Backrooms (2026)
If you’ve spent any part of your youth watching Creepy Pasta content and navigating corridors in first-person gaming, Backrooms is your movie. If you have to ask what Creepy Pasta is, change your ticket.
For the uninitiated: the Backrooms lore began with a single posted photo of an empty institutional space. Soul-sucking yellow walls. No windows. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like a dying conscience. Think decrepit Severance. YouTube creator Kane Parsons brought it to life with a series of shorts about an endless maze of mystery and dread. A24 then handed him the keys to write and direct the feature.
The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a man who discovers the Backrooms through a portal in the basement of a discount furniture store. He becomes obsessed. His therapist (Renate Reinsve) follows him in to see if the stories are real.
Backrooms alternates between art-house cinematography and found footage, and it nails its intended setting: anxiety. The corridors stretch into emptiness, punctuated by startling discoveries that border on the surreal. A seven-foot tall peg-leg pirate appears without explanation. Nothing is explained. That’s the point.
Ejiofor and Reinsve provide the film’s only real humanity. Without them, this could have been a student blender project. There were moments I instinctively reached for a mouse to move our tortured hero out of danger, and I mean that as a compliment to the immersion and a criticism of the storytelling. There is barely a story here, and what exists is largely random.
Some will call that the delight of Backrooms. I called it a long walk through someone else’s fever dream.
I love the horror of liminal spaces. The Shining. Us. Blade Runner. But Parsons asks the viewer to do too much of the heavy lifting. His visual instincts are undeniable, and he may well become one of the more innovative filmmakers of his generation. This film, though, is a calling card more than a destination.
This is a movie for people who speak fluent internet. Everyone else may find themselves wandering the same yellow corridors as Clark, wondering when a story begins.
Backrooms gets a 6 out of 10.
Jim Chandler is a morning radio host on Nashville’s Totally Hits 93.3 and a member of the Music City Film Critics Association.
Untitled Film Project 