Backrooms (2026)
Backrooms, the newest horror smash from A24, takes the eerie feeling of a lucid dream—or falling down a YouTube rabbit hole at 4 a.m.—and blows it up to cinematic proportions. Unsettling and mesmerizing in equal measure, it's a promising debut feature from first-time feature director Kane Parsons, who created the original web series upon which Backrooms is based.
The original Backrooms web series capitalized on the inherent creepiness of "liminal spaces" such as empty hallways, windowless office buildings, abandoned pools, etc. To meet the needs of a mainstream moviegoing audience, the film version has a similar aesthetic focus but this time with a narrative, though barely. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays furniture store owner Clark, who discovers a portal to another dimension in the basement of the store one night. When Clark eventually goes missing, his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), makes the journey into this extradimensional space, a labyrinthian series of rooms and offices that all seem a bit "off," in order to find and possibly save Clark.
Where recent horror releases have tried, often unsuccessfully, to capitalize on our current media landscape—see this year's podcast-themed horror film Undertone—Backrooms wisely retains the free-floating anxiety of its source material while providing just enough story to satisfy a 90-minute runtime.
In fact, Backrooms is at its best when it makes the least sense. In particular, the sequence when Clark first discovers this series of "backrooms" is fascinatingly, terrifyingly strange, like descending into someone's dream or some version of hell. When Backrooms does ultimately start to explain itself, the film gets a little less interesting, dispelling its own eerie, nonsensical spell.
Ejiofor and Reinsve, both Oscar nominees, are eminently watchable screen presences, and they're able to sell what are ultimately thinly-drawn characters. Reinsve, in particular, does her best with what feels like an underdeveloped "traumatic backstory," a seeming prerequisite for any A24 horror movie.
Between box-office sensation Obsession
and now Backrooms, it's an exciting time for original horror stories and
suggests promising things for young filmmaking voices such as Kane Parsons.
