Backrooms (2026)

Kane Parsons has adapted his YouTube series for the big screen resulting in a truly unsettling experience.

Note: My original review was initially posted on Taste of Cinema, which can be found here. For those unfamiliar with the origins of Backrooms, going in blind offers quite the experience. Kane Parsons’ debut feature has its origins on the imageboard website 4chan, with the ‘backrooms’ portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional complex of empty rooms. The idea began with a single image of a large empty room taken at the former site of a furniture store in Wisconsin over two decades ago and has since become its own online entity.

Fans have expanded the initial ideas into indie video games and short films, and in 2022, YouTuber Parsons began publishing his Backrooms series on the platform. And now, we have a cinematic full-length release, one that has gone down very well indeed and exceeded all expectations at the box office.

Apparently, for fans of the series, there are plenty of easter eggs here, and it seems the audience’s response has been favourable. But going in knowing next to nothing about it, Backrooms offers an eerie and sometimes disturbing tale of memory, reality, and fear that successfully leaves you with more questions than answers by its finale.

Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark is a lonely middle-aged man whose rapidly failing furniture emporium isn’t just down to lack of customers. He’s currently living in the store after being kicked out by his girlfriend, and every night has electricity issues, with lights flickering and the power somehow staying on and costing him money, something that a visiting electrician can’t explain. Clark is also seeing a therapist, Renate Reinsve’s Mary, who appears to have her own demons while trying to help Clark get his life back on track.

One night, Clark discovers a porous section of a wall in the store’s ample basement, seemingly a portal into what appears to be an infinite expansion of the store itself, but one that has been designed by someone, as Chris Morris might say, with a mind as bent as a bad hedge. What he finds inside these backrooms, one could almost argue, is for the viewer to decide. This is a horror film in which the architecture and furniture are far more unsettling than any monster or ghost lurking in a dark corner.

You’re reminded of the blackness of rooms in the work of David Lynch; most notably, Parsons invokes Inland Empire (2006), not something that you’d advise to anyone, and yet here it makes total sense. Both Ejiofor and Reinsve are terrific, each expressing plausible bafflement and terror at what they find in this increasingly unnerving hellscape of a maze with its alarming characters and startling furnishings. The first time we enter through the wall, a pile of furniture instantly reminds you of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), but while Backrooms toys with the supernatural, the scariest thing is the idea that the twisted problems are perhaps of our own making, our memories as porous as the wall Clark initially falls through.

One could make the case that the Backrooms is about misremembering trauma, humans desperately trying to refresh their memories, yet we as the audience know there’s only pain and suffering in trying to revive such things that the mind has desperately sought to forget. This is amplified by Danny Vermette’s haunting production design that offers one brain twister after the next, and there’s little doubt that the expansion of Clark’s store is a character in itself. The score also adds to the setting, composed by Parsons himself and Edo van Breemen.

Backrooms is a hugely impressive feature debut, and although I found myself less immersed in the story when it’s taking place outside of the titular architectural ordeal, this is a frequently intoxicating work, and it will be fascinating to see how Parsons evolves for his next directorial work. ★★★½ 7.5/10