Backrooms (2026) – Film Review
Director: Kane Parsons
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Certificate: 15
By Roger Crow
When therapist Mary Kline’s patient vanishes into a mysterious dimension beyond reality, she embarks on a terrifying journey into the endless maze-like world known as the Backrooms. As she searches for answers, the line between reality and nightmare begins to dissolve, confronting her with strange entities, psychological horrors and the unsettling secrets hidden within the liminal labyrinth.
Born from a viral internet phenomenon, Backrooms successfully expands the ‘creepypasta’ mythology into a feature-length horror experience.
Director Kane Parsons, who started the series of short movies aged around 16, retains the eerie atmosphere and sense of isolation that made his online shorts so effective, while the performances from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give the story an emotional anchor. This is essentially an arthouse psychological horror with a hint of David Lynch. It also features one of the most memorable ’dinner’ scenes since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
“Muzak-filled nightmare”
Parsons is now 20, and to watch him in interviews describing how he made the shorts and film is incredible. I recently sat through one of his Backrooms shorts in which an unseen character descends down a staircase for what felt like 10 minutes. Yes, it sounds like a waste of time, but for any gamer who has done the same for years, that’s perfectly normal.
The film’s unsettling production design and soundscape (co-composed by Parsons) generate genuine dread, although the narrative occasionally struggles to match the power of its concept. Still, Backrooms is easily the best surrealist chiller set ‘in’ a furniture showroom. You’ll never think “sofa so good” as the Post-It note yellow labyrinth sucks you deeper into a woozy muzak-filled nightmare.
And it’s even more trippy when the film is over and you might emerge into an equally soulless empty mall like me. (It genuinely took me 10 minutes to readjust to reality as every staircase and corridor felt like it would reveal a jump scare monster, or something lurking in the shadows).
“Fresh and disturning”
This may be the shape of AI-inflected horrors to come, and it does for empty office spaces what Jaws did for sharks. I’m not surprised it’s taken a fortune at the box office. And the numbers are insane: made for around $10 million, it’s grossed almost $250 million worldwide. So yes, a sequel is inevitable, as are those spoofs and copycat thrillers, but for now this feels as fresh and disturbing as that other ‘found footage’ thriller The Blair Witch Project did back in 1999.
If there is a hell, it may be endless empty yellow corridors and buzzing overhead neon lights with something hiding around every corner. I cannot wait to see what Kane Parsons does next.
Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
crowsfeat.com; nostalgiahhh film podcast
