‘Backrooms’ Review – A Claustrophobic, Mind-Bending Nightmare That Lingers With You

Imagine a place that lingers in the deep recesses of your mind, familiar yet with something distinctly off about it. That is the best way to describe the otherworldly place that the two central characters venture into in Backrooms, the feature-length directorial debut of Kane Parsons, the young YouTuber and filmmaker whose visual effects videos for the web series Backrooms led A24 to make Parsons the youngest director they ever employed. Parsons was only 19 during the film’s production, but his age clearly wasn’t a detriment and became a much-needed asset. The soundscape and space of Backrooms feels like it’s ripped from his mind, and as if only he could construct the intricate and seemingly never-ending rooms that become a mind-bending and dizzying nightmare as the movie progresses. For the uninitiated (and I must admit, I’m one of them), Backrooms will leave lingering questions, but the film is such an attack on the senses that it simply can’t be ignored. It’s best enjoyed as an experience that grows more claustrophobic with every single frame.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is the owner of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire furniture store, and he’s also a man going through a series of struggles that puts him under the care of therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). His wife has left him, kicked him out of the house (that he, on more than one occasion, exclaims that he bought), and he’s an alcoholic, something else he blames on his wife since he has put aside his career as an architect to bust his ass selling furniture to pay his wife’s way through law school. Dr. Mary Kline guides him through his woes in a typical fashion with role-playing exercises that are supposed to make Clark more comfortable with expressing how he feels, but it’s clear that she has her own repressed memories that haunt her. Mary has a lingering trauma of watching her childhood home being demolished, and what appears to be a mother who kept her trapped within the home out of fear of “the people” on the outside who might do them harm.

Clark sleeps at his furniture store on a nightly basis, and on one of those nights, deep within the lower level of the store, he drunkenly stumbles after the lights begin to flicker, leading to a power surge, and discovers a new place after he phases through a wall. Where he finds himself feels more like an alternate reality of the furniture store, with some of its items stacked on top of each other in piles, but it’s also void of much personality. The walls are covered in faded, pale wallpaper, and the quiet and emptiness of the space is atmospheric in its silence. However, there is a presence of sorts that is nearby, and something else is living within this space. When Clark finds himself lost within the labyrinth of rooms that only seem to go on and close in as if it’s a portion of someone’s mind that hasn’t quite completed them yet, Dr. Mary Kline ventures in to search for him and finds herself within a memory of a place where the laws of physics are defied, and getting trapped feels like the only option.

It should be noted that I have ZERO knowledge of the origins of the Backrooms, which reportedly began as a 4chan thread that features images that “just feel off” and eventually evolved into more lore from site users based on these images that they believed represent a time and space from another dimension. From that lore, they created interconnected rooms and even entities with nefarious intentions that inhabit them. Parsons finds himself here as the film’s director because, under his visual artist name Kane Pixels, he created a web series that was based on the concept that went viral. A24 was so impressed that they made him the youngest filmmaker to receive a development deal under their banner, and it’s wonderful to see their belief in him pay off. Nothing about what Parsons does, from a technical standpoint, feels amateurish. He has a keen eye and a strong visual style that makes Backrooms feel like something David Lynch would’ve dreamed up.

Backrooms is decidedly open-ended because the rooms themselves feel like pieces of the characters’ minds that have entered them. Everything feels a bit distorted as if the subconscious is so blocked that it can’t fully conceive what the mind wants to express. The pacing of the film also feels like the mind is gradually catching up to what it’s seeing. At 112 minutes, every frame of Backrooms feels deliberate, and through Parsons’ vision, admirably aided by Jeremy Cox’s cinematography and Danny Vermette’s production design, the exploration of these rooms induces a growing sense of dread as a new one is discovered. Each scene feels like a slow burn that builds to the next. Every time a character turns a corner or enters through another door, the audience anticipates that something will be there that means the character’s harm. This isn’t even always the case, but Parsons and his team make it feel that some kind of danger is constantly lingering.

The intention is to keep the audience constantly on edge, and because Parsons is so familiar with the mythology, even though we don’t get what feels like a concrete explanation of it, he’s able to give the audience the experience of what it COULD be. His control of the tone and atmosphere is something to be admired, and his use of space and sound design, particularly from the score composed by himself and Edo Van Breeman, is enough to make the nerves of the viewer grow more and more tense. Most of the movie is the characters wandering from room to room in hopes of discovering more of its secrets. This is why the film feels more like a vibe and a sensory exercise rather than a movie with typical narrative beats and proper character development. Beyond the two leads, Parsons does provide SOME hints at what could be going on through the character of Phil (Mark Duplass) and the company he works for, which suggests his reality is trying to figure out why it’s being melded with the reality of the people who have entered through the walls as if they are ghosts.

This is where some might struggle. You’re given enough to get to know Clark and Dr. Mary Kline on the surface, but discovering everything that makes them tick and what makes a part of their mind create the space of the Backrooms they are inhabiting is open for interpretation. If you’re expecting to truly discover why Mary’s childhood traumas are connected to this place, you might end up disappointed, and if you’re hoping to figure out why the Backrooms make Clark go a bit more mad than Mary, you might be left wanting. Parsons, along with screenwriter Will Soodik, doesn’t feel as interested in these explanations and is more concerned with the world created they enter into. This could prove to be a problem for some, but thankfully, the actors put in some solid character work that helps spell out the woes they have been experiencing.

Both Ejiofor and Reinsve are solid, providing the film with vessels to enter this world that are at least interesting. Even if Parsons and his creative team haven’t spelled out all of their character beats, it’s clear that during the film’s production, the actors were given more insight to form their performances. Ejiofor’s Clark is a broken man, likely searching for new meaning in his life, and he seems to find it in the Backrooms, something the actor conveys with a growing eeriness that comes off as if he’s more than happy to remain in this nondescript space because he feels in control of aspects of it. Reinsve portrays Mary with a calm that hints at more beneath the surface. She’s performing a job that involves her helping others, but you can occasionally see a sadness in her eyes that hints at more. In the film’s best scene, both actors are seated at a dinner table as Clark tries to explain to her what this new place means to him. There is a hint of menace that permeates throughout the scene, and it leads to more agency from Reinsve that shows she can reach a boiling point.

A lot has been made online, likely through unwarranted jealousy, that Parsons ghost directed Backrooms and that the film’s name producers, Osgood Perkins, Shawn Levy, and James Wan, assisted behind the camera for a modern-day Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg Poltergeist situation where this young face is being used as some kind of marketing tool while the veterans did all the hard work. It was bull when it was suggested Hooper wasn’t the man behind the camera on Poltergeist, and it’s bull here. Even though Backrooms isn’t perfect and will require more explanation from some of those who see it, Parsons proves to be a true visionary who seems more than capable of creating worlds outside of this one because his love for filmmaking and the creativity within his mind feels vast. It’s through his artistry that it becomes entertaining to become lost within the Backrooms. It all might be a bit surreal, and every image or sound may feel like more can be explored, but that could be the point. Parsons makes this a claustrophobic nightmare that lingers with you and makes the audience, despite some of the fear it induces, want to discover more of what goes on behind its walls.

Backrooms debuts exclusively in theaters nationwide on May 29, 2026, courtesy of A24.