Backrooms

I want to be upfront with you right from the top on this one. I really, really wanted to love Backrooms. This was one of my most anticipated watches of the year, and by the time the credits rolled I was sitting there thinking, it’s good. It’s definitely good. But I can’t sit here and tell you it’s great, and I can’t tell you it blew me away. So keep that in mind as we go, because there’s a lot here I admired, and there’s a fair bit that just didn’t land for me. And I think my own preparation might have been part of the problem, but we’ll get to that.

From Bedroom YouTube to A24 History

First, a bit of context, because the story behind this movie is honestly wilder than the movie itself. Backrooms is the feature debut of Kane Parsons, the YouTube creator known as Kane Pixels, and this kid is 20 years old. The film was announced back in 2023, with A24 distributing alongside Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment and 21 Laps, and James Wan and Shawn Levy attached as producers. That is a serious roster of names standing behind a teenager. And here’s a detail I love: Oz Perkins, the guy behind Longlegs and The Monkey, came aboard as a day-to-day mentor to Parsons during the 30-day shoot up in Vancouver. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, Renate Reinsve as Doctor Mary Kline, Mark Duplass as Phil, Lukita Maxwell as Kat, and Finn Bennett as Bobby. And the results speak for themselves. Produced for just $10 million, it’s grossed more than $330 million worldwide, becoming the highest grossing film in A24’s history, and Parsons became the youngest director ever to helm a number one box office film globally. Off a $10 million budget. That’s not a hit. That’s a phenomenon.

Now, my own road into this one was a bit unusual. The trailer was the very first exposure I’d ever had to anything Backrooms. Total blank slate. But when I mentioned it to a friend, it turned out she knew everything, the whole Kane Pixels channel, all the lore, and she sent me a link to a deep dive playlist, nearly two hours of his videos, all in chronological order. And I loved it. That liminal, disorienting feeling of not knowing where anything is or what’s going on, I found it very, very cool. Coming to it completely fresh, it actually reminded me of Severance on Apple TV, that same unsettling office-space wrongness, even though Kane’s stuff came at it from a totally different angle. And the thing that impressed me before I’d even pressed play on the film is that Parsons kept everything connected. He promised the movie would sit in strict continuity with his viral YouTube series, taking place only a few years after those videos, and that’s exactly what you get. He wasn’t throwing his own world away to go Hollywood. He built on it.

And the opening of this movie is where that continuity absolutely sings. I felt like I was straight back inside those YouTube videos. The Async logo, that steadicam atmosphere, the researcher in the yellow suit running through those endless rooms, it all came flooding back. It almost feels like Parsons turning to camera and saying, hey, for everyone who watched my channel, here’s a quick refresher. Remember this. It’s still got that same creeping vibe: what’s behind every corner, taken super slowly, dimly lit hallways, something blurred out in the distance that doesn’t resolve until you’re right on top of it, and then you’re thinking, what the hell is this? This doesn’t make sense. And I really liked the transition he pulls off. The movie opens in that rustic, old-school VHS styling straight off his channel, and then once we hit the title card it emerges into crisp, high definition filmmaking. He even threads his original audio from the YouTube era through the early stretch of the film. It’s a lovely piece of connective glue between the two worlds, the bedroom-YouTube world and the Hollywood-budget world. Same philosophy, bigger palette.

Falling Through the Wall

Then we’re into the real world, which is something the YouTube series never really gave us. Those videos were claustrophobic by design, all fixed cameras and found footage. Here we meet Clark, and poor old Clark is a man thrown to the floor by life. Separated from his wife, sleeping in his own furniture showroom, working through it all with his therapist. And there’s a detail I latched onto: the walls of Clark’s place are covered in architectural drawings and world-building artwork, and we find out he wanted to be an architect before he ended up selling furniture. And my brain immediately went, hang on. The Backrooms needs to build rooms. What is it using to build them? Is it pulling from Clark’s head? I might be completely wrong, but the film keeps feeding that theory. Furniture piled up in those classic yellow rooms mirroring his business, a parrot on the ground straight out of his TV ad, a crutch on the floor from the same ad. The Backrooms never gets things quite right when it reproduces stuff, and there’s a beautiful scene where Clark explains it to Mary: ask someone to draw a dog who’s never seen a dog, because the devil’s in the details. That is exactly how this world operates, and it’s exactly how it played in the YouTube videos. When Clark falls through that crack in the wall after the fuse box plays up, completely shocked, surrounded by stacked furniture under those fluorescent lights, the film is on point. Although I’ll flag one big lore change: Clark seems able to move between the Backrooms and the real world through the wall itself, which we never saw in the videos. That’s brand new territory.

On the performances, this is where the film is genuinely strong. Chiwetel Ejiofor is brilliant in basically everything he touches. He’s an Oscar nominee for 12 Years a Slave, and here he gets to play both the broken, everyday Clark and something far stranger once the Backrooms has had him for a while, because Clark has clearly been down there so long he’s completely lost his mind in that other world. Renate Reinsve I’ll come back to. And then there’s Lukita Maxwell, who I’ve been watching on Shrinking on Apple TV for the last few years. That’s honestly the only thing I’d ever seen her in, so I was very keen to see how she’d go, and she was amazing. If you haven’t seen Shrinking, by the way, that’s your homework. Harrison Ford doing the best comedic work of his later career. On the flip side, Mark Duplass is wasted here. One very short scene. The guy who co-created The Morning Show and made those wonderful little Duplass brothers indies deserves more to chew on than that.

Where It Stumbles

Reinsve’s Mary is where the movie both picks up and stumbles for me. When she goes looking for Clark, finds the store, and discovers the entrance, that’s when things got interesting. And I had a theory running the whole time. Those flashbacks to her mother, who always seemed so paranoid: I got the strong feeling her mother had encountered the Backrooms in some way, which would explain why Mary handles the place better than anyone. She soaks it in, works it through in her head, deals with it. There’s one gorgeous shot from the mother’s lounge room where the camera just pans down, and down, and down, and every room changes the deeper we go. That shot alone tells you the mother’s story. But here’s my problem: the flashback scenes themselves just didn’t earn their place for me. I don’t understand why we needed that much of it, and it’s part of a bigger pacing issue. Because I found the pacing extremely slow. I was hoping for it to kick into gear and put me on the edge of my seat, and instead whole stretches felt like the movie was treading water. I understand what Parsons was doing, bringing his YouTube world into the film so newcomers didn’t have to go digging, but for me, it dragged. And my other real disappointment is Async. I was hoping for a proper deep dive into the Async Research Institute, the company behind all of this, because we never got enough of it on YouTube either, and I wanted this film to pull back that curtain rather than just watching unlucky people fall through portals. The final 14 or 15 minutes give us a bit more Async, but it just wasn’t enough to hold my interest. That’s the movie I wanted, and it’s not quite the movie I got.

Some connective tissue before we land this. The comparison I can’t escape is Obsession, because a week before Backrooms, I watched Obsession knowing absolutely nothing, and it blew me away. And the parallel is almost spooky. Obsession was made by 26-year-old Curry Barker, who also got his start on YouTube, grossed more than $370 million globally, and cost $750,000 to produce. Two YouTube kids, two micro-budgets, two of the biggest hits of the year. But that contrast is exactly why I think my viewing experience suffered. I went into Obsession blind and it floored me, and I went into Backrooms after a two-hour deep dive, knowing precisely what everything was going to be. If you want more Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World is essential viewing, and she picked up an Oscar nomination for Sentimental Value. She’s one of the most exciting actresses working right now. And if you finish this film wanting more Kane Parsons, he’s also the creator of the mystery thriller web series The Oldest View. That’s sitting on YouTube right now, for free.

So, final thoughts. This definitely isn’t for everybody. I’d class it as a pigeonhole film, a smaller group of people who will properly connect with it, and that’s fine. I’m glad I waited for digital rather than the cinema. I wouldn’t really call it a horror, either. It’s an unease machine more than a scare machine. And here’s my strongest piece of advice: if you haven’t touched the YouTube videos, do not do the deep dive first. Go in completely fresh. I think you may enjoy this a lot more than I did, because the discovery is the whole game here, and I’d already discovered it all. As for the future, Backrooms 2 is already in development at A24, and honestly, I’m not 100 percent keen on that idea. But I am still hugely impressed by Kane Parsons, and I’m excited to see what he builds next. This time, I’m staying well to the side and going in as fresh as possible. There’s also an extended version, the Everything Must Go Edition, released in theaters with around 15 minutes of extra screen time as a post-credit scene, so the lore-hungry among you have somewhere to go.

But look, that’s just how Backrooms landed for me, and I know part of that is on me and my two-hour homework session. Entertainment is subjective, and a film that felt like treading water to me might be the most immersive thing you see all year. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay.