Backrooms opens the door on a fear that started online and has been growing ever since. In Kane Parsons’ feature debut, a failed architect named Clark drifts through a hidden space behind a California strip-mall store and finds himself in a maze of office-like rooms, yellow light and corridors that seem to keep going without end.
The film, backed by James Wan, Osgood Perkins and A24, arrives on Friday, May 26 at 1 hour 50 minutes and leans hard on the same strange logic that made the Backrooms idea spread in the first place. Parsons, now 20, built the feature from shorts he started making as a teenager, and the result does capture something of the concept’s intriguing unease, even if the storytelling is underbaked.
Clark is not a chosen hero or a clean blank slate. He runs Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire in a quiet California suburb circa 1990, sleeps at the store after his wife throws him out following a bitter, booze-fueled fight, and one night discovers a wall he can slip through while fiddling with the breaker downstairs. On the other side is a room lit in a sickly institutional yellow, with furniture haphazardly piled in the middle, and beyond that more rooms, staircases, doorways and crawlspaces that make the place feel as if it might go on forever.
That premise is the hook, and it is also the trap. Backrooms began as a creepypasta, an internet urban legend that fans kept feeding with their own lore and their own work. Parsons has taken that shared nightmare and given it a feature shape, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve in the cast, but the leap from eerie idea to satisfying narrative remains incomplete. The film understands the texture of liminal horror, the kind that can make a hallway feel like a threat, yet it is less sure about how to move its characters through it with purpose.
That imbalance matters because this corner of horror already has landmarks. In 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski published House of Leaves, and in 2022 Skinamarink pushed similarly vague, boundaryless dread into theaters. Backrooms belongs to that same family of work, where the point is not simply a monster or a reveal but the feeling that space itself has gone wrong. Parsons gets enough of that right to make the film stick in the mind, especially in the early passages where the empty architecture does the work. But once the novelty of the maze wears thin, the film has less to say than the concept around it promises.
The review’s clearest verdict is also the simplest: Backrooms is most effective when it lets the rooms speak for themselves. The original internet image of the idea was often summarized by an explorer as looking like “construction workers on acid,” and the film captures a version of that deranged, industrial unease. At one point, characters in the film reach for the problem of describing it at all, saying it is like asking someone to draw a dog they have never seen after only having it explained to them. That is the right metaphor for the movie and for the franchise around it: the image is vivid, but the story inside it still needs to grow up.
