Backrooms (2026)
The anomalous door (the one that opens onto something the building has no business containing) is among the oldest instruments in horror, and Kane Parsons, who at twenty has become the youngest director to reach number one at the American box office, understands its grammar with uncommon precision.
His feature debut takes an idea born in the fever swamps of internet horror culture (the “Backrooms” creepypasta, for the uninitiated: a collective mythology of endless yellow rooms and fluorescent hum that spread across forums and YouTube channels with the viral persistence of a bad dream) and makes something with genuine dread and, at intervals, genuine emotional consequence. The horror Parsons builds here runs on older fuel than platform culture, and the film is more durable for it.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns a furniture store the way some men inhabit a failure: not dramatically, but with the dull, daily weight of it. He is a trained architect who never built anything worth mentioning, a husband whose marriage is dissolving in increments too slow to constitute a crisis, and an alcoholic whose relationship with whiskey is the most reliable thing in his life. His therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), is working through her own losses: a demolished childhood home, a mother institutionalised by agoraphobia. One evening, Clark notices the store’s lights flickering; he goes to check the breaker box and finds, behind the wall, a glowing slit. He steps toward it and falls through, and a film about a damaged man in a struggling furniture store abruptly becomes something with no floor.
The production design is the clearest evidence of Parsons’ control. The Backrooms (that infinite labyrinth of yellowed corridors, damp carpet, and fluorescent lighting) has the texture of a place that has always existed and will continue to do so once the characters are gone. Liminal places carry a particular unease: the airport corridor at three in the morning, the hospital wing after visiting hours, the rear section of a furniture store. The film’s setting makes that last example count. Parsons turns this ambient wrongness into a structural principle, finding horror in the persistent suggestion that the world contains more space than anyone is prepared to account for.
Ejiofor holds the film. Clark is brittle in a way that Ejiofor renders precisely: the controlled flinch, the small evasions of a person who has learned to absorb rather than address. Reinsve’s performance is tightly calibrated; she invests Mary with an interior life the screenplay never fully honours. The film’s central weakness is that Will Soodik’s script establishes each character’s damage with real precision and then fails to make those personal histories feel consequential to what the Backrooms actually does to them. The thematic connection between the characters’ traumas and the horror they encounter is asserted rather than demonstrated.
The score, composed by Parsons alongside Edo Van Breemen, is restrained and often effective, dissonant without being declarative. The late inclusion of a track by the Caretaker is the film’s most predictable choice.
Parsons is drawing on anxieties that predate his generation by a considerable distance: the sensation of being lost inside systems too vast to comprehend, of institutions persisting long after their purpose has dissolved, of spaces built for human beings that have ceased, at some unmarked point, to be for anyone. These are not uniquely digital anxieties, and the film is more unsettling for it, pressing on fears that have no particular decade.
The final act strains, and certain threads are left dangling with more inscrutability than genuine mystique. In my view, these are real enough limitations to keep Backrooms from fully delivering on what its best passages establish. What those passages do establish is that Parsons can build dread from architecture alone, and that is a skill horror cinema does not produce often.