Film Review · A24 · Sci-Fi Horror · 2026
Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons · Written by Will Soodik · Feature DebutKane Parsons was 20 years old when Backrooms was released. He started making horror videos on YouTube from his bedroom using Blender and After Effects when he was a teenager, A24 came knocking, and two years later he was directing Chiwetel Ejiofor on 30,000 square feet of practical sets built across four sound stages in Vancouver. The film went on to gross $330 million worldwide, becoming A24's highest grossing film of all time. I mention this upfront not to distract from the film itself but because once you see what Parsons does with the camera and the space and the atmosphere, the number 20 becomes genuinely difficult to believe.
I really enjoyed this film.
The setup is deceptively simple. Clark, a furniture store owner, is sleeping in his own store after a fight with his wife. One night he stumbles through a doorway in the basement and falls into the Backrooms, a seemingly infinite labyrinth of dull yellow corridors, buzzing fluorescent lights, and rooms that feel like places you have half-remembered from a dream. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, goes looking for him.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is doing something very specific here. Clark is an ordinary man, not a hero, not particularly brave, just a furniture salesman who has ended up somewhere he was never supposed to be. The vulnerability Ejiofor brings to that situation is what makes the film work. You believe him completely. There is no moment where the performance slips into genre mode. He is just a man, frightened, trying to find his way back.
Renate Reinsve, who has one of the most compelling screen presences working today, gives Mary a quiet determination that makes her scenes land differently from Clark's. Their dynamic is built on a professional relationship that becomes something much more human under pressure, and both actors earn every moment of it. The film has a strong cast around them too, but these two are the reason it works as well as it does.
The environments in this film are extraordinary. Parsons originally designed the Backrooms in Blender for his YouTube series, and for the feature he worked with production designer Danny Vermette to build them physically. The result is something that feels genuinely uncanny. These are not scary rooms in the traditional horror sense. They are wrong rooms. Off-kilter, half-remembered, slightly too large or slightly too narrow, filled with furniture that resembles Clark's own store but distorted.
The film describes it as what a picture of a dog might look like if the artist had never seen a dog. That sentence is perfect, and it is exactly what the spaces feel like on screen.
The atmosphere Parsons creates is suffocating in the best possible way. There are two or three sequences in this film that are among the most unsettling horror scenes in recent memory. The found footage sequence in particular had me sitting forward in my seat. He is patient with his horror in a way that most directors twice his age are not.
The ending is strong. Deliberately open, deliberately unresolved in a way that feels earned rather than frustrating. The Backrooms as a concept has an enormous amount of lore still untouched, and Parsons knows it. He leaves threads deliberately. How did any of this start. What is actually behind the Backrooms. Who or what is creating these spaces. The story is very much still there to be told.
The film answers enough to satisfy and leaves enough to demand a sequel. If Parsons comes back for another one, and the box office makes that a near certainty, there is a genuine mythology here waiting to be explored. The story is not over. That is not a complaint. That is the point.
The Verdict
Backrooms is a genuinely impressive film. Not a perfect one. It loses some of its grip in the middle third and some of the horror sequences are more effective than others. But as a debut, as a piece of filmmaking from someone who taught himself everything on a laptop in his bedroom, it is remarkable.
Parsons has a visual language that is entirely his own, a patience that most horror directors twice his age do not have, and an understanding of what makes a liminal space feel genuinely threatening. He is 20. The story is not over. I cannot wait to see what comes next.