110 min | R | May 29, 2026 | A24
The kernel of a great idea, stretched past its breaking point. Kane Parsons has an eye for dread but not yet a feel for structure.
The Backrooms began as a creepypasta and a set of YouTube videos by a teenager named Kane Parsons. The idea is simple and genuinely unnerving. Reality has a basement. Step wrong and you fall out of the world into endless empty office space, buzzing fluorescent lights, damp carpet, no exit. Parsons makes his feature debut adapting his own viral series, and the kernel is still good. The problem is that a ninety-second video that runs on pure dread does not automatically become a hundred-and-ten-minute movie. The short form hid the seams. The feature exposes them.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a man trapped in the rooms, and he commits to the role’s misery. Renate Reinsve plays Dr. Mary Kline with cool intelligence. Both actors are better than the film around them, but the script hands them vague characters and stranded scenes, and even they cannot make the connective tissue work. Mark Duplass, Lukita Maxwell, and Finn Bennett fill out a cast that never settles into a consistent register. Some performances reach for naturalism. Others tip into the exact horror-movie pitch the material should avoid. The unevenness is constant and it keeps breaking the spell.
The craft is where Parsons shows real promise. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox renders the rooms with wide-angle dread and switches to grainy VHS for key stretches, and the spaces feel authentically wrong. Parsons co-scored the film with Edo Van Breemen, layering synths and pixelated noise into a soundscape that does most of the heavy lifting. When the film simply sits inside the environment, it works. The atmosphere is the achievement. The trouble is everything built on top of it. The middle act sags. The pacing stalls. The film keeps reaching for a plot its premise cannot carry.
There is a striking short film and a real visual sensibility buried in here. Parsons is twenty and he clearly has an eye and an instinct for fear. But atmosphere is not structure, and a feeling is not a story. The film mistakes its own mood for momentum and asks the audience to stay scared long after the scares have run out. The Backrooms works best as a place you glimpse and flee. Stretched to feature length, the dread thins into tedium. The idea deserved a sharper movie than the one it got.