"Backrooms"

 ☆☆☆☆

In the '50s there were nuclear-created monsters. In the '60s, the dread of other people. In the '70s there was the devil. The '80s had slasher movies. Every generation seems to have its own specific kind of horror film, so what does it say, I wonder, that audiences in the 2020s seem afraid of, well, themselves?

Earlier this year, the Japanese Exit 8 left a man stranded inside a Möbius strip of an empty subway, forced to reckon with his own mind. A few weeks ago, Obsession said the thing fear most is what you desire—you will be your own undoing. Now comes Backrooms, which uses weird, incomplete liminal spaces to stand in for the liminal space of the mind, the incomplete, always growing, never knowable space inside our own heads.

The movie is notoriously based on a set of YouTube videos in which a camera wanders around endless hallways, most of them covered in a sickly yellow wallpaper, and occasionally encounters very weird, sometimes scary and malevolent, things.

The movie takes that concept and builds on it, expands on it, takes it into areas that are different, new, unpredictable, and sometimes fulfilling, sometimes not. It also grafts a story on to the idea — well, at least one story, possibly two, maybe even more than that. As much as Backrooms is, on one level, a surprisingly effective and intriguing psychological thriller, on another it's an almost depressing beginning of a Hollywood "franchise," a movie whose success will almost certainly beget sequels and TV shows and spin-offs until the whole thing burns itself out. Even more than Obsession, Backrooms is a 21st century Blair Witch Project.

Fortunately, it's vastly superior to that overrated snoozefest. Writer-director Kane Parsons seems to have conceived of his original Backrooms videos as part of a broader, interconnected science-fiction story. That may well work for the short-form videos — I've only seen a few — but it is less successful here. The ultimate "reveal" at the climax of Backrooms is the least interesting part of the film.

The most interesting is the setup and the human story that writer Will Soodik and 20-year-old Parsons have created here. (If 20 years old seems awfully young to direct a movie, maybe it is — but Parsons displays unquestionable talent.) It focuses on Clark, played by Chiewetel Ejiofor, the struggling owner of a struggling furniture store in a seemingly empty part of Silicon Valley in the early 1990s.

Clark isn't happy. He's dealing with a lot, including the breakup of his marriage, which has led him to live in the store. He sees a therapist named Mary (Renata Reinsve), who's struggling a bit herself. Her self-help series isn't doing well, despite late-night TV ads. Her approach to therapy is that all we have to do to help ourselves is to walk through one of the many open windows in our minds.

One night, Clark hears some mysterious goings-on down in the basement of the furniture store. He investigates, and falls into a sort of Wonderland, though this one is lit not by a beautiful sunlight but by ugly fluorescent lighting, and its population isn't quite as zany as the creatures Alice found.

The best parts of Backroom are the ones that treat Clark as a modern-day Alice, unsure of what he has discovered, curious and adventurous. He returns from his first few excursions, urging others to help him explore — including Mary, who imagines she is prepared for what she might find. She's not.

No one is. The mysteries of the seemingly endless back rooms seem unwilling to reveal themselves. Until they do. And that's when the movie starts losing a lot of its edge. It threatens to turn into a low-budget cinematic Lost, answering questions both far too literally and also too obliquely. Fortunately, the movie ends before it goes too far off track, with a final set of images that is as confounding as the best of them.

The thing about Backrooms is that it defies explanation. Whatever explanation we create for it is going to be infinitely more interesting than anything the filmmakers can. Whether Parsons knows that remains to be seen. In the meantime, his debut effort is more engaging, more mysterious, more intriguing and potentially more revelatory about the shape of the human mind that Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. When a 20-year-old kid can go up against Steven Spielberg and win, you can bet that's a filmmaker to watch.

Viewed June 17, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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