There is something fitting about Backrooms (the movie) arriving in theaters as one more artifact unearthed from the Backrooms (the world). The idea began with a stray image of an empty yellow room and an anonymous warning about falling out of reality. It accumulated through creepypasta, wikis, video games, Discord excavation and Kane Parsons’ astonishing YouTube videos, whose recovered-tape grammar gave the place an institutional past and an unknowable present. The feature has arrived in the same spirit, trailing an in-universe commercial for Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and positioning itself as another episode in Parsons’ continuity. This time, however, in blockbuster fashion.

That is an exciting way to approach an internet-born mythology: the movie does not explain the archive from outside; it becomes another artifact inside it. After 105 minutes, however, it is difficult to know whether devoted fans will consider this an essential chamber in the mythology or an expensive, strangely disposable detour through a universe that has already proven more frightening in fragments.

My full review is below, with significant spoilers.

Backrooms: full review

Parsons’ directorial debut stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a failed architect and collapsing furniture-store owner whose basement opens into the yellow-lit rooms beneath ordinary existence, and Renate Reinsve as Mary, his therapist, eventually drawn into both the maze and Clark’s disintegration. The film arrives with blockbuster dimensions: Parsons’ digital environments have been made physical in an enormous practical labyrinth, and the corridors retain the stale, matte hostility of the image that began the entire phenomenon. Its emptiness is of a less useful kind. Backrooms has craft, conviction, and a concept carrying enormous cultural electricity; what it lacks is a story capable of keeping that voltage in the walls.

Its most arresting idea is the one the movie never converts into sustained fear. The Backrooms are described as the molecular memory of the universe, a material afterlife where nothing disappears cleanly and everything may return misassembled. Rooms, voices, furniture, and bodies recur as approximations, instantly recognizable and wrong in ways the mind cannot settle. It is a ravishingly horrible cosmology: existence retains everything and understands nothing, endlessly rebuilding the debris of human life after losing any memory of why those pieces belonged together.

That principle finds its finest expression in Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a store name so magnificently confused that it seems Backrooms-generated before the portal ever opens. A pirate captain has somehow been fused to an upholstered imperial pun; Clark’s own peg-legged brand persona does not understand the business it is advertising. Down below, the joke sours into menace. Wood clacks through unseen rooms. A peg leg becomes an acoustic signature of pursuit. The humiliating furnishings of Clark’s life appear to have been digested and returned as a body with hostile intent. The film speaks fluently in these malformed objects, far more fluently than it does when Mary begins naming Clark’s emotional defects aloud.

For all the care poured into its membranes and thresholds, Backrooms produces startlingly few rooms that make the stomach fall. Perhaps three floorplans achieve the essential wrongness: doors placed according to some approximate memory of use, stairwells whose proportions expose an intelligence unfamiliar with bodies, carpeted passages that cannot answer the simplest human question of where they might lead. Too much of the movie then domesticates that sensation. Paths are marked. Sound is recorded. Experiments are run. A place that should annihilate the possibility of orientation becomes an especially hazardous site survey. The film asks its architecture to embody the terror of incomprehensibility while devoting its runtime to teaching the characters how to read it.

The sharpest scare arrives when reading becomes irrelevant. A character tethered to a rope is yanked out of frame, leaving a handheld camera abandoned on a surface and staring uselessly into the room. It is a merciless image: the recording survives the person who made it, and the audience is denied even the false comfort of turning toward the violence. Parsons has never needed much equipment to create terror. A fixed frame, a muffled impact, the obscene patience of a room after someone has vanished—these are his native instruments.

They are also the instruments of found-footage horror, which Backrooms the movie and Backrooms the universe utilize often. The rope sequence carries the primitive shock of Paranormal Activity, which understood how vicious an ordinary room could become once the camera was refused the right to intervene. Problem is, Backrooms keeps trying to merge that terror with liminal horror, yet its two modes pull against one another. Off-screen violence electrifies the camera. The architecture itself rarely summons an equivalent panic. The characters meet impossible space with curiosity, procedure and theory; their bodies finally register danger when something heavy begins walking toward them.

Parsons handles that approach beautifully at first. The unseen thing acquires presence through wood against flooring, through the muffled authority of footsteps in the next room, through a body withheld while sound gives it weight. Once the lights begin flickering on cue and the silhouette resolves into a long-limbed threat, the film steps into distressingly familiar territory. The electricity announces danger with the grammar of Stranger Things; the creature begins to carry a Demogorgon shadow at the precise moment when this universe needs an enemy stranger than franchise iconography. A cosmos that reconstructs common matter incorrectly is nightmare enough. The blinking-lights monster lowers the temperature of the idea, these days.

The institutional passages have their own network of allusion. The company mapping an impossible interior, the official signage pasted over metaphysical disorder, the staticky multilingual recordings and the urge to administer the unknowable all pass through terrain Remedy’s CONTROL rendered with astonishing suppleness. Mary’s role summons the resemblance again: a woman descending into ruptured architecture in search of a damaged man, given the shape of a savior inside a place already fluent in his ruin. Whatever the line of influence, the viewing experience is inescapable. The Oldest House made bureaucratic paranormality intimate, absurd, and dangerous. Parsons’ maze often feels like a less emotionally conductive facility built nearby.

A wash of Severance also hangs over the blank signage and fluorescent procedure, without the agonizing human captivity that gives that show’s hallways their bite. The employees of Lumon know, somewhere beneath their severed selves, that the office owns them. Clark and Mary are repeatedly transfixed by the Backrooms. They catalog its oddness until footfalls and flickering bulbs instruct them to be afraid. The movie wants the space itself to violate human consciousness; on screen, a creature keeps having to perform that labor for it.

That failure of interior life begins with the therapy story. Clark and Mary do not unfold as people so much as arrive as medical histories waiting for the correct crisis to make them speak. He is addicted, abandoned, professionally diminished, and marinating in grievance. She is composed, helpful, and trailed by her own unprocessed wound. When Clark binds her and Mary finally lashes him with a plainspoken diagnosis of his self-pity, the scene has no trapped intimacy to detonate. A patient and therapist have not been driven across some unimaginable ethical threshold. Two character summaries have reached the point where they can recite each other.

Smile made a therapist’s clinical vocabulary inseparable from her terror. Rose Cotter had organized her life around witnessing, assessing, and containing suffering; the horror dismantled her through that very confidence, turning diagnosis into helplessness and inherited trauma into a living predator. Mary’s past promises a related depth, then remains strangely peripheral. The Backrooms shown here belong to Clark: his failed design, his store, his domestic wreckage, his humiliation, and his anger. Mary’s grief sits beside that structure instead of becoming part of its architecture. The film reduces humanity to clinically diagnosable life events, as though naming pain were the same as making it felt.

Reinsve is left holding that thinness in a role pitched almost continuously at strained comprehension. Mark Duplass passes through with barely enough presence to leave an emotional mark. Ejiofor receives the one promising degradation. Clark’s duration inside the maze is left productively unstable: time may have swallowed him, the place may have changed his mind, or solitude may simply have worn away the border between revelation and breakdown. Once he begins relating to the humanoid figures in the rooms, the film approaches its saddest and strangest horror—a man so altered by isolation that imitation has started to resemble company. Those encounters open a door the movie scarcely explores.

The way Backrooms is destined to forever contrast with Curry Barker’s Obsession, in terms of blockbuster debuts, is especially bruising. Barker’s debut works from a humbler supernatural mechanism, a wish that forces love into existence, yet its dark magic wounds because Bear and Nikki have first been allowed to become awkward, needy, funny, selfish, and alive. Their violation has human texture. Parsons commands the grander metaphysics: a universe archiving corrupted versions of matter, memory, and home. His people remain embalmed in explanation. Obsession gives a simple curse complicated lives; Backrooms gives an astonishing cosmos people the screenplay has already finished diagnosing.

There is a daring movie flickering inside this one: the peg-leg crossing a hallway, the sad ridiculous majesty of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, voices caught in static where no voice belongs, Clark finding a ruined fellowship among human-shaped remnants. That movie might have made this feature feel indispensable to Parsons’ expanding mythology rather than a lavish side chamber within it. Fans who have spent years excavating his YouTube continuity may relish another artifact, another opening in the wall, another corridor connected to Async and the yellow rooms. The question is whether Clark and Mary add anything the universe needed, or merely occupy a feature-length annex to mysteries that felt more alive when recovered in pieces.

The molecular memory of the universe as a urine-shaded, crude, and iterative space is, indeed, a terrifying thought. Backrooms remembers the furniture, the footsteps, the signage, the bodies, and the fluorescent hum. It forgets to give them people worth mourning, or rooms frightening enough to fully dread entering.

Backrooms FAQ

When does Backrooms come out?

Backrooms opened in theaters Friday, May 29, 2026. The A24 horror film marks Kane Parsons’ feature directorial debut.

How long is Backrooms?

The film runs 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Who’s starring?

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, with Renate Reinsve as Mary. Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell also appear.

Who made Backrooms?

Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons, creator of the viral Kane Pixels YouTube series, from a screenplay by Will Soodik. James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins are among the producers.

Where can you find other Backrooms worlds on the internet?

Start with Parsons’ Kane Pixels YouTube series, beginning with The Backrooms (Found Footage). The wider mythology also lives across fan wikis and games including Escape the Backrooms and Inside the Backrooms.