Movie review: Backrooms

Backrooms (2026), directed by Kane Parsons

​A room with askew: Backrooms (2026, Dir, Kane Parsons)
Review by Paul Oswell

Horror and its related genres (in this case intense psychological drama with horror elements) has always served as a metaphor for real life anxieties. Dracula tells on Victorian England’s fears of reverse colonization and repressed sexuality, while Frankenstein has unchecked scientific ambition and the isolation of ‘the outsider’ as themes. 

Kane Parsons – a YouTuber tapped by A24’s cinematic distribution juggernaut – has created something that is genuinely unsettling, which is impressive given how desensitized we all are to, well, everything. Mr Parsons was born in 2005, and already has years of lore about The Backrooms concept online. It’s largely a Gen Z phenomenon, so we can perhaps extract data as to their generationally-specific demons.

Backrooms is a dreamlike experience, abstraction and surrealism featuring heavily. David Lynch may have approved. The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly about Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect in the early '90s who's separated, alcoholic, and managing a tatty discount furniture store called 'Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire'. He makes humiliating TV ads dressed as a pirate, aware that he should be a sultan for the pun to work. He sees a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), a morose woman hawking self-help tapes. Both are broken in their own ways. 

One day, Clark finds an impossibly porous section of wall in the store's basement that leads to an infinite network of backrooms, like a portal.  These rooms are uncanny, installation-style areas showing snapshots of different realities. It's like someone took every beige corridor, every fluorescent-lit waiting room, every soulless corporate space you've ever been trapped in and the physical reality matches your memory of them a week later. 

Clark begins to warily explore the rooms, mapping them as best he can amid half chairs in the walls, narrowing corridors, stairs that go nowhere and nonsensical masonry. Noises and shadows hint at a hidden population that inhabit the rooms. Clark’s young media team - Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) - and eventually Mary are also drawn into the space. The less you know about what comes next, the more your appreciation for it will be. 

It's not really the supernatural horror that gets to you. This is a film about Gen Z’s most pressing existential terrors dressed up as found video footage. It's about being lost in systems designed as traps. These aren't haunted mansions or cursed graveyards, they're waiting rooms and office buildings. Dead yellowish light leaks from strip lighting, and what you feel is the dread of being one of millions of people stuck in the same beige nightmare, unable to escape.

We're all just wandering through the backrooms, looking for a way out. But it probably doesn't exist.
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Backrooms is playing at cinemas across the city