Synopsis: After a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him.
Stars: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
Director: Kane Parsons
Rated: R
Running Length: 110 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Kane Parsons turns his viral Backrooms shorts into an unnervingly confident feature debut. Two committed Oscar nominees and a maze you can get lost in carry a thriller that trusts your imagination to do the heavy lifting.
From a 4chan Thread to A24
A few years ago, the scariest thing on the internet was a photo of an empty room. The Backrooms began as a single image in a 2019 4chan thread, an off-kilter shot of yellow walls and buzzing fluorescent light that someone handed a mythology. A 16-year-old named Kane Parsons turned it into a YouTube series now nearing 200 million views. He is 20 today, the youngest director in A24’s history, and his feature debut is here. If you have watched online creators keep landing in theaters lately, from Markiplier’s Iron Lung to Curry Barker’s Obsession, you know the bet: small, meticulous horror with a built-in fanbase and real money on the line.
Set in 1990, it follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave), a furniture salesman whose architect ambitions soured into a failing pirate-themed showroom and a nasty divorce. When flickering lights lead him to a slit in his basement wall, he phases through into the Backrooms, an endless maze of office carpet and sickly yellow light. He brings the discovery to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value), who dismisses it until she has to go looking for him there herself.
Two Pros, One Wild Premise
Two Oscar nominees headlining your debut is a strong calling card, and these are not relics coasting on old glory. Ejiofor and Reinsve choose their roles on purpose, so their presence tells you they saw something here. Both excel at playing a fractured psyche, and that commitment is why the dread works even when the movie barely lifts a finger to scare you. Reinsve keeps finding fresh corners of grief to inhabit. One day I would love to see her in a film where nothing awful happens to her. She has earned it.
Others get less to do. Mark Duplass (Safety Not Guaranteed) turns up as a mysterious observer whose scenes never quite justify themselves, a thread the movie keeps tugging without much payoff. Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) should carry more weight than they end up with, especially once the story drops them into real danger. You can feel more interesting characters underneath, and wish the script had given them room to breathe. That is a writing shortfall, not an acting one.
A Maze You Can Get Lost In
The premise only lands if you believe this impossible place exists, and the crew makes sure you do. Production designer Danny Vermette built more than 30,000 square feet of Backrooms across four soundstages, enough that the team printed daily maps so people would stop getting lost. He spent a month on the wallpaper alone, running 50 camera tests across 50 prints until the pattern read right on camera, because fans would catch it if it did not.
One centerpiece, nicknamed the Vertigo Room, climbs 40 stories of Escher-style stairs that lead nowhere. Vermette and Parsons even reverse-engineered the original 2003 photo that started all this, matching the camera, the geometry, and the shadows.
According to the production notes, Jeremy Cox shot on a Sony Venice with a Rialto rig so the camera can slip through tight corridors, alternating clean widescreen with handheld found footage that never wears thin. Mica Kayde’s costumes keep the era deliberately vague, an anytime that could be today or three decades back. The score by Parsons and Edo Van Breemen carries the retro unease fans recognize from the series, including the creepy liminal-music cut “Six Forty Seven,” while Eugenio Battaglia’s sound design lets benign noises sour into threats until one distant footstep is all it takes.
The Kid Delivers
What got me most is how many modes Parsons runs at once: found-footage jolts, psychological thriller, and the slow-burn drama of a therapist facing her own buried damage while trying to save a patient she first doubted. The Backrooms work as more than a haunted maze. They are a mirror, copying half-remembered rooms and eventually the people inside them, feeding on the same modern isolation that sends real people down internet rabbit holes hunting for meaning in static.
Clark and Mary are both coming apart, and the film is honest enough to suggest the only exit runs straight through the wounds that pulled them in. It asks for a few leaps of faith and feels sparse in places, but that emptiness is the point. It hands you the pieces and trusts you to assemble them.
It makes sense that a vision this strange found a home at A24, a studio with the patience to let an odd idea build instead of sanding down its edges. There is something genuinely new here, too: a fan-driven creation that grew up on Reddit threads and Discord servers, now reaching the multiplex with its inventor still steering.
Parsons has said more of this world is coming, and on the strength of this debut, I want all of it. With two terrific leads and a script that withholds as much as it reveals, Backrooms introduces a filmmaker worth following. And ignore the noise about whether a kid really directed this. He did, and he made it count. Find the door if you dare. Just know the place is mapping you while you map it.
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