Backrooms Finds the Door, Loses the Way Out

Kane Parsons announces himself as a major filmmaking talent with a first two-thirds of pure, sustained dread, only to watch his screenplay lose its nerve just when the psychology it built so carefully was about to pay off.

By MIGUEL MATEO | MAY 30, 2026

For a while, Backrooms had me ready to call it a horror masterpiece. Kane Parsons, adapting his own viral creepypasta series for his feature debut, does something I did not expect from a twenty-year-old working his first studio budget. He builds a place, not just a plot. The furniture store basement that opens onto an endless, humming, fluorescent-lit nowhere becomes as much a character as anyone on screen, and for a long stretch the film earns every comparison to The Shining that I am sure it has already collected. This is a movie about a setting that thinks and breathes and slowly closes its hand around you, and I have not felt that kind of environmental dread at the movies in a long time.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the other reason this works as well as it does. As Clark, a furniture store owner whose grip on reality frays the longer he wanders these endless rooms, Ejiofor plays the unraveling with real precision, never tipping into camp even as the character's psyche comes apart in increasingly extreme ways. It is a performance built on control, which makes its slow loss all the more unsettling to watch, and the film is smart to keep circling back to him as its center even as the mythology around him expands.

The production design is the film's true achievement, and it is not close. Every hallway, every identical yellowed room, every hum of the lighting rig does the work that a lesser horror film would outsource to jump scares. Parsons, who came up building this world alone on YouTube, clearly understands better than almost anyone working right now that atmosphere is not set dressing, it is the argument. If there is any justice, this is the kind of achievement that gets remembered when awards season starts handing out below the line nominations.

Where the film loses me is the therapist. Renate Reinsve, an actress who has been extraordinary in nearly everything I have seen her in, gives Mary a haunted childhood backstory that the screenplay clearly means to matter, and then simply never returns to it with any weight. It is a strange choice to spend real time building a psychological wound for a character and then leave it sitting there unclaimed, and it is the first sign that Will Soodik's script is more confident setting up ideas than following through on them. It is not Reinsve's fault, but this ends up being the performance of hers I have connected with least, mostly because the film never gives her the second half of the equation she was clearly promised.

That same imbalance defines the ending, and it is where the whole film comes apart. Everything Parsons spends an hour patiently earning, the dread, the psychology, the sense that Clark's unraveling has real stakes, gets rushed through in a final stretch that trades earned payoff for gestures at meaning. The Lynchian turn the film reaches for in its closing minutes wants the ambiguity of a filmmaker like David Lynch without doing the structural work that makes Lynch's ambiguity feel inevitable rather than arbitrary, and the difference between the two is the difference between an ending that haunts you and one that just shrugs.

I left Backrooms disappointed, but disappointed in the specific way you only feel when a film has shown you it was capable of much more. Parsons has the eye and the instincts to be one of the defining horror filmmakers of his generation, and Ejiofor gives him a performance worthy of that ambition. I just wish the script had trusted its own foundation instead of rushing past it, because the movie sitting inside the first two-thirds of Backrooms was something close to great, and it never should have let that go.

Rating: ★★★ out of ★★★★★
Now in theaters

Directed by Kane Parsons | Written by Will Soodik | Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell