At the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan, I went with a friend to see Backrooms, a 2026 sci-fi psychological horror film directed by Kane Parsons, based on his webseries and inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta, and written by Will Soodik.
The Backrooms creepypasta has a lot of Internet lore to it, but started with an anonymous photo taken in 2002 posted on 4chan in 2019 of a large, empty room with an unsettling yellow appearance, taken at an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. The photo led to people expanding on the concept of liminal spaces, with interconnected Backrooms and dangerous creatures that roam the spaces. The Backrooms has inspired indie video games and short films, as well as the "innies" world of Severance and in American Horror Stories.
Kane Parsons, then 16, uploaded a short horror film in 2022 titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) under the name Kane Pixels, presented as a VHS tape by a filmmaker in 1990 who goes through the Backrooms and is pursued by a monster. The short film was a great success, leading to a series of short films with more backstories added to it, and Parsons got a deal with A24 to develop a mainstream feature length film of it.
The film takes place in 1990, and starts with a VHS tape shot by researcher Naren Wayne (Avan Jogia) going through the Backrooms, where he gets separated from his group and is chased and attacked by an unknown monster. The story continues with two main characters: furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is struggling with alcoholism and going through a divorce, and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who promotes her self-help audio tapes in local commercials (as does in Clark promoting his furniture store) and who is working through her own trauma from having grown up with a mentally ill, agoraphobic mother. She has him do a role-play exercise with her playing his wife, which leads to him blowing up at her in abusive rants about paying for everything and supporting her while she's a law student, revealing a lot of pent-up anger and nastiness in Clark.
Clark, having been kicked out of his house by his wife, has taken up residence in the store, and through electrical outages and flickering lights, discovers an invisible portal through the wall of the store's basement and walks through the wall into the Backrooms, a labyrinthine expanse of dull yellow rooms, with narrow pathways leading to small doors or windows, with piled-up furniture, mysterious voices heard from recordings, and the growling sounds of a creature in the distance. Clark escapes the creature and returns back to the store, but when he tells Mary about it, she thinks he is having delusions from alcohol withdrawal and is skeptical and patronizing towards him.
Clark brings along two young people, the assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him film the Backrooms as proof of his claims, where the VHS video is more like Kane Parsons' original web series. When calamity happens and Clark isn't returning for more therapy appointments, Mary goes to the furniture store and discovers the Backrooms for herself.
I found this movie really interesting. I didn't know anything about the Backrooms, so a lot of the lore I had to catch up on before seeing the movie, and I liked the set design of the maze of rooms, as well as the sound design, especially when the monster is eventually revealed, with fantastic practical effects that were portrayed by a real person (actor and former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi), but with an uncomfortable puppetry movement. I liked how weird and unsettling it felt, and I liked the found footage style of the VHS camcorder videos, even if it followed found footage cliches of cutting off just before the big bad is seen.
I did like how the Backrooms changed based on a person's memories and traumas, and being a misremembered copy of reality. A line that is repeated a couple of times is when Clark says, then later Mary, that to describe the Backrooms to someone is like trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen one before, and getting some details right, but still making it sound confusing.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is fantastic in this film, playing a guy with just barely constrained rage bubbling under him, and he did some great forehead acting in one scene, seeing his forehead scrunch up as he emoted. Renate Reinsve was really good in playing someone trying to play the role of the understanding, calm therapist while wrestling with her own childhood trauma and repressed issues.
I especially liked the in-movie commercials where Clark is dressed up as the pirate mascot of his store, with a peg leg strapped to his leg while trying to hobble on it, and a fake parrot on his shoulder, and promoting the furniture store; and Mary in her commercials for her New Age-like therapy audio tapes promising to "open the windows" to further enlightenment and understanding.
It was good going into this movie cold, as there were some reveals that were in the web series with the backstory of the Backrooms but that I didn't know, and Mark Duplass in a bureaucratic role that feels akin to Paul Reiser's role in Aliens made me hate him a lot, and he's a director/actor who seems like a nice guy, but who I've never liked as an actor, so it was a funny moment of feeling vindicated in not liking him when he popped up.
I'm happy that my friend and I saw this together, and that I could catch up to the Internet lore to these liminal spaces.
