Backrooms (2026) – Review

Well, I guess the YouTube era of horror is now in full swing. Hot on the heels of other such success stories as Mark Edward (Iron Lung) Fischbach and Curry (Obsession) Barker, it’s now time for Kane Parsons to take his shot reconfiguring an entire genre into strange new areas.
Infamous for his creepypasta web series (creepypasta now being a general term for horror content posted onto the internet), Backrooms, Parsons has already explored unfeasibly eerie new surroundings in the realms of liminal horror, but now he’s making the jump to the big screen to see if he can wring out the same amount of existential dread out of endless, yellow, wallpaper than he did online. Expect long silences, unsettling feng shui and the threat of unimaginable, unseen, eldritch horrors driving people insane as we enter the Backrooms and (hopefully) experience a brand new horror phenomenon.

Struggling furniture store owner, Clark, is also struggling to make sense of his life. While Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire opens to precious little business, his alcoholism and hair trigger temper has contributed to his recent divorce and while he now has resorted to sleeping in his store, he’s trying to work through his issues by visiting therapist Mary Kline. However, while she helps him to try and find new paths to travel rather than continue the self destructive habits that’s driven him thus far, Mary has a sizable amount of trauma to work through herself thanks to having a childhood burdened with a mother with a severe mental illness.
However one night, while grumbling about the fluctuating electrics in his store, Clark stumbles upon a portal in the wall of the lower floor of his sales area and ends up in the Backrooms, a seemingly endless maze-dimension of confounding architecture, fairground funhouse logic and a whole lot of piss-yellow wallpaper. Fascinated with his discovery, Clark’s confusion first turns to excitement as he explores his new environment, and then to fear when he finds eviendence that he’s not alone among the endless corridors and rooms.
Discovering that Mary doesn’t quite believe him, Clark ropes his two employees, Kat and Bobby into helping him document the Backrooms, but after disaster unsurprisingly follows, the therapist gets a cryptic message on her answer machine from Clark saying he won’t be returning. Deciding to go to Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire herself to do a wellness check, Mary is about to discover that not only was Clark right, but there’s something about this disorganised, distorted dimension that makes a perverse amount of sense to someone whose dreams and accomplishments lay in ruins. As Mary finds herself surrounded by malformed furniture and mind searing decor choices, she soon discovers that the life that dwells within the Backrooms is just as unpredictable as the floor plan.

One thing that a lot of horror films have failed to grasp is realising that Lovecraftian feel of something being so alien and unimaginable to the human mind, it drives the average human psyche completely bonkers just trying to process it. Obviously, it’s not something I’d actually want filmmakers to harness (cinema prices are high enough without having to worry about dispersing sanity), but to create a facsimile of that sense of dangerous unreality has become like a horror holy grail to me rather than cheap jump scares and easy-to-explain monsters. Obviously David Lynch was a dab hand at it and such filmmakers as Robert Eggers and Ari Aster have managed to tantalisingly scratch the surface of somehow realising the unrealisable as they create genuine dread and unease by breaking narrative rules and expected conventions. While Kane Parsons’ Backrooms never quite nails that sweat inducing horror that should come with the brain twisting deconstruction of reality, it pays off with extreme weirdness and some of the best set design you’ll see all year.
For a film that’s seemingly being advertised everywhere and is getting quite the sizable release, it’s worth noting how much Backrooms doesn’t seem to give a fuck about being accessible to a general audience and there’s a good chance a lot of the film’s more subtler scares or themes may pass clean over the head of someone wanting more simple to understand fare – or at the very least, a good “boo” every now and then. However, tying in the notion of a jumbled, alternate reality that looks like the Minions have be put in charge of one of those house renovations shows, to trauma and psychological issues proves to be something of a master stroke.

Spending time within all the counter-intuitive angles, nonsensical features and furniture randomly jutting out of the walls and floor, proves to be a strangely fascinating experience and the fact that such a malformed reality may make more sense to someone whose normal, buttoned-down life has resently come apart at the seams proves to be worryingly prescient. Chiwetel Ejiofor goes big as Clark, who uses the endless expanse of shitty carpet and kitsch furniture to escape his own issues, while Renate Reinsve goes subtle as she struggles with her own inner trauma born from her complex childhood. But while these two floundering souls attempt to make sense of a universe that’s as unpredictable as a Christopher Walken speaking engagement, Parsons really turns up the weird in the final third, piling on more questions and bizarre sights while remaining refreshingly steadfast about not delivering any real answers.
To be honest, the reveal of what’s lurking throughout the endless rooms may perplex some and outright turn away others, but the notion that the Backrooms and everything in them are malformed like a slightly incorrect memory proves to be a fascinating notion. We frequently see warped versions of items seen in characters homes or the store scattered all throughout and that also means that there’s also people existing in there that prove to be an imperfect copy of someone someone else once knew. Of course, the fairground mirror representation of these beings result in yet more surreal imagery and a twisted dinner scene feels like something that could have popped right out of a colourised version of Eraserhead, but some may find the towering, stumbling brute that stalks the various halls just too strange to be effective scary. However, Backrooms ends up having something of a secondary effect as it ends up being far more creepy to mull over its various themes, messages and narrative hints after the fact than it is while you’re actually watching them. After all, what’s scarier than the notion that normal life can get so chaotic, somewhere like the Backrooms can start to feel like home.

Destined to exist on either a liminal double bill with Exit 8, or a tribute to warped mirror images of society with Jordan Peele’s Us, Backrooms is plainly disinterested by playing by any conventional rules. But while some will struggle to grasp what Kane Parsons is shooting for, just for sheer innovative set design and out and out weirdness alone, this is one film that’ll rent infinite space in the old noggin.
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