‘Backrooms’ review: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve lose themselves in creepy, slow-burn horror

Dir: Kane Parsons. US. 2026. 110mins

In – or more accurately, behind – the basement of an auspicious California furniture store lies a hidden, sprawling labyrinth of unused storage rooms. Or is it a portal into another dimension which bends both time and space? Or is it an experiment into particle physics by a shadowy tech company? Or is it a doorway into a fevered mind, spiralling into the darkest reaches of one’s id? The true nature of the backrooms has been enthralling certain sections of the internet since a disquieting photo of an empty retail space appeared on a 4chan message board in 2019. Now, debut director Kane Parsons assuredly harnesses the creepy, mind-bending potential of this liminal concept, delivering an original horror that has both the scares and the smarts.

Careful to strike a balance between appealing to newbies and satisfying fans

That original photograph – of a vacant, impersonal but weirdly creepy shop space in Wisconsin taken in 2003 – kick-started a massive ‘creepypasta’ movement, inspiring people to share their own ‘backrooms’ photos (of seemingly innocuous places that inspire a feeling of dread) on sites like 4chan and Reddit, and create involved (often conflicting) backstories about this ominous, infinite space. Parsons’ impressive, digitally-crafted series of YouTube Backrooms shorts, the first of which went live in 2022 under the name Kane Pixels, have racked up millions of views, and were enough for A24 to tap the now 20-year-old Parsons to turn them into a feature.

This substantial built-in audience should turn out when Backrooms rolls out globally from May 29, although its R-rating in the US could prove a hurdle to accessing those all-important young adult fans. The presence of Chiwetel Ejiofor and international superstar Renate Reinsve, riding high after starring in Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord, could encourage a wider audience, and the film’s atmospheric marketing campaign (and the fact that Longlegs director Osgood Perkins serves as a producer) is likely to be a clarion call for horror fans, regardless of their familiarity with the original concept.

Indeed, Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodick (who has penned episodes of genre TV series Ash Vs Evil Dead and Westworld) are careful to strike a balance between appealing to newbies and satisfying fans. The fact that the backrooms are located in a furniture warehouse is an immediate easter egg – that first backrooms photograph was taken in a building that used to sell furniture – and there are plenty more nods to the lore.

The owner of that warehouse is Clark (Ejiofor) – named, perhaps, for his superman ego – a self-absorbed heavy drinker and failed architect who seems unable to take any responsibility for the fact that his business is dying and his marriage is over. Regular visits to therapist Mary (Reinsve), who has her own traumatic childhood backstory, don’t appear to be having any positive effect. That Mary prophesises the breaking of behavioural loops (her book is called ‘The Window Within’) is somewhat on the nose, as is a brief snippet from The NeverEnding Story used in a later scene.

When Clark falls (literally) into the backrooms that exist on the other side of his store’s basement wall, he finds his horizons well and truly expanded. He is initially wary of this maze of interconnected, architecturally impossible rooms either empty, or stacked with furniture, cardboard cutouts and the occasional stop sign. There is evidence, too, that he may not be alone in there. Yet Clark becomes obsessed with exploring and mapping this secret space, occasionally observed over scratchy CCTV by an anonymous viewer – later revealed to be Phil (Mark Duplass), an employee of the Big Brother-esque Async whose motives remain unclear here but are detailed in Parsons’ shorts. When Clark disappears, an initially disbelieving Mary follows him into the backrooms, only to discover the true extent of its horrors.

Much of the creeping dread of the backrooms comes from its emptiness, from what is not there, and Parsons avoids the temptation to overcomplicate things, sticking to this paired-back aesthetic. Excellent sound design hints at terrible things unseen, while Danny Vermett’s sparse production design and cinematography from Jeremy Cox work in tandem to render the core spaces like an abandoned office building: endless benign yellow walls; stained ceiling tiles; the insidious background hum of neon lights. Further on, there are sunken bathrooms and eerie housing estates; oddities strewn throughout – weirdly stacked furniture, doors in ceilings, shoes embedded in the floor, forced perspectives – nail that chilling sense of off-kilter familiarity. The fantastic, bombastic score from Parsons and Edo Van Breemen also does a great deal to fill in the blanks, utilising propulsive, often deafening beats with skittering tones and barely-audible throbs.

While Parson’s shorts were entirely digital, this production built a 30,000 sq. ft. layout of rooms, which gives a pleasing analogue texture to this 1990-set story. While the backrooms seem to exist outside of time and space – and, some fans hypothesise, may have a strange effect on both – the characters’ fashions, TVs and use of early model camcorders (plus a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it timestamp on CCTV footage) put the feature in the same timeframe as the short films. Within this environment, Ejiofor and Reinsve are excellent as two sides of the same coin; he is impulsive, angry and selfish, she is repressed, logical and caring. Their different experience of, and reactions to, the backrooms give the film its emotional core, and pushes the screenplay’s more cerebral ideas of memory, trauma and identity.

The rooms often look like bad copies of bad copies – a sofa embedded in a wall, a doorway at an impossible angle. That is, the film suggests, the nature of memory; every time we remember something, we alter the truth of it; the same event can be recalled (or even experienced) in myriad ways. There’s also an obvious AI analogy here too, the janky appearance of the rooms as if you asked an AI to replicate the same image 100 times. This imperfect, almost inhuman layering of reality is the essence of what makes the backrooms so terrifying, and Parsons nails that concept while leaving the film open to interpretation – and, it seems, the door open for more.