‘Backrooms’ movie review: Kane Parsons’ postmodern labyrinth is a mesmerising moodboard for the horrors of the internet age

After I was a baby, the nightmares that terrified me probably the most seldom concerned ghosts, killers, demons, or some other entity determined for screentime throughout my dream time. It virtually at all times concerned only a place.

This was at all times a well-recognized place, but someway uncanny. It typically felt oddly serene, however had a malice of some type that appeared woven into the house itself. There was one thing off about it that triggered a concern so primal that I’d typically get up in a chilly sweat. Typically that dread would take form as some imprecise, menacing factor pursuing me with unspecified intent and relentless willpower. More often than not although, the place itself was sufficient. However to realize it, you will need to first have dreamt it.

So you may think about my mounting horror when Kane Parsons’ feature-film adaptation of the web age’s most notorious liminal house rendered that feeling with such astonishing constancy. Even when the mere concept that a complete era raised on web lore might need someway excavated the identical nook of the collective unconscious is simply as provocative to ponder, this was an archaeological reconstruction of a childhood nervousness so particular that it feels insane to witness materialise exterior my subconcious. 

The case of Kane Parsons is a curious one. He belongs to the primary era of filmmakers whose inventive training concerned web tradition, videogame lore, analogue horror, and the infinite properly of data on the finish of a satisfying YouTube rabbit-hole. But his creativeness retains circling concepts that predate the web by many years, pointing in direction of extra elementary issues involving house, reminiscence or goals, which enchanted and impressed cult style voices like David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick.

The 20-year-old filmmaker behind the eponymous viral YouTube sequence constructed his popularity creating found-footage horror shorts by means of Blender and Adobe After Results whereas nonetheless in highschool. These movies remodeled a creepypasta impressed by a 2019 4chan picture of an empty yellow room into probably the most defining horror mythologies of the web. His function adaptation for A24 follows Clark, performed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect who now manages Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furnishings showroom in California, in 1990. Whereas investigating unusual electrical faults within the retailer’s basement, he discovers a porous wall that leads into an infinite uncanny-valley labyrinth of liminal rooms.

What follows is likely one of the most persuasive acts of spatial horror I can keep in mind seeing in years. Parsons and manufacturing designer Danny Vermette conceive the notoriously inconceivable Backrooms as a world assembled from half-remembered directions about actuality. The ingenious set design finds numerous methods to visualise the unique mythology’s notion of “noclipping” from actuality, scattering glitched furnishings and half-submerged home detritus all through the maze, whereas the winding geometry typically evokes an Alice in Wonderland-style descent into ever deeper layers of spatial absurdity. Piss-yellow lighting in opposition to the uninteresting, lifeless officecore purgatory however, Jeremy Cox’s marvellous found-footage cinematography compounds the unease by means of compositions that continuously deny any semblance of spatial certainty.

A nonetheless from ‘Backrooms’
| Picture Credit score:
A24

Regardless that I’ve but to learn Home of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel exerts such huge affect over the r/liminalspace subreddit that its mythic presence looks like an unavoidable comparability to attract right here. It’s a helpful allegory nonetheless, contemplating each liminal horrors are two of probably the most distinctly postmodern descendants of the Labyrinth of Daedalus, exacerbating the traditional terror of turning into bodily misplaced with the much more modern nervousness of turning into epistemologically misplaced. It additionally feels surprisingly near the anime idea of an isekai, a style constructed round peculiar folks crossing a threshold into one other world ruled by unfamiliar legal guidelines (the essential distinction, after all, being that this specific isekai provides no improbably devoted entourage of anime ladies ready to validate your existence).

Fairly the other, in reality. Parsons populates the Backrooms with a profound and virtually suffocating loneliness. Clark initially approaches his discovery with the curiosity of an architect stumbling upon the best structural anomaly in human historical past, painstakingly sketching maps of and excitedly recounting his findings to his therapist, Renate Reinsve’s Dr. Mary Kline. Ejiofor performs these early scenes with manic enthusiasm that step by step curdles into obsession as each expedition yields recent impossibilities. The extra time Clark spends making an attempt to know the Backrooms, the much less he turns into in sustaining a life exterior them. 

Within the last act, when Mary finally ventures into the Backrooms looking for the lacking Clark, Parsons makes an attempt some potent, if barely clunky, commentary about trauma and the unconscious thoughts. As Mary’s personal reckoning with the labyrinth forces her to confront reminiscences involving her childhood dwelling and her emotionally troubled mom, one putting sequence — involving a static shot descending by means of successive layers of the identical home, every iteration rising progressively extra summary and indifferent from actuality — felt telling. Right here, Parsons nudges at the concept that the Backrooms are a sprawling manifestation of buried reminiscences and psychic particles.

A nonetheless from ‘Backrooms’
| Picture Credit score:
A24

So is that this Parson’s critique of American extra and consumerist accumulation? Or a Synecdoche, New York-style metaphor for a thoughts slowly disappearing into itself? Each readings have sufficient proof to maintain them, which is why I discover them much less attention-grabbing than the expertise of inhabiting the movie. There’s a specific sort of artwork that resists mental dissection but communicates with exceptional readability on an emotional degree, and the movie does lose a few of its efficiency every time screenwriter Will Soodik makes an attempt to transform sensation into clarification.

However what made Backrooms register so viscerally for me was how nostalgic parts of it felt. Parsons understands the peculiar, wistful wavelength of early-2000s dreamcore so intuitively that most of the pictures carry the unusual sensation of remembering one thing you by no means really skilled. A lot of these visions are additionally supplemented by the woozy, retro-digital synth rating he co-composed with Edo Van Breemen, which evoked the melancholy of Minecraft in some ways. And that ambiance suspended my disbelief totally and immersed me so utterly in Parsons’ uncanny creativeness that fixing the riddle of the Backrooms turned secondary to easily present inside this glitching mausoleum for late-capitalist interiors. 

This may increasingly look like an terrible lot of research for a movie whose lineage can in the end be traced again to {a photograph} of an empty room, however the undeniably distinct hypnotic expansiveness of the entire Backrooms Expertise™ hopefully justifies my indulgence. Horror periodically reinvents itself every time a brand new era discovers recent visible vocabularies for previous anxieties, and Parsons possesses a uncommon skill to translate the absurd and deeply unsettling mythology of the web world right into a cinematic language that feels totally his personal. The web, because it seems, is a terrifying place. Much more so for unsupervised and unsuspecting youngsters intoxicated by its infinite wonders, to by accident no-clip into oblivion. 

Backrooms releases in Indian theatres this Friday

Revealed – June 11, 2026 06:04 pm IST