Few filmmakers arrive as fully formed as Kane Parsons, whose feature debut Backrooms takes the collective nightmare of internet folklore and transforms it into something altogether more disturbing. His, is a horror film less interested in frightening its audience than in quietly dismantling their sense of reality.
From the opening moments, the film establishes a remarkably distinctive visual aesthetic. Those endless yellow corridors, flickering fluorescent lights, and impossibly repetitive architecture generate an atmosphere that is at once hypnotic and oppressive.
The knowledge that Parsons modelled these environments in Blender — a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite — before they were reconstructed as vast practical sets lends the film an added layer of uncanniness. The spaces feel architecturally impossible yet physically immediate, tangible enough that you can almost smell the stale air. It is rare for a horror film to achieve such a fully realised sense of place.
The premise is deceptively simple yet remarkably dense: a troubled and very recently divorced furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) stumbles into a bizarre liminal dimension, finding himself trapped in a reality where logic, time, and identity steadily dissolve. The Worst Person in the World star ,Renate Reinsve, plays the therapist drawn into that world after him.
Backrooms has little interest in resolution — uncertainty is the point and the dread it generates feels less like atmosphere than architecture. It is, beneath the horror, a film about isolation and meaninglessness, the backrooms functioning less as a setting than as a landscape of the mind.
The cast navigates this strange material with considerable skill. Ejiofor delivers one of his finest performances, stripping away the warmth that has defined much of his screen career to play a man consumed by rage — toward his ex-wife, toward the life they once shared, toward everything the backrooms seem determined to force him to confront.
Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell each contribute to the film’s unsettling emotional texture, never overplaying the material even as the story grows increasingly abstract — a collective restraint that proves essential to keeping the film grounded.
Most impressive of all is the sheer assurance of the direction. Backrooms never feels like a gimmick or an overextended YouTube project; it carries the conviction of a director with a fully formed artistic vision, synthesising found-footage terror, psychological horror, and philosophical science fiction into something that feels genuinely its own.
Disturbing, visually unforgettable, and intellectually ambitious, Backrooms is the kind of horror cinema that treats atmosphere and ideas as inseparable from spectacle. That Parsons has made the leap from teenager filming YouTube shorts to helming one of A24’s most compelling releases of 2026 is truly remarkable.
