Backrooms

Backrooms is a 2026 psychological horror film directed by Kane Parsons in his feature length film debut, and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. The Backrooms started as a 4Chan post about this office space like hellscape that seems to span on forever and makes little to no sense and then it was adapted into a horror short series on YouTube by none other than Kane Parsons himself. Dude was creating the Backrooms web series while he was in high school and directed this feature length film at 20 years old. Madness, but kudos. Makes me feel like a bit of a pile of crap as a self-proclaimed creative mind myself, but hey. We need to applaud and champion small time creators that hit it big, especially one that’s so young and already so driven towards his passion and projects. That’s impressive stuff. What’s also impressive is that this has made over $103 million at the box office and it was just released at the end of May. The biggest opening box office weekend for an A24 film ever, which is also insane. Between him and Curry Barker with ‘Obsession’ earlier this month (which I still need to check out at some point. Don’t revoke my horror card please.), these small time YouTubers hitting it big in film is starting to become less of an underdog story and more of a semi-regular thing it seems. With all the hype and talk around it though, did it live up for me? Let’s talk about it!

The story follows a down on his luck furniture store owner played by Chiwetel Ejiofor who has a failing business, a drinking problem, is going through a divorce, and feels the crushing weight of never chasing his dreams. We all feel you there my brother. Then he discovers the Backrooms. What are these backrooms exactly? Well, that’s kind of hard to explain, but like I said earlier it’s like a never ending liminal hellscape. Like I imagine it as if someone worked in retail or in an office job for a long time and they hated it, but they were also a terrible person and ended up being punished in the afterlife then something like this would be their own personal hell they would be trapped in. Just never-ending, twisting, and disorienting rooms and office spaces and hallways that feel like a copy that looks familiar but just isn’t quite right. Chairs and furniture partially placed into the ground, the dull yellow hue in every room and on every piece of wallpaper, doors that led to nothing, doors that led to more doors and more rooms. That’s what I feel this movie really did right. The set design. They did not hold back when it came to the look and the atmosphere in this movie and that’s really where I feel like it shined the most. They built and created over 30,000 square feet of actual Backrooms in an abandoned space and laid it out so disorienting and sprawling like that people were actually getting turned around and lost inside the set itself and that’s just awesome to me as a practical effects and set kind of guy. They certainly succeeded when it came to creating an unsettling atmosphere.

The story in itself is where the movie kind of faltered for me personally. Like I said Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character Clark had his character laid out and his trauma presented to us, but that’s about all that he was. A lonely furniture salesman with a drinking issue that was going through a bad divorce. Same can be said though for Renate Reinsve’s character Mary. She’s a therapist who we know grew up with a crazy mother due to flashback sequences and that carries with her a lot of trauma, but that’s like it. It just feels like there’s a lot of layers to peel back with both those characters and their personal traumas and past struggles, but we just stay very surface level with them. Present their grief and their pain and then just kind of leave it at that because now the focus is on the Backrooms. Which I’m not complaining about because at the end of the day that’s why everyone was there anyways, to see the Backrooms on the big screen, but it kind of felt like they didn’t overly care about their main leads and just wanted to get to the Backrooms elements of the movie so they wrote a little struggle storyline to get you invested in them and then just dove into Backrooms stuff. Which if you’re the kind of person that wants to thoroughly know what’s going on when you’re watching a movie then you’ll probably have a struggle with this one as well because that’s kind of the whole point of the Backrooms anyways.

Nothing makes sense in there. Everything is off and you don’t even necessarily know what to make of anything. Are these things bad and evil and hunting you or do they just kind of exist and are placed there as a copy within the Backrooms? That’s sort of part of the unsettling nature of it all. On top of the general ‘I don’t like that’ feel of the never-ending office spaces and the disorienting continuous hue of yellow throughout it all, was just general confusion as to what you were looking at and wtf was going on in there and that caused a tension in itself. I caught myself saying “What the hell?” under my breath to myself multiple times throughout this and that’s just kind of the nature of what they’re going for, I think. In ways that disorientation worked for me, but in other ways it was almost too head scratching. I don’t always like walking out of a movie with more questions than answers and not very much payoff. It’s fine to not payoff your movie if you’re clearly setting it up for something more that draws viewers back in, but I don’t even know what the hell was going on here half the time anyways and the ending just kind of felt like it abruptly ended instead of tying things together in any kind of way. Regardless, I champion the success of a project like this.

I think if anything the success of this and ‘Obsession’ just taking over and raking in the dough at the box office over the last month just proves to Hollywood that people are getting tired of remakes, reboots, and sequels upon sequels of played out franchises for the most part. Not that those major IPs don’t have fans and always will, but eventually things become stale when you pepper us with more and more content on a consistent basis and people want something fresh. So, this is again hopefully becoming the era of the one-off horror film. Give some unknowns a chance in these genres if they have good ideas and I think you’ll find success in terms of box office more often than not because people are starving for originality in film right now. Anyways, that’ll do it for this one folks! Go check out Backrooms in theaters now and make sure to like my page on social media or come back to my website often for new content over horror movies (old and new), newly released films, pro wrestling, and more! Thank you and until next time, be good to one another!