‘Backrooms’ Review
Kane Parsons successfully captures the eeriness of his popular viral web series while also ultimately expanding on the tinctures of the horrific mundane in everyday life.
Twenty-year-old Kane Parsons’ Backrooms successfully captures the eeriness of his popular viral web series while also ultimately expanding on the tinctures of the horrific mundane in everyday life. There’s a lot of pressure on Parsons to bring to the screen digital folklore with such a cult following. Parsons doesn’t disappoint.
Set in 1990, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor (Twelve Years a Slave, The Life of Chuck) as Clark, a furniture salesman whose life is painfully prosaic. He lives in the furniture store that never has any business, on the outskirts of society and reality. When he visits his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), he relives the turning point in his life where his wife left him. Sometimes details are how he wants to remember them, other times they’re actually how things happen. Mary is also lonely and has a humdrum personal life. She has flashes of memory that haunt her and guide her. Her memories, like Clark’s, are liminal.
One day, Clark’s life gets interesting. When the lights go off in his showroom, he accidentally flips a switch that opens the portal to the empty backrooms. He discovers a series of discrepant connecting rooms. He’s initially befuddled, then ecstatic that something so interesting has entered his life. But is there something sinister lurking down there with him?
Clark’s life becomes one of inexhaustible “no-clipping”. He shares his findings in his next session with Mary. She’s more than a little doubtful. Clark gets cameraman Bobby (Finn Bennett) and his assistant/girlfriend Kat (Lukita Maxwell) to go with him to make sure it’s real. Things quickly go south once they crossover. When Mary doesn’t hear from Clark, she goes looking for him.
Though the film is set in 1990, it could take place in any time in the past 50 or 60 years. The interiors of some of the backrooms have kitschy off-color Twister game colors from the 60s. Burnt lime and yellow colors from the 70s. Everything has an aura of mildew and decay. What makes the rooms even more mercurial is the soundtrack written by Kane and Edo Van Breemen. It gives one the feeling of just stepping off The Gravitron. The world is loopy and topsy turvy.
Chiwetel, who could emote the old school phonebook and make it captivating, taps into Clark’s quiet desperation and loneliness, making him a slightly narcissistic everyman. Renate, fresh off of Oscar winning Sentimental Value, subtly conveys the emotions churning underneath Mary’s calm veneer. Mark Duplass also has a signature role.
While Parsons started his series in 2022 as Kane Pixels, the concept originated with an image on 4chan’s Paranormal Export board in 2019 and grew into a collective project. For his feature debut, Kane keeps it simple, yet complex, allowing our minds to do much of the heavy lifting. Existential dread drips through every scene like water from a faucet. Time is as limitless as the landscape of the rooms. The film doesn’t rely on jump scares but psychological curiosity and emotional rhythms. It’s a movie that’s as much about feeling as seeing.
Mary’s character could have been explored more. She, like Clark, has snippets of thoughts that define her, but they’re buried in her subconscious. We find out more about what makes Clark tick in just his few conversations than we get from Mary’s visions. Other than that, Will Soodik’s (Homeland, Westworld) script is seamless.
A24’s Backrooms hits Theaters on May 29, 2026.
Sonya Alexander started off her career training to be a talent agent. She eventually realized she was meant to be on the creative end and has been writing ever since. As a freelance writer she’s written screenplays, covered film, television, music and video games and done academic writing. She’s also been a script reader for over twenty years. She's a member of the African American Film Critics Association and currently resides in Los Angeles.
