I knew the Backrooms in the same vague way most people know them. Yellow walls. Fluorescent lights. Empty rooms that seem to continue forever. The visual equivalent of walking into an office building on Sunday and immediately wondering whether anyone would ever find your body.
What began as an internet horror concept eventually became a sprawling mythology shaped by message boards, games, fan fiction, and Kane Parsons’ enormously popular YouTube series. Now Parsons has brought that world to theaters with Backrooms, an A24 feature starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. A24 credits Parsons as director and Will Soodik as the screenwriter.
This review is spoiler free.
The story begins when a strange doorway appears beneath a furniture showroom. After a therapist’s patient disappears into the dimension beyond it, she follows him inside, hoping to bring him back.
That setup sounds like it could lead to a conventional rescue movie involving monsters, chase scenes, and several people ignoring clearly posted safety procedures. Backrooms is not especially interested in being that kind of movie.
Parsons approaches the material as quiet psychological horror. The film does not constantly leap at the audience or blast the soundtrack every time something moves in the distance. It lets the architecture do most of the damage.
Rooms stretch farther than they should. Hallways lead into spaces that seem familiar but make no practical sense. Furniture sits in strange piles. Clothing has been abandoned without explanation. Every corner feels like it belongs to a place you once visited as a child, although you know perfectly well you have never been there.
That contradiction is where the movie becomes genuinely unsettling.
The Backrooms are not frightening simply because they are endless. They are frightening because something about them feels welcoming. The spaces offer a strange sense of nostalgia, almost like returning to a forgotten hotel, school, or office building from a dream. The lights hum. The carpet looks worn. Nothing appears immediately dangerous.
You could probably sit down for a moment. That is exactly how the place gets you. Parsons understands that comfort can become horrifying when it arrives without context. The rooms seem to tell visitors that they are safe, that their problems outside no longer matter, and that continuing deeper might finally provide some kind of relief.
It is less like entering a haunted house and more like being slowly persuaded to stop looking for the exit.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a furniture store owner whose life already appears close to collapse before the doorway opens. He carries the exhausted tension of a man who has spent years holding himself together with routines that are no longer working.
Ejiofor never plays him as simply unstable. There is intelligence, pain, embarrassment, and genuine longing underneath his behavior. When he talks about what he has discovered beneath the store, he sounds like someone desperate to be believed but also terrified that believing him might be worse.
The Backrooms do not create all of his problems. They simply recognize which ones to press.
Ejiofor is especially effective during the quieter scenes, when his character attempts to explain experiences that cannot be organized into normal language. He appears to be searching for the correct words while another part of him has already accepted that words will not help.
Renate Reinsve provides the movie with a necessary counterweight as his therapist. She begins from a position of reason and professional control. Her job is to interpret fear, memory, grief, and delusion through an understanding of the human mind. Then she enters a place that does not appear particularly concerned with the rules of the human mind.
Reinsve handles that transition without suddenly turning her character into a standard horror heroine. She remains observant and practical, even as the foundation supporting those qualities begins to crack.
The tension comes from watching someone trained to explain human behavior confront an environment that may be responding to human emotion.
There are echoes of The Shining and 1408 in the way the location seems to study its visitors. However, Backrooms has its own psychological texture. The Overlook Hotel feels malicious. Room 1408 feels aggressive. The Backrooms feel indifferent. They do not appear angry that people have entered. They seem content to wait until those people decide they no longer want to leave.
The cinematography gives the film a visual language that avoids making the endless rooms feel repetitive. Slight changes in light, scale, furniture, and geometry create the sense that the environment is rearranging itself without announcing the change. Several shots are frequently held on empty spaces long enough for the audience to search for something that might be there.
That is an old horror movie trick, but it remains brutally effective when used with discipline. Eventually, every doorway becomes suspicious. Every dark section of the frame begins to feel occupied.
The score adds another layer of unease without explaining what we should fear. It pulses and drones beneath the imagery, occasionally creating the sensation that the building itself may be producing the sound.
There are a few strong scares, but Backrooms is not constructed around a parade of loud jolts. Parsons is more interested in the feeling that follows you home. It is the kind of movie that makes the harmless unfinished corner of your garage seem suddenly involved in something.
The film will probably frustrate a few viewers looking for a detailed explanation of how the dimension operates. Parsons provides enough information to create a larger mythology, but he refuses to hand the audience a neatly organized guidebook.
There are unanswered questions. Some images appear symbolic rather than literal. Several ideas are left open enough to support different interpretations. Normally, that can feel like a filmmaker refusing to finish the story. Here, the uncertainty feels connected to the central experience.
Explaining every corridor, object, and phenomenon would shrink the Backrooms into a set of franchise rules. The fear comes from sensing that the place is larger than the characters’ ability to understand it.
The film occasionally feels like it is preserving certain mysteries for future installments, which could test the patience of anyone hoping for complete closure. Still, the character journeys provide enough emotional direction that the ambiguity rarely feels empty.
Parsons’ age and his path through YouTube will understandably become part of the conversation surrounding the movie. It is exciting to watch another filmmaker move from online shorts into a major theatrical production, particularly without sanding away the qualities that made his original work connect with viewers.
But Backrooms should not be graded on a curve because its director is young or because he began on YouTube. The movie works because Parsons has a strong eye, understands sustained dread, and knows that an empty room can become terrifying when the audience is given enough time to imagine what should be inside it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Backrooms is quiet, eerie, and intentionally resistant to easy answers. It does not chase the audience out of the theater. It lets us leave on our own, then waits for the next ordinary hallway to remind us that it may still be nearby.
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