Backrooms (2026) Review

Before there was a film, before there was a YouTube series, before A24 found itself with the biggest hit in its history, Backrooms was essentially a photograph of an empty room that made people uncomfortable.

That’s still the strangest thing about Kane Parsons’ feature debut.

Most horror films start with a story and build imagery around it. Backrooms begins with an image that somehow spawned a story. An ugly yellow room with fluorescent lights and cheap carpet. And that dream-like sense that something is wrong, even though nothing appears to be happening. The challenge facing Parsons wasn’t creating a mythology – the internet had already done that. The challenge was figuring out how to turn a feeling into a film. And for long stretches, he pulls it off.

The plot is almost beside the point. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a struggling furniture store owner whose life has settled into a depressing cycle of self-pity, alcohol and bad decisions. When investigating a power issue at the store, he discovers that he has a hidden threshold in the basement. A portal in the wall takes him into an endless maze of rooms, corridors and impossible spaces that seem to obey the logic of a half-forgotten dream. Or nightmare.

Speaking as someone not that familiar with the Backrooms phenomenon, I’m not entirely sure where I stand on all the lore. Some viewers will love digging through every breadcrumb about Async and the nature of the Backrooms themselves. Personally, I found myself becoming less interested whenever the film started explaining things. For me, the mystery is the attraction and the minute somebody begins discussing rules and systems, a little of the magic leaks away.

What affected me instead were the spaces. A corridor leading nowhere, windows that don’t make sense, a room that appears familiar until you look slightly closer, and a staircase that seems to have been designed by somebody working from memory rather than reality.

At its best, the film captures a very specific sensation that I suspect most people have experienced at some point. Walking through an unfamiliar office building. Getting lost in a hotel. Taking a wrong turn in a shopping centre and suddenly finding yourself somewhere oddly empty. The Backrooms take that feeling and stretch it until it becomes unbearable.

The production design deserves enormous credit. One of the risks with adapting internet mythology is that things can end up looking overdesigned. But here, the spaces remain stubbornly mundane and that’s what makes them work. There aren’t any haunted house cobwebs and creaky floorboards. They’re finely modelled places that look as though people should be in them, but aren’t.

Ejiofor is excellent. He could easily have approached Clark as a man descending into madness, but he plays him more like somebody becoming seduced by the possibility of escape. Clark’s life is already a dead end before he enters the Backrooms and the labyrinth merely gives physical form to feelings that were already there.

Renate Reinsve has the trickier role and probably the more compelling character. There were points where I found myself wishing the film had spent even longer following Mary – maybe that’s the plan for a sequel. Her relationship with memory, trauma and domestic space feels closely connected to what the Backrooms are actually trying to represent.

But not everything worked. The film occasionally loses confidence and starts answering questions people probably aren’t asking. Plus, the late monster reveal also feels slightly less effective than the abstract dread it generates when it appears (or can be heard) just off camera. With this film, the unknown is Parsons’ strongest weapon, and less exposition could have had a greater impact.

Yet the longer I thought about Backrooms, the less those issues seemed to matter. What stayed with me was the confidence of the filmmaking itself. Parsons has taken a piece of internet folklore that probably shouldn’t have worked as a feature and turned it into something genuinely cinematic.

Plenty of horror films arrive with clever concepts. Far fewer create images and spaces that audiences immediately start carrying around in their heads. Whatever happens next with the franchise, Backrooms feels less like the arrival of a new horror property and more like the arrival of an exciting new filmmaker.

Movie Rating:

Backrooms trailer