Backrooms Review – Someone Walked Out of the Movie Theater. And That Tells You Everything

Backrooms throws audiences straight into the yellow rooms right away. We follow a shaky, grainy ’90s camera slowly moving through the creepy environment, peering into every empty, wallpapered dark room ahead. You have no idea who they are, where they’re going, who’s chasing them or what’s behind the next corner. Is this another dimension? Is this a secret lab? Are we in an alien world? We don’t know. We hear the hum. We see the fluorescent lights buzz. And the maze-like rooms stretch on forever. Then comes the first big scare. And within those first few minutes, a person in the movie theater stood up and walked out quickly.

But that’s only the opening of Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, and it really sets the tone for everything that follows.

Parsons, who started uploading videos to YouTube in 2022 as a 16-year-old teen and gained millions of views and a cult following, has now adapted his creepy video idea into a full feature film for A24. And everyone who worried about how the found-footage shorts would translate into a big-budget idea, starring two Oscar-nominated actors, can breathe a sigh of relief. He’s done it, and the film hasn’t lost that same dread you felt watching the homemade films.

It’s clear that at this point, Parsons has pretty much mastered this world. He understands what made his videos work, and he understands how to toy with audiences to make them sit upright in their seats. Backrooms takes its time crawling into zooms and building music beat by beat as the scene builds to a crescendo. The pacing, the mood and the tension are what make the entire film work. In fact, there are moments in the backrooms when you completely forget the story that leads the characters to this alternate dimension. Instead, you’re focused primarily on that moment, on each step towards what lies beyond the next room. And it’s genuinely scary.

The film does have a strong story, too, however. It follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect sleeping in the back of his own discount furniture warehouse after a failed marriage. His therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who has her own past trauma, is trying to help him when Clark disappears and doesn’t show up for his appointment. In a session before that, he explained that he went through a wall in his basement and entered another world, a seemingly infinite maze of yellow-lit, identically carpeted rooms with no exits and no logic. Mary eventually goes looking for him and discovers that everything he described was real.

The production team built every set in the film, and you feel it almost immediately. VFX could never have done the world justice, especially as the cast and camera interact with the environment. Ejiofor makes the space feel very real as he wanders the corridors with genuine disbelief and panic. We experience the fear with him as his eyes explore the setting, and he touches items that are completely out of place. Reinsve matches him, and the two carry what is essentially a two-person film through its most demanding stretches with very real conviction.

Backrooms becomes a different film in the second half, when Parsons introduces monsters. Suddenly, the pacing changes, and we go from slow movements to long chase sequences, loud growling, extreme violence, and more “what the F” moments. Things genuinely get super weird and, depending on who you are, that’s either a good or bad thing. Good if you embrace everything that follows, but bad if you were hoping for something more grounded. In these moments, walls feel like they’re watching you, and rooms are arranged in a way that shouldn’t be possible. And, honestly, the architecture feels scarier than the creatures themselves at times.

The space itself seems to represent something more. The characters’ pasts are somehow interwoven with the world they discover. It’s not just weird for the sake of being weird. There’s meaning behind every strange room they encounter. But Parsons doesn’t spell it all out for you. It’s a puzzle you’ll have to unpiece yourself.

There’s genuinely nothing like Backrooms out there at the moment. The closest comparison I could think of is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film also riddled with mystery, moving rooms, and strong character performances.

And for a first-time director, that’s a hell of an achievement. Parsons is actually A24’s youngest director, working with tools he taught himself using Blender on a laptop, and the result sits comfortably next to the work of directors twice his age. And the demand for a sequel coming out of early screenings says everything about how much of this world he still has left to explore.

2026 is turning out to be a great year for horror films. Obsession set the stage. Backrooms continues the work.

It’s proof again that audiences want good films made by actual human beings. Parsons proved that at 16 on YouTube, and he’s proved it again at 20 with Backrooms.