Mark Duplass pushed back Tuesday after social media users questioned whether Kane Parsons really directed Backrooms, saying the 20-year-old filmmaker was in charge on set and, in his view, ran the production better than many older directors. The exchange landed just days before the A24 horror feature opens in theaters Friday.
The argument online centered on Parsons’ age and the scale of the movie around him. He is 20, and Backrooms makes him A24’s youngest feature director. But the project also carries the names of established filmmakers James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins among its producing team, which helped fuel speculation that Parsons was not the one calling the shots. Duplass answered one post that said, “we all know Kane Parsons absolutely didn’t direct this movie,” by writing, “Hmmm, with all due respect I don’t remember seeing you on set.”
Duplass’ defense matters because this is not a small internet debate about credit on a side project. Backrooms stars Duplass, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, and it is heading into theaters as a full studio horror release. The film follows a therapist tracking down a missing patient inside a bizarre dimension of liminal space, turning a YouTube-born concept into an A24 feature with real box-office stakes.
Parsons has been building toward this moment for years. He began uploading the YouTube series that inspired Backrooms in early 2022, when he was still a teen, and at CCXP Mexico he said the team built 30,000 square feet of actual backrooms for the movie. He said the film uses the existing series and online lore as a jumping-off point, but shifts the focus to its characters, who live, in his words, “these atomized, lonely lives.”
That framing also undercuts the suspicion around him. The complaint from some users was not simply that Parsons is young, but that a 20-year-old could not plausibly be the real director of a film with this much studio backing and so many recognizable producers attached. Duplass answered that directly, saying, “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control,” and adding that Parsons was “more so than many directors 3x his age.”
The remaining question is less about whether Parsons was present than how much of the final creative authority he truly held once a major distributor and seasoned producers entered the picture. For now, the public defense comes from someone who says he watched Parsons run the set himself, and Friday’s release will be the first chance for audiences to judge the result for themselves.
