Kane Parsons’ deliriously scary YouTube creepypasta series The Backrooms has been adapted to the big screen, and he is not the first to graduate from YouTube filmmaking and short-form horror to feature auteur in the last few years. Zach Cregger and Curry Barker have similar trajectories off the success of Barbarian/Weapons and Obsession, respectively. But Parsons makes a direct adaptation of his own highly successful and notorious Backrooms project here, becoming A24’s youngest feature director in the process.
This was pretty easily one of my most anticipated horror movies of the year, because to put it plainly, I find traversing the backrooms deeply frightening. Trying to peer around corners and see down the ends of long, meandering hallways while the occasional monster of God-knows-what shape creeps out was absolutely terrifying to me in the short YouTube snippets I’ve seen. The trailers for this are excellent because they capture that feeling well, and when the movie works best, I’m physically trying to wrap my head around the walls on screen to anticipate what might lurch out next. It’s a genuinely unsettling experience in a theater and Parsons’ visual style translates to the big screen with almost disturbing ease. A24 built over 30,000 square feet of practical backrooms set in Vancouver, reportedly enough to get people lost on set, and Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox use every inch of it.
The movie follows struggling furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), kicked out of his house by his significant other as a result of his alcohol addiction and anger issues. He stays nights at his store, occasionally disrupted by flickering lights storewide and brief cutaways on his TV to strange, empty yellow rooms seemingly recorded via security camera. When he’s not at work, he attends therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), to some – but not much – success. Mary carries her own childhood trauma from living with her schizophrenic mother and her home being demolished, which the film parcels out through brief flashbacks.
One night, Clark messes with the circuit breaker to fix the store’s lighting issue and happens upon a slit in the wall that leads to, you guessed it, the titular yellow rooms. After he goes missing, Mary has to find her way in and to him.
The film works at its best as a liminal horror movie where it’s so unpredictable where the camera is panning next and what could be jumping out at you. The visual style is so spectacular and creepy that when it isn’t in the backrooms, you genuinely wish you were there instead, moving through the next room or floor, seeing the creepy pools, stumbling upon a mysteriously red Christmas setup or whatever M.C. Escher-style image Parsons can dream up next. He can set up a scary tracking shot as well as anyone working in the industry already.
His pointedness as a storyteller may still need a bit of work. The inner workings of the backrooms ultimately boil down to Easter eggs for fans of the series, despite how integral they are made to seem from the film’s cold open. Async, a research institute trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on in there, is really only ever explored through the opening and closing scenes, with an underutilized Mark Duplass serving as one of its figureheads who only interacts with either of the leads in the film’s closing moments.
Instead, Parsons pivots to tell a story of shared trauma between Clark and Mary, and how the memories of their most traumatic moments are morphed into the backrooms at their very basic details. As the characters repeat multiple times in the story, their memories of trauma are like explaining to someone who has never seen a dog what a dog is, and then having that person draw it. The further you step back, the more it doesn’t make sense.
It’s pretty heavy-handed in how Parsons literalizes those ideas, and the culmination of Clark’s therapy sessions with Mary result in a dinner scene about 70ish minutes in that really clunked off the backboard for me. And it’s where the “elevated A24 horror” of this starts to wear thin within its own labyrinth. There will be a lot of comparisons to Kubrick for various reasons here, especially in how Parsons uses the camera and empty space to convey the isolation of the backrooms the way Kubrick does better than anyone ever has in The Shining. But Kubrick puts far less emphasis on explaining the theme through any of his movies than Parsons does in that dinner scene and what comes after, as Mary tries to escape.
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So it’s a good movie. But after how high my expectations were, I was left a bit disappointed. The lore and mythos of the backrooms are largely left unanswered. What we get instead is a film that tackles trauma and therapy in a way that doesn’t feel all that new or interesting, especially considering trauma has become such a recurring theme in A24 horror over the last decade. The creepypasta-ness of it really works. The story is a bit underwhelming. It’s less twisty and insane than a Zach Cregger movie, and more interested in mining layers and layers of its own themes that I found less engrossing.
Score: 6/10
Backrooms (2026)
- Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Mark Duplass
- Director: Kane Parsons
- Genre: Horror, Mystery, Science Fiction
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: May 29, 2026
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