstered by strong direction and impressive, tactile set design. The overbearing, fluorescent lighting skilfully disorients both the audience and the characters. The strongest sections use found footage, leaning into 1990s technology in sequences that are both genuinely frightening and a faithful extension of Parsons’ YouTube origins.
Where Backrooms falters is its pacing and reliance on character psychology. Large portions of the film involve re-treading similar paths, which become repetitive by the time Mary fully enters the maze. A dulling of atmosphere established in the first half is further undermined by a third act reveal that foregrounds the interpersonal framing of the Backrooms. While Ejiofor and Reinsve give convincing but perfunctory performances: Clark’s escalating hostility and Mary’s trauma-born fear – the film often renders them more symbolic than fully realised. Many viewers will likely mine the film for thematic connections to the web series once the credits roll, but it’s hard not to feel slightly numbed by that point.
Unique, perplexing, and blunt, Backrooms is an exercise in spatial literalism that will engross some viewers and infuriate others. The mostly CGI-free craft, particularly the soundscape, production design, and found-footage sequences are consistently admirable. However, the uneven pacing, cipher-like characters, and the final act’s overt psychological framing leave the film feeling somewhat exhausting. It is an elliptical portrait of distorted memory, loneliness, and complete breakdown; only offering answers as fragmented as the Backrooms’ inhabitants. Nevertheless, there are flashes of brilliance, proving that whatever Kane Parsons does next will likely be a room worth stepping into.
){kind=link}