Backrooms
Kane Parsons, in cinemas now

There is something uniquely disturbing about a room that seems to have no reason to exist. A corridor without destination. A chair half planted into the floor. A couch positioned just wrongly enough to become a threat. In Backrooms, the feature debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, ordinary objects are stripped of their everyday usefulness and made alien. A shadow, a carpeted hallway, a buzzing fluorescent light: all become evidence that reality has lost its bearings.

Parsons, better known online as Kane Pixels, first developed Backrooms as a YouTube phenomenon inspired by a photo of a yellow-wallpapered, fluorescently lit room posted online by an anonymous 4chan user in 2019. The poster asked for other “disquieting images that just feel ‘off'”; another user responded with the concept of “the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow… and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in”. An internet horror phenomenon was born.

Parsons’s film, written by Will Soodik, is set in June 1990. It follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect now running a large furniture store, and Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), his psychotherapist. Clark, a bruised, ordinary man, discovers a strange door in the store’s basement, leading to a seemingly infinite series of rooms. He can’t find his way out – and Mary goes in looking for him.

The leap from short-form web horror to feature film could easily have diluted the concept. Instead, this film keeps the unsettling atmosphere of the original shorts intact, then expands it through disquieting production design, patient cinematography and a soundscape that may be its most terrifying feature. A constant electrical buzz becomes almost ingrained in the skull, producing a low-grade discomfort that never quite fades.

The early-1990s setting does more than provide a period aesthetic. The VHS textures, analogue recordings and institutional blandness place the film in a technological limbo, just before the digital world made surveillance, mapping and simulation feel ordinary. That matters, because Backrooms is, at heart, a horror film about space as an unstable system.

The “backrooms” aren’t simply a maze or another dimension waiting to be explained. The film suggests that spending time inside them can affect the psyche, and that the psyche may, in turn, distort the place itself. Perception becomes a building material. Fear, memory and obsession may have spatial consequences. That idea gives Backrooms a richer texture than a straightforward monster-in-the-dark story, even if the lore remains deliberately incomplete.

It also places the film within the current wave of liminal-space horror, alongside Exit 8, Genki Kawamura’s adaptation of the Japanese video game about a man trapped in a looping metro passageway. Both films understand that repetition and slight wrongness can be scarier than gore. Both are rooted in viral digital culture. Both turn spaces we normally pass through without thinking into psychological traps. Yet, Backrooms is less about spotting anomalies within a rule-bound loop than about surrendering to a world whose laws may be forming around its victims in real time. Where Exit 8 is precise, minimal and almost gamified, Backrooms is more sprawling, contaminated and cosmological.

The film is also smart about the horror of utility. Everything in the backrooms could, theoretically, be useful. Endless empty space could solve problems of storage, housing, logistics, even urban overcrowding. One can see why a corporation or research body might consider it a treasure. But Parsons twists that possibility into dread. What looks like opportunity is also unknowability. A limitless warehouse is a nightmare if you cannot find the way out.

The performances help ground this abstraction. Reinsve is excellent as Mary, bringing a warmth and eerie certainty to her character. Meanwhile, Ejiofor gives Clark the weary confusion of a man who has already failed in one world and is now being invited, or condemned, to enter another.

The ending is abrupt, clearly designed with further instalments in mind. Many questions remain unanswered, perhaps violently so. Yet, that frustration is partly the point. By the end, we share Clark’s compulsion to understand what the backrooms are. Few recent horror films have made shadows, wallpaper and cheap furniture feel so hostile. What began as an image posted on a 4chan thread has become an unusually potent big-screen experiment in fear, space and perception.

Davide Abbatescianni is a film critic based in Rome, Italy