Review: Backrooms
In 2022, the 16-year-old Kane Parsons uploaded an analog horror video to YouTube titled The Backrooms (Found Footage). Over the next four years, the video garnered over 80 million views and unforeseeably widespread internet discourse surrounding the lore and mysteries of the Backrooms. Now 20 years old in 2026, Parsons makes his feature film directorial debut with Backrooms, making him the youngest filmmaker ever to open a film at No. 1 in North America. Backrooms is a modern horror labyrinth. It’s a dreadfully unnerving feat of suspense set in a liminal space, one that combines an excitement of discovery with the dread of what the discovery may entail.
The film primarily follows a struggling furniture store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his sympathetic therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). In a therapy session, Clark laments his alcoholism, his recent divorce, and his failed career aspirations as an architect. Clark is the type of man to blame the world and others for his problems, never accepting responsibility for his actions. While Mary tries to help him, she carries her own burdens from neglect by her mother with schizophrenia. Because Clark’s wife kicked him out, he sleeps at the furniture store. One night when lights at the store flicker, he goes down to the breaker and sees a slim line of light shining through a crack in the wall of the subfloor. As he approaches, he can hear the buzz of fluorescent lights beyond the wall. Leaning in to investigate, Clark falls through the wall and into the Backrooms.
Upon entering the Backrooms, Clark sees a pile of furniture in a fluorescent-lit yellow room. The random assortment of furniture looks vaguely like items he’d sell in his store, but slightly off. Upon closer examination, he sees that two stacked chairs are inexplicably fused together. He explores the maze until the sound of something approaching makes him flee to the safety of his furniture store. The next time we see Clark after this excursion, he’s consumed with the labyrinth of the Backrooms and its mysterious allure. When he tells his therapist about the place, she’s concerned he’s lost touch with reality. He promises to prove the reality of the Backrooms to her and storms out to return to his eerily empty yellow maze.
