Backrooms (2026)

A picture of an abandoned room plastered in worn pastel yellow wallpaper took the internet by storm on 4chan in 2019. The internet myth went viral as millions of people came across the anonymous user's post on a paranormal board, and were collectively hit with a feeling of familiarity and surreality. Over the years, every other person's thoughts layered and confirmed the suspense what could this place mean? until it was reimagined on youtube with found footage films by director Kane Parsons. Individually, and collectively on reddits like r/creepypasta, the lore expanded further - turning the office walls and rooms into labyrinths filled with endless background noise, sterile florescent lights, and entities or monsters inhabiting the space.

This post contains spoilers.

One of the best parts of Backrooms is this exploration of liminality - not just the transition of a photograph moving into online obsession and now a feature film, but Parson's handling of the physical space. He leaves the film to be your gaze and wherever it lands as Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a bankrupt furniture salesman at the edge of his rope attending therapy with Mary (Renate Reinsve) enters the backrooms looking for answers in the maze of hallways and rooms shifting around every bend. The film doesn't rush, holding onto an impressive pacing on par with The Shining  - where something's different down every hallway, or maybe you're just convinced it is because it all starts to look the same after a while. The longer you stay in the backrooms, the more difficult it becomes to remember why you or Clark started venturing in the first place, and damned if you don't feel scared to touch a wall or door afterwards, lest you might slip through to the other side too.

It's just a shame more of the film (although it probably spends a good 45+ minutes in the backrooms) doesn't stay there. The mystery has more than enough means to speak for itself - not only as a physical space to be explored (kudos to the exceptional cinematography and production design) but also to house the characters' trauma - primarily, Clark's alcoholism aided by his failed marriage, and Mary's childhood with her mom suffering from an undisclosed mental illness which led to hoarding, paranoia, and destruction of her childhood home. But once Clark enters the backrooms, there's no build-up to his obsession of what this place brings out in him or why. His downfall comes and goes so swiftly, it's almost like there's a jump-cut from him being the main character to focusing on what makes Mary tick, and very little connecting their inner conflicts along the way.

Like most A24 movies over the past fifteen years, guesses as to what it all means introduces themselves and wants to convince you they all hold equal weight, so really no theory is too wrong or right. With so much going on with the backrooms - furniture disappearing into the walls, crawl spaces, loud noises from unseen monsters, Christmas tree rooms, open floors of office buildings - the mixed reasoning only adds more dead-ends: advertising by a life coach hypnotically talking about walking through the windows of one's subconscious (is it just mere advertising repeated throughout? is it signaling Mary as a hypnotherapist and Clark suffering from an experiment gone wrong?); flashbacks of Mary's childhood; impressions of the real world, the furniture store, a stop sign, seagulls are replicated below either distorted or reversed, so the world is echoing real life; but then it also records the characters' trauma and memories to recreate still life versions. The least interesting solution is Async, a privately funded corporation using a threshold into the backrooms as their own storage facility among other things (like cutting down on global shipping costs) that lapses into residential areas. As the running time ticks by, the script attempts to explain away what the backrooms can be capable of and why, but it never lands confidently enough like Parson's online series does. 

When an entire landscape of a film begins and ends with "nothing is what it seems", ambiguity only becomes more frustrating that the script's open-ended suggestions never becomes concrete. Backrooms has a story it wants to tell, particularly with trauma leaving an imprint on one's mind and the ability it can create to turn someone's psyche into a monster that eats away at them...and with Parsons steady direction in pacing and visuals, and great performances by Ejiofor and Reinsve, it really could've gotten there. Eventually, any interesting character dynamics, the once hypnotic anticipation and dread, kind of dwindles down into a final act where so much is hinted at behind the curtain, a lot of it isn't actually scary; it's convoluted and never-ending, almost like a Stranger Things' Upside Down except set in the 90s and very very yellow.

Rating: ★★★☆☆