It’s one thing to go from the small to the big screen, but it’s a whole other thing to do it with a built-in fanbase ready to devour whatever comes next. The reputation of the Backrooms precedes it, and with good reason, but now the question is: Can the A24-backed feature film live up to the promise of Kane Parsons’ original YouTube series? Thankfully, I’m here to tell you that the filmmaker has without a doubt got the stuff, with instincts far beyond that of a budding 20-year-old artist. Parsons already had four years of crafting this story under his belt, and that has turned him into a young master, with this story growing into a liminal masterpiece. Backrooms is a truly terrifying cinematic rabbit hole that takes its audience down a twisted and dread-filled path as cerebral in its horror as it is aesthetically pleasing in its design.
The movie focuses on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Clark, who finds an entrance to the Backrooms (via what fans will know as a null zone) in a wall in the basement of his furniture store. The scene is set immediately: This place is dangerous, terrifying, and we shouldn’t want to explore it. Parsons’ debut captures that unsettling feeling from the very start as opposed to maybe letting the audience marvel at the, well, marvel of the setting as an introduction to the concept. The sinister tone carries on throughout the film, with the heightened presence of the Backrooms themselves, much like any predator, feeling as though the walls are breathing as they stake out and track their prey.
Interestingly enough, though, that ominous and threatening tone isn’t only bolstered by the film’s evil central locale. Ejiofor’s Clark is a troubled and bitter man consumed by resentment, and his hatred infects the film just as much as the sickly yellow, moldy walls do. This is the first time you don’t care about a central character stuck in Parsons’ Backrooms — there have been several there prior to the events of the film — and it actually works to the movie’s advantage. It’s an interesting way for Parsons to revisit the world by giving us an irredeemable character’s perspective of what it means to exist inside it. Most viewers probably aren’t going to like that, and some will find an off-ramp from the entire thing because of it, but those of us who have spent time within this world will recognize the choice for what it is: a reflection of the reality that the Complex (as it’s known in the YouTube series) doesn’t discriminate. That truth — the notion that truly anyone is subject to the worst the Backrooms have to offer — is a terrifying prospect in and of itself.
The production design of this film, in a word, rocks. The Complex itself is stunning, and feels even more unsettling as a life-sized set, which hardly seems possible when Parsons is so good at building it virtually in Blender. That said, the Blender sequences — and there are several in the film for fans hoping that style would make its way to the big screen — do so much to anchor the movie’s horror foundation in a threat that feels both so far yet so close to our reality. They smartly reinforce the film’s ’90s timeline with a gritty shot-on-video texture that builds a layer of realism before becoming a vehicle to ramp up the horror elements to the max. Paired with smart camera angles and an innate sense of comfortability in crafting compelling images, Parsons shapes a visual language for the world of the Backrooms that feels both homey and horrifying in equal measure.
Parsons does an excellent job of playing to both sides with this film — those who know nothing about the Backrooms and its lore, and those who have an intimate knowledge of the groundwork Parsons started laying in 2022, so there’s plenty of story and lore to get their teeth into. There are tons of excellent intricate connections to the story Parsons began crafting in the web series, which is undoubtedly exciting for fans of the expanse of that groundwork. Like he’s done in the series by weaving in the technological bureaucracy of the Async Research Institute and the stories of real people noclipping into the nightmare world of the Backrooms, the film laces together the scientific side of the lore and the reality that comes with someone randomly entering this twisted endless world. How does that ordeal permanently alter that person’s psyche? Their relationship to memory? Their proximity to loneliness? It’s more than enough to satisfy existing fans, especially ones who are excited by Parsons continuing to build upon the world he’s working in, but it’s also absolutely intriguing enough to hook people with no experience in the overall concept.
That said, it doesn’t hold the hands of newcomers getting immersed in the world of the Backrooms for the first time. How the film goes about answering and not answering questions might end up being the most divisive part of its reception. By their nature, an audience will be receptive to answers handed to them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like to be or want to be challenged; in fact, many films in the mainstream these days don’t give their audiences that level of textual respect. But Parsons doesn’t just fill in the blanks for the sake of it, and he doesn’t give any details arbitrarily. Fans of his original series, like myself, will love that ambiguity and the promise of more discoveries to come. I’d like to think the greater viewership will see and appreciate that choice for what it is, but I fear easy viewing has placated us in recent years in a way that makes Parsons’ intentional gaps look like potholes and not details to uncover later. There’s so much potential for more here if you’re willing to let the story take you for the ride it wants you to go on, which means surrendering to the unknown until the narrative says otherwise; hopefully, audiences will be receptive to that vision.
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