Kane Parsons has arrived in feature films with Backrooms, a sci-fi horror movie opening this weekend that turns a viral creepypasta into a trip through liminal space. Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a therapist and her patient, and both are pulled into another dimension that looks unsettlingly empty, familiar and wrong at the same time.
The first reactions say the 20-year-old Parsons does not waste the opportunity. Critics have singled out the opening seven minutes as among the most effective horror filmmaking of the year, while one second-act sequence is being described as the kind of thing that could rank among the most bone-chilling moments audiences see in a theater in all of 2026. When Backrooms works, it is being hailed as an arresting triumph and one of the strongest debut features in years.
That response matters because Backrooms has the burden and the benefit of arriving with a reputation already attached to it. The film is based on a viral internet horror phenomenon, and the early praise suggests Parsons has turned a piece of online dread into something with the scale and texture of a real movie rather than a novelty project. It is also being discussed in the same breath as A24’s more experimental scary films, the kind that trade loud shocks for atmosphere, patience and a creeping sense that the floor has shifted under you.
Parsons’ biggest advantage, by the sound of it, is restraint. Reviewers say the scares work because he rarely leans on cheap shock tactics, instead building tension through mood and unease. One critic called him a wizard of mood who shares early David Lynch’s love of industrial, cosmic sound design, and another said the film is less interested in frightening its audience than in quietly dismantling its sense of reality. That is not a small thing for a filmmaker making a first feature from material that could easily have collapsed into gimmickry.
The back half of the movie appears to push that approach even further. The last 40 minutes are described as strange, heavily indebted to Twin Peaks and the work of David Lynch, though the film is also said to become a beast all its own by the end. In other words, the influence is obvious, but the result is not imitation. It is a horror film that is genuinely singular, eerie, melancholy and deeply uncanny, and it trusts viewers enough to leave them lost inside its maze.
For Parsons, that is the real significance of the opening weekend. Backrooms is not being framed as a clean, commercial crowd-pleaser, and there is no box-office number here to change the conversation. What it has, based on these first reviews, is something harder to fake: identity. If the early reactions hold, the movie does more than adapt an internet nightmare. It announces kane parsons as a director who understands that the most frightening space in horror is not the one full of monsters, but the one that makes reality itself feel unstable.
