YouTuber Kane Parsons makes a striking feature directing debut with Backrooms, a conceptual horror film scripted by Will Soodik and based on Parsons’ web series. The film blends influences from J-horror, found-footage horror, Severance, and The Rehearsal to create a bleak story about memory, identity, and being trapped inside distorted versions of reality. Rather than relying only on metaphor, the film also suggests that its uncanny title world may literally exist.
Set in the early 1990s, the story follows Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect and alcoholic who is separated from his wife and struggling to survive while managing a rundown discount furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. He appears in awkward pirate-themed television ads and lives with the sense that his life has shrunk into a humiliating performance. Renate Reinsve plays Mary, a gentle therapist and self-help audio-tape seller who carries deep emotional scars from an abusive childhood. Both performances are described as powerful and emotionally resonant.
Clark sleeps in his store among staged “bedroom” displays that mimic ordinary homes, adding to the film’s eerie sense of artificial life. In the basement, he discovers a hidden porous wall that opens into an endless labyrinth of “backrooms,” a vast secret network of strange, installation-like spaces that seem to contain fragments of different realities. Once inside, escape becomes increasingly difficult. Mary later enters the same space in search of Clark, deepening the tension and mystery.
The film’s visual atmosphere is a major strength. Production designer Danny Vermette and cinematographer Jeremy Cox combine physical sets with digital work to build a suffocating, yellow-tinted world lit like a decaying mall, office complex, or retail wasteland. The result is described as oppressive and unsettling, with a dead, crepuscular glow that makes the environment feel both familiar and deeply wrong. The setting intensifies the horror by turning anonymous commercial spaces into a vast, invisible city of fear.
As the film progresses, it becomes more ambitious and more frightening, escalating through jump scares, body discomfort, and quieter moments of dread. The review highlights how the movie uses its strange architecture and atmosphere to sustain fascination while gradually increasing the terror. Backrooms is presented as a distinctive and disturbing horror debut that turns a familiar internet concept into a full-scale cinematic nightmare.
Backrooms is scheduled for release on 28 May in Australia and on 29 May in the UK and US.
