BACKROOMS (2026)

Studio:   A24
Director: Kane Parsons
Writer:    Will Soodik
Producer: James Wan, Michael Clear, Roberto Patino, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Dan Levine, Osgood Perkins, Chris Ferguson, Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Kori Adelson
Stars:    Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia, Robert Bobroczkyi

Review Score:

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Summary:

In search of a missing patient, a therapist experiences a surreal mystery inside a liminal space hidden beyond reality.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Dr. Mary Kline, whose haunting experiences with her delusionally paranoid mother Nora motivated her to become a therapist, conducts a session with her patient Clark, the owner of a pirate-themed furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. As part of Clark’s treatment, Mary has him roleplay the night he was kicked out of his house by his ex-wife Barbara over accusations of alcohol abuse and other bad behavior. Reliving that confrontation causes Clark to become angry and defensive.

A meterman comes to Clark’s store to investigate ongoing electrical issues. Both men are puzzled to find that the breaker box includes mislocated switches pointing diagonally.

Flickering lights and other unusual activity later lead Clark into his store’s basement. There, Clark falls through an invisible portal in a wall and enters a bizarre liminal space resembling an office environment with yellow walls and items like chairs that are either oddly arranged, misshapen in some way, or entirely out of place.

In navigating his way through this extradimensional area, also known as “the Backrooms,” Clark finds a bag belonging to Naren Warne, a scientist with Async Research Institute who had been investigating the Backrooms before being killed by a mysterious entity. Following a crawlspace takes Clark into a room with peculiar dimensions and items partially sunken into the floor. A fleeting figure frightens Clark back to the starting point where he returns to reality through the portal in the wall.

As Clark continues obsessively investigating the Backrooms over time, Phil, another scientist with Async Research Institute, secretly monitors Clark’s experiences via surveillance cameras. Phil later identifies Clark from a furniture store commercial while watching TV with his wife and children.

In another therapy session, Clark anxiously tells Mary about the otherworldly place he discovered in his store’s basement while showing her a map he made of its labyrinthine corridors. Mary skeptically questions if Clark was intoxicated when he made his supposed discovery. Clark storms out in frustration after promising to bring Mary proof that the Backrooms exist.

Clark recruits his assistant manager Katherine “Kat” Taylor and her boyfriend Robert “Bobby” Franklin to help him research the Backrooms with the aid of their video camera. Kat and Bobby are both astonished when they witness Clark vanishing through the invisible portal in the store’s basement wall. Frightened yet fascinated, Kat and Bobby follow Clark into the Backrooms.

Tethered with a rope, Bobby is sent down a steeply sloped corridor to investigate another room. Bobby finds piles of clothes on the floor, including one with a shirt he previously wore. Startled by a briefly glimpsed figure, Bobby rushes back up the slope to Clark and Kat, but the unseen entity uses the rope to pull Bobby back down. Clark and Kat are also pulled down in time to see Bobby disappear behind a hatch at the end of a blood trail. Kat turns a corner, screams, and vanishes.

Clark runs through a series of strange rooms culminating in one with a Christmas tree. A redhead resembling a deformed mannequin with an expressionist still life face staggers toward Clark, who retreats to a pool room where he hears Kat pleading for help from behind a wall. An unseen entity attacks Clark.

After receiving a cryptic voicemail in which Clark says he opened a window and won’t be coming back, Mary visits Clark’s store. In the basement, Mary sees that Clark drew an outline of a door where the portal exists in the wall. Drawn toward it, Mary goes through the wall and enters the Backrooms.

Mary navigates the bizarre corridors until she comes to a strange mural depicting a large, frightening figure. Having seemingly suffered a psychotic break, Clark confronts Mary with cryptic declarations. When an unseen presence begins approaching, Clark apologizes and then chokes Mary unconscious.

Mary recovers to find herself restrained to a chair at a table with Clark seated at the opposite end. Also in the misshapen room is the peculiar redhead from earlier and two other still life figures, one of whom is named Archibald Leland Sutter.

After repeating some of Mary’s teachings about living a life of circular routine, Clark demonstrates how the still life entities don’t feel pain by stabbing one in the neck. He also shows that they are made of edible stuffing. Clark opens a nearby fridge, revealing Kat’s decapitated head, which alarms Mary.

Terrified, Mary asks to be untied so she can help Clark. Clark tells Mary he wants her to tell him he did nothing wrong. Tearing off the redhead’s scalp and placing it on Mary, Clark tries to restart the roleplay scenario with his ex-wife Barbara. Mary breaks the setup by angrily insisting Clark needs to take responsibility for his own actions instead of blaming others.

Clark tells Mary he doesn’t think he wants to change who he is. He also tells her he likes it in the Backrooms because he feels like he is finally in a place where he belongs. Mary encourages Clark to stay, but to let her go.

Clark cuts Mary free from her rope restraints. The redheaded still life suddenly races into a corner. A towering figure resembling Clark as a mutated pirate enters the room. Clark tries calming the menacing pirate by explaining they don’t have to change. Pirate Clark still violently attacks Clark.

Mary flees into a recreation of a suburban street. With Pirate Clark in pursuit, Mary hides in one of the homes. Mary then works her way through a series of strangely designed rooms until she reaches a recreation of Clark’s furniture store. A subsequent struggle between Mary and Pirate Clark triggers a trap that alerts Async Research Institute. Mary fights off Pirate Clark by hitting it with a keepsake piece of concrete she recently took from the demolition of her childhood home.

Mary escapes through a narrow corridor that Pirate Clark cannot fit through. A HAZMAT team from Async Research Institute pulls Mary to safety.

After she recovers, Phil debriefs Mary with questioning. Phil explains that his company, Async Research Institute, used to make MRI machines, but investigating the Backrooms became their priority when they discovered its existence in liminal space. Phil asks Mary to recount and interpret her experience in the Backrooms. Mary chooses to describe the Backrooms the way Clark did: as if they were someone’s misremembered recreation of reality. Suspicious of Async’s motives, Mary asks what will happen to her after the interview concludes. Phil claims the decision is not up to him. As realization dawns on Mary’s face, the camera cuts to a montage of Mary’s memories recreated with surreal details inside the Backrooms, including her as a deformed still life sitting in Phil’s interrogation chair.

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Review:

At the time of its theatrical release, a conspiracy theory made some noise by suggesting Kane Parsons didn’t really direct the “Backrooms” feature film adapted from his YouTube content. This claim wasn’t based on any factual evidence or firsthand accounts, just a suspicion that A24 could not conceivably give an underexperienced 20-year-old free reign to make a ten-million-dollar movie without a heap of heavy-handed oversight.

Perhaps there’s a puff of smoke in the fact that the film has ten producers, including big horror names James Wan and Osgood Perkins, though this unfounded theory eventually evaporated as ageist conjecture. I’m only recounting it because age-based perspectives might still influence how viewers filter “Backrooms” on an individual basis, just not in a way that disrespectfully dismisses the director based on his youth.

The Backrooms concept began in 2019 as a single photograph of an unfurnished room in an empty commercial complex. It was posted anonymously to a creepypasta forum as an example of an image that felt inexplicably unnerving. Multiple people developed fiction to build weird worlds and strange settings lurking within these walls and around concealed corners. But it was a series of viral shorts started by Kane Parsons in 2022 that made the Backrooms break out as a backdrop for horror set in liminal spaces where people encounter eeriness and odd déjà vu outside the blurred boundaries of reality.

It’s interesting to me that the Backrooms became a phenomenon of fright among millennials and pre-teens, although it’s not unexpected considering the lore grew popular through the most modern means of how that demographic acquires entertainment. I’m too far removed from their mindset to accurately gauge what they find scary about the “Backrooms” film. As someone more than twice their age and a reformed office drone to boot, the image of a jaundice-colored room baking under the humming heat of fluorescent lights evokes the touchstone terror of mindlessly toiling through a soul-sucking job. I’m only explaining my POV, not gatekeeping, but post-9/11 babies who’ve only ever worked from home fortunately don’t know that horror, so “Backrooms” presumably encompasses a different idea for them.

For the white and blue collars who’ve regularly commuted to a rectangular corporate building intentionally designed with no distinguishable personality, “Backrooms” brings out the buried dread of being unconsciously trapped in an oppressive environment that slowly melts a mind into compliant complacency. Maybe they even remember long overtime hours, surrounded by a sad maze of abandoned cubicles, feeling alone enough to break through the fugue to wonder, “What am I doing here?”

“Backrooms” begins with a voiceover from Dr. Mary Kline, one of the movie’s two main characters. She calmly intones, “We all have our loops, our habits, behaviors that keep us walking in circles, reaching for the same solutions over and over again, thinking each time, they’ll take us somewhere new. But they don’t. And still, it’s the neural pathway of least resistance. A path you made. It’s the one that kept you safe as a child … And now, as an adult, you’re still stuck right where you started.” With an opening declaration this loud, one could hardly accuse Will Soodik’s script of hiding its horror in a metaphor about being chewed up by the rut of routine.

Mary’s current patient, the movie’s other main character, is Clark. Struggling with a contentious divorce and in denial about the alcohol abuse that helped him lose his wife, Clark runs a failing furniture store. It’s the kind of business that puts him in a pegleg and pirate costume for a shabby commercial recorded on video by his assistant manager Kat and her boyfriend Bobby. Unopened bills pile up on his desk. He drives a boxy sedan. Nights are spent sleeping on a showroom bed in his store while “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” flickers on a tube TV. Clark’s life, in two words, is pitiably average.

Mary’s everyday activities are equally mundane. She watches the same public domain movie while eating her reheated dinner for one off a TV tray. Still processing past trauma inflicted by a mentally unstable mother, and coming to terms with the demolition of the childhood home where she experienced that pain, Mary distractedly drinks wine at a dinner where she stares contemplatively at a different mother and daughter interacting. Like Clark, hers is an underwhelmingly ordinary existence.

Things grow significantly less ordinary when unusual electrical activity leads Clark to discover a mysterious, invisible portal in his store’s basement wall. Passing through the portal transports Clark into an otherworldly space that resembles the abandoned office described earlier, but built with bizarre angles that would make Sarah Winchester green with envy. Oddly piled pieces of furniture partially sink into the floor. Labyrinthine corridors lead into rooms echoing M.C. Escher’s erratic sense of direction and dimension. Initially appearing harmless, these Backrooms hide unknown entities bent on consuming wayward wanderers, and Clark’s fascination with these findings gradually draws Kat, Bobby, and then Mary into a dreamscape of unsettling uncertainty.

Until the last act, “Backrooms” doesn’t put its monsters or murders, all of which are few in quantity, out in the open. In keeping with the askew atmosphere where the movie takes place, disturbing sensations stay unspoken and unseen. Being cerebral with its suggestive nature is what makes the slow-burn drama intriguing to minds immersed in the movie’s mood yet concurrently confounding to those who aren’t swallowed up in its subtleties.

Running 110 minutes, the inherent limitations of a liminal space psycho-thriller can drag the movie into monotony no matter how well one takes to the film’s surreal fantasy. Along similar lines, creative set design and clever camera movements can only go so far to counter a cryptic mystery whose lingering questions will have more than a few frustrated fingers searching for “ending explained” answers after end credits roll.

Not to add fuel to a fire that’s already been extinguished, but it seems unusual for a freshman filmmaker to be this tuned in to a mature theme that resonates as a reflection of suffocating in a cyclical pattern that’s imperceptibly inescapable. Maybe that merely speaks to Kane Parsons’s exceptional ability for handling such material, or maybe my interpretation of “Backrooms” as a working-class nightmare wasn’t ever included in Parsons’s original intent. Maybe “Backrooms” signifies something completely different to the YouTube generation that made it a sensation in the first place, though you’d have to ask them for an alternate take on its meaning, if they weren’t lulled into listlessness by its low speed and deliberate dearth of action.

Review Score: 65

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