By TRH Entertainment Desk
Kane Parsons transforms the viral internet phenomenon Backrooms into a chilling A24 horror film that combines psychological depth, unsettling atmosphere, and cinematic ambition, establishing the 20-year-old filmmaker as one of horror’s most promising new voices.
Mumbai, May 31, 2026 — A wrong place. Anxiety of a trap. A horror film finds its backdrop. The movie runs into high expectations of a big fanbase. The demands of mainstream cinema add to the pressure.
Kane Parsons is a master story teller. He crafts his script to the backdrop. He’s just 20. He delivers Backrooms that sets box office on fire. The horror strikes. Parsons shows that he can deftly thread needle with confidence.
The Backrooms began as a single eerie photograph. That was posted online. A yellowing, fluorescent-lit expanse of office carpet that seemed to go on forever. It spawned a creepypasta mythology. A viral found-footage YouTube series. Parsons himself behind the camera. Now, the film acquires the scale in the hands of A24 with producers James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins alongside him. They deliver a full theatrical feature.
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The premise is simple: a therapist (Renate Reinsve, quietly extraordinary) enters an otherworldly dimension after her patient, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner suffering a near-psychotic break following his divorce, vanishes through a portal hidden in his shop’s basement wall.
It is that basement. The infinite labyrinth beyond it. The Backrooms finds its story. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox (fresh from Osgood Perkins’ Keeper and the second-unit work on Longlegs) conjures a second-act sequence of such sustained, bone-deep dread that it stands as one of the most unsettling things one may see in a cinema.
The production design is hypnotic. Murky swimming pools. Tightening passageways. Dividing walls. No architect in his right mind would have drawn. As Seattle Refined’s Candice McMillan observed, “the macabre network of deserted office space devolves into absurdist chambers the deeper he travels,” and Clark, “self-imprisoned in this labyrinthian landscape, prefers to lose himself in a meaningless world rather than to find meaning in the real one.” It is, unexpectedly, a film as much about grief and dissociation as it is about monsters.
Those monsters — the entities of Backrooms lore — are where the film’s ambitions slightly outpace its execution. DiscussingFilm’s Andrew J. Salazar noted: “The film’s entities work better as interesting ideas than as freakishly terrifying ones.”
Parsons wisely keeps them at the periphery for much of the runtime. He leans instead on architecture and sound design to manufacture unease. When they do fully appear, the effect is more conceptually striking than viscerally frightening — a minor but real disappointment for devotees of the web series, where the implied horror of a half-glimpsed creature proved far more effective.
What Parsons gets absolutely right is his refusal to alienate newcomers at the altar of fan service. Critic Scott Mendelson wrote: “Backrooms refuses to pander to its fanbase at the expense of the uninitiated. It refuses to use its high-profile movie based on a thing your kids like existence as an excuse for mediocrity or to ignore the nuts and bolts of cinematic storytelling.”
The film’s period setting — 1990, a smart choice — allows for a found-footage VHS aesthetic that Parsons deploys sparingly and effectively. Backrooms is not a perfect film. As a feature debut, as an adaptation of internet folklore, and as a piece of sustained atmospheric horror, it is a genuinely impressive achievement. It demonstrates Kane Parsons has a career in cinema. And it may be well beyond the maze that made his name.
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