An Empty Room Was Enough

A doorway opens in the basement of a furniture showroom, and on the far side is the backrooms: an endless grid of yellow-wallpapered offices under humming fluorescent light, corridors that lead nowhere and then fold back on themselves. If you've spent any time online in the last few years you already half-know this place. Kane Parsons built it as a teenager filming found-footage shorts in his bedroom, and the internet quietly decided his version was the definitive one. Now he's directed it as a feature for A24, and the dread that made those clips spread survives the jump to 110 minutes mostly intact.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, who slips through the door. Renate Reinsve is Dr. Mary Kline, the therapist who goes looking for him. Parsons keeps the geometry deliberately broken, dead ends and objects half-swallowed by walls, closer to Escher than to architecture. When the film trusts that emptiness it's genuinely unnerving, and the cast holds the human thread together, Reinsve especially, who plays calm as a thin lid over something coming apart.

Most critics have responded to the restraint. The comparison that keeps surfacing is Annihilation, and it earns it: both films treat an impossible space less as a puzzle to be solved than as a thing that slowly rearranges whoever walks into it. Deep Focus Review called the debut remarkably assured, and Variety found it extraordinarily effective, with scores clustering high and the British site HeyUGuys handing it full marks.

My problem starts where the blood does. Almost everything terrifying here could have arrived in a PG-13 package, and that isn't a content-warning quibble. The backrooms work because they withhold. There's no monster you can name, no wound you can point at, just the wrongness of a space that should be safe and isn't. When the film reaches for graphic violence and a steady drip of profanity, it swaps that withholding for something far more ordinary, and the spell thins. Plugged In made the same complaint more bluntly, and they're right. Saint Maud understood this: it holds on one woman's certainty and never once steps outside it, and the horror is the airlessness. Backrooms knows it for an hour, then forgets.

The other honest caveat is narrative. There isn't much of one, and the film won't spoon-feed you lore. If you need a plot that resolves, the long stretches of wandering a liminal nowhere will test you. I didn't mind. The point was never the answer.

So you get an open-source internet myth, a thing that belonged to everyone and no one, somehow ending up on a cinema screen with Ejiofor in it and not curdling into a theme-park version of itself. Parsons trusted the room to do the work. Where he trusts it, this is one of the most unsettling things A24 has released all year; where he doesn't, it's a competent horror film with a knife. I'd have taken the whole thing a notch quieter.

Sources:

Backrooms (2026) Movie Review — Deep Focus Review

Backrooms Review: Kane Parsons' YouTube-Gone-A24 Head Trip — Variety

Backrooms Movie Review — Plugged In

Backrooms Review Thread — r/movies