Backrooms (2026)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
As expected, the presentation of Backrooms is visually inventive and genuinely unsettling.
Just 20 years old, director (and composer) Kane Parsons demonstrates an exceptional ability in creating atmosphere, mood, and tension.
Completes a trilogy of sorts of YouTube content creators pivoting to massively successful feature filmmaking. Backrooms success, like that of Obsession and Iron Lung before it, represents something significant in the modern history of cinema.
NO
Could we have worked on that script a bit more? For 110 minutes, this feels threadbare and extremely thin.
Repetition can work wonders in a short form video format. In a feature-length film, you have to be very careful how much and how often you revisit similar sequences. Backrooms feels like its stretched too far at times.
People may disagree, but the themes this movie explores felt surface-level, obvious, and told to the audience. Parsons will learn to trust his audience more, but a lot of this dialogue is heavy-handed and on-the-nose.
OUR REVIEW
Backrooms, the latest buzzworthy horror film, completes a makeshift trilogy of horror flicks from directors who cut their teeth on YouTube and social media-released short films. What’s interesting is that with each one of these releases, each film seems to one-up the one that comes before it.
The first film in this quasi-trilogy I am referencing belongs to Mark Fischbach, a/k/a Markiplier. Iron Lung landed in theaters at the end of January and was written, edited, directed, and stars a guy with approximately 39 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. Working with a $3 million budget, he self-released his science-fiction/horror hybrid and saw it play in more than 3,000 theaters on opening weekend and go on to gross $51 million worldwide. Quite impressive.
A few weeks ago the world was introduced to 26-year-old Curry Barker, who saw Focus Features deliver Obsession to theaters in mid-May. The film is a runaway pop culture phenomenon, building on huge buzz from a fall 2025 festival run. Shot for $750k, Barker, who amassed a large social media following with partner Cooper Tomlinson creating sketch comedy vignettes, has seen his film grow in popularity since it was released and could gross near $125-150 million by the end of its theatrical run. Quite incredible.
And now, at the end of May, we have Backrooms, the feature-length directorial debut of 20-year-old wunderkind Kane Parsons, a/k/a Kane Pixels. This cinematic adaptation of his science-fiction/horror web series of the same name was given a $10 million production budget by A24 and two Oscar-nominated actors to lead it - Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. Initial reports indicate that this could become the largest opening weekend ever for an A24 film.
And it’s directed by someone not yet old enough to drink. Kids these days, amirite?
Whether it’s Markiplier, Barker and Tomlinson, or Parsons, the fact that these content creators are making hugely successful feature films does represent a significant moment in mainstream cinema. Their accomplishments are important, as it no longer means that they can be pigeonholed as just “YouTubers” or “social media influencers.” These creators, and others who will undoubtedly emerge, have developed fanbases that will seemingly follow them anywhere they go. As of this writing, the web series Backrooms, across its 24 episodes, has earned nearly 200 million views.
So can 200 million viewers be wrong? What even is this Backrooms movie anyway?
Based on an internet creepypasta (slang for a horror story that travels around the internet), Backrooms takes us directly into the terror of liminal spaces, otherwise identifiable as places of transition like long hallways, abandoned malls, cavernous rooms, or stairwells. In Parsons’ vision, these spaces are essentially a maze with no clear pathway in or out, and they go on and on with no end in sight. Tapping into the fear of isolation and vulnerability, liminal space horror becomes so effective because no one ever wants to feel trapped or essentially buried alive. This is that - just with supernatural, horror, and science-fiction elements tied into the storytelling.
Parsons turned his theatrical adaptation over to television screenwriter Will Soodik (“Ash vs. Evil Dead”), and the results are disappointingly thin and threadbare. There just isn’t much to Backrooms as a 110-minute feature, though Parsons is incredibly skilled at creating a sense of anxiety, tension, and dread within his unique and intriguing settings.
From a found-footage opening scene that gives fans of the web series a lot to enjoy, Backrooms tells the story of Clark (Ejiofor), a furniture store owner struggling with his professional and personal life. Not having quite recovered from a messy divorce, he seeks guidance and counsel from therapist Mary (Reinsve), who frustrates him as much as she helps him.
One evening, while investigating a power surge in the downstairs of his store, he finds a portal through one of the walls. Reaching through it pulls him into a completely new world of yellow-wallpapered rooms, fluorescent lighting, hallways, floors, and doorways which look like optical illusions. Clark can seemingly walk around and explore a never-ending layout of hallways, doorways, and rooms.
He tries to map it. He returns time and again. His efforts to convince Mary of its existence prove futile. Only when he ropes in his assistant manager (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend (Finn Bennett), does Clark begin to understand the dangers of what he has encountered.
To say more spoils what Parsons has to offer. I will say that though the film is prone to repetition and elongating the points it wants to make, this kid is a master at making an audience unsettled, creeped out, and uneasy. Even as the story struggles to resonate in a meaningful way, it should become obvious to anyone watching this why Parsons received this opportunity.
Ejiofor and Reinsve work hard to convey the complex emotions we come to understand they are wrestling with. Soodik unfortunately crafts his screenplay in a way that requires each character to implicitly inform the audience what they are feeling, why they feel it, and why they cannot deal with certain things. This is most obnoxious in a scene, during a messy third act, where Clark and Mary meet up in an unlikely location and Clark just won’t stop talking.
Within the yellow-washed interiors and labyrinthine madness, production designer Danny Vermette and set decorator Trevor Johnston, who have worked with Osgood Perkins on his films Longlegs, The Monkey, and Keeper, bring a similar off-kilter mystique to the expansive 30,000-square-foot set created by the production crew.
If you want a choking sense of atmosphere, Backrooms has it in spades. If you want to squirm and wince and fear what may be coming next, Parsons can set up those moments with a great deal of skill and instinct.
Where he struggles is elevating the written material to match the impressive storytelling techniques he has already developed. Backrooms is an interesting escape room of a film. However, when it tries to become a meaningful examination of how grief and trauma can trap us, I can think of at least a half dozen movies that deliver what Parsons and Soodik simply cannot quite grasp.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Lukita Maxwell, Finn Bennett, Mark Duplass, Avan Jogia, Krista Kosonen, Robert Bobroczkyi
Director: Kane Parsons
Written by: Will Soodik
Based on the web series “Backrooms” by Kane Parsons
Release Date: May 29, 2026
A24