MOVIE REVIEW – Backrooms turns Kane Parsons’ internet-born nightmare into an A24 horror film, and not just any horror film: this is not a conventional scare machine, but a yellowing, fluorescent, psychological maze where fear does not jump at you, but slowly walls you in. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a broken-down furniture-store owner who literally slips through the wall of reality and finds, on the other side, everything that makes the internet’s abandoned in-between spaces so unnerving. This will not be an easy ride for everyone, but for viewers who like horror that hums, decays, and scratches at the edge of consciousness instead of simply screaming, Backrooms is a serious trip.

Backrooms does not begin like a standard horror movie, which is already good news. There is no instant group of disposable teens, no cheap demon summoning, no suburban door creaking open while a sound engineer loads the shock effect. Kane Parsons’ film is far more insidious. It centers on Clark, a man whose life already looks like something left behind in the back storage area of a discount furniture store after the clearance sale ended.

Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor with almost pathological inner tension, is a divorced, bitter, declining furniture-store owner. His shop, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, sounds like the shared offspring of a terrible local TV commercial and a nervous breakdown. Clark advertises cheap, ugly furniture in a pirate costume while, in truth, he is rotting inside the display window of his own life. He sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, played by Renate Reinsve, and their sessions involve role-playing exercises in which they reenact his anger and humiliation over being thrown out by his wife.

The film’s true fall begins when Clark tries to fix the store’s terrible lighting, feels drawn to a wall, and simply passes through it. On the other side, there is no Narnia, no orderly afterlife, no neatly explained sci-fi dimension, but a seemingly endless space of empty, musty, yellowing rooms that resemble both a cleared-out, rotting version of his own store and a hell designed by the god of mediocre commercial real estate as punishment. Mustard-yellow walls, dirty carpets, rectangular fluorescent panels, rooms opening into rooms, holes, passageways, occasional stacks of furniture, piles of laundry, and the sensation that this whole place is not somewhere, but somehow behind us.

The Internet Nightmare Finally Becomes A Language

What makes Backrooms distinctive is that it does not merely adapt an internet creepypasta; it tries to turn the way that creepypasta thinks into cinema. The Backrooms myth began with a disturbing image, a 4chan post, and the collective online imagination, before Kane Parsons’ YouTube shorts gave it a real audiovisual body. Endless empty offices, yellow walls, bad lighting, and a sense of spatial dislocation did not build a traditional monster mythology, but an aesthetic: the terror of abandoned, transitional spaces.

That aesthetic works because it does not say that something is hiding in the dark. It says something worse: even in the light, there is nothing, and something is still wrong. The yellow rooms of Backrooms are not Gothic castles, demonic caves, or blood-painted corridors. They are spaces that should not exist, yet feel far too familiar. A cleared-out office, an abandoned store, a hotel floor where you stepped out of the elevator at the wrong door, a hallway where every corner leads to more of the same. This kind of horror does not leap into your eyes. It crawls under your sense of space.

Parsons is strongest when he refuses to over-explain this world. The film does not rush to hand us a rulebook for how the Backrooms work, does not build a ten-minute exposition dump about how this dimension tore away from reality, and does not surrender the story to laboratory charts. Instead, we feel along the walls with Clark, listen to the electrical hum, watch the carpet, shadows, strange room connections, and the oppressive sense that the place is not merely endless, but deliberately refusing to release him.

The film’s kinship with Eraserhead, Skinamarink, Inland Empire, and, in a certain sense, the empty corridors of The Shining is hard to miss. This is not a matter of direct story imitation, but of a very specific sensation: images beginning to misbehave. Backrooms does not so much tell a nightmare as design a space in which the viewer’s brain starts producing dread on its own.

Chiwetel Ejiofor Holds The Yellow Hell Together

Chiwetel Ejiofor is an excellent choice for Clark because the film badly needed someone who could do more than react to weirdness; it needed an actor who could give human weight to an abstract nightmare. Clark is not a sympathetic hero in the conventional sense. He is bitter, sliding into alcohol, wounded, and unable to understand his own collapse, though he carries it in every inch of his body. What works in Ejiofor’s performance is that Clark is not simply afraid. He is searching for meaning. For him, the Backrooms are not only a maze to survive, but a warped chance to finally give shape to his own disintegration.

That search gives the film its emotional center. Clark seems to hope that if he goes deep enough into this endless, ugly space, somewhere inside it he will find not only a monster, but an explanation. Why did his life become this? Why did he end up in a tacky furniture store, dressed as a pirate, advertising his own failure? Why did anger become his only working emotional language? Backrooms does not always answer these questions cleanly, but because of Ejiofor, we keep feeling that for Clark the maze is not merely an external location, but an inner map.

Renate Reinsve, as Dr. Mary Kline, provides a quieter, more distant counterweight. The therapy scenes are not conventional psychological explanation inserts, but part of the film’s larger question of reality. The role-play in which Clark restages his rage and grievances may seem slightly artificial at first, but later it folds neatly into the film’s central idea: what if identity itself is just another room we keep furnishing with the same bad pieces?

In its best moments, the film does not separate Clark’s mental state from the physics of the Backrooms. The walls, lights, passages, and distorted figures all seem made from the same damaged inner material as Clark’s life. That is what makes Backrooms more than a simple internet adaptation. The question is not what is around the next corner. The question is why we feel as though we have already been there.

Fear Here Hums, Glows, And Refuses To Entertain

Parsons’ direction is strongest as atmosphere. The sound design is industrial, cosmic, and irritatingly precise: buzzing lights, distant vibrations, muffled hollows, and noises moving through space that are difficult to identify. This film is not competing in the jump-scare Olympics, and that is one of its major virtues. Backrooms works slowly and stubbornly. It is like the sound of a badly placed refrigerator: at first it annoys you, and an hour later you are certain it is trying to talk.

The visual world is equally strong. Yellowish walls, moldy-looking carpets, poorly lit rooms, and repeating spaces create a monotonous kind of dread that is rarely flashy, but highly effective. The film is frightening not because it shoves a new horror into your face every minute, but because it twists normality half a degree out of place. The space is both everyday and impossible. That tiny displacement is more unsettling than a digital monster loudly jumping into frame.

There are monsters, of course. Parsons does not remain entirely in the realm of suggestion, and he occasionally reveals distorted, tormented figures, including a huge demonic version of Cap’n Clark and human wrecks that look as if multiple faces have been crumpled into the same skull. These figures are not always explained creatures, but visual wounds. They are frightening not because we know what they are, but because they sit too close to what we might become if we stayed long enough in a place that reflects everything except an exit.

This type of horror, however, will not be a patient friend to everyone. Anyone expecting conventional, plot-driven scares with lots of twists and clearly defined rules may easily be frustrated. Backrooms does not always want to satisfy. It prefers to leave things open, suspended, delayed, and it forces the viewer to endure uncertainty. That is both its strength and its limitation. As atmosphere, it is extremely strong; as classic storytelling, it is much airier.

It Gives No Exit, Only Another Corridor

The greatest achievement of Backrooms is that it never feels like a mere YouTube expansion. Kane Parsons does not simply stretch his internet idea to feature length; he tries to preserve, at cinematic scale, its disturbing, shapeless, irregular nature. That is a risky decision, because the big screen often demands cleaner arcs, stronger dramatic anchors, and clearer endpoints. Parsons does not fully give in to that pressure, and the film remains genuinely strange because of it.

That is not a flawless choice. The film sometimes trusts atmosphere to carry too much, and there are moments when the viewer could reasonably want a stronger narrative anchor or a more sharply developed character arc. The mystery does not always deepen; sometimes it merely extends, and the world of the Backrooms occasionally comes dangerously close to repeating its own effect. Yet even in those weaker passages, there is something stubborn, cold, and memorable about it.

The film works because its fear feels very current. It is not only afraid that monsters live behind the wall, but that there is no center behind the world. That our lives are a sequence of badly lit, repeating rooms where every door leads to another version of the same place. That a capitalist wreck of a furniture store, therapy, an internet horror myth, and personal collapse can all end up in the same empty yellow space. That idea is strong enough to keep the film lingering even when not every scene lands.

Kane Parsons’ feature debut is therefore not perfect, but it is a serious warning shot: internet horror can become real cinema if filmmakers do not merely quote it, but understand its language. Backrooms does not explode in the viewer’s face. It stays in the head like the hum of a fluorescent light behind a badly closing door. Not everyone will love it, but those who fall into it may find every empty corridor a little more suspicious afterward.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-