******SPATIAL SPOILERS!******
Every so often, I like to do random image searches on my computer for liminal spaces. Images of deserted spaces between destinations; empty corridors, a bus depot late at night, abandoned offices, warehouses, etc. For some reason, I find the solitude eerie, yet oddly tranquil. Having worked retail for (too) many years in a former vocational life, I’m quite familiar with desolate spaces lit with dull, buzzing, fluorescent lights. Apparently, so is young filmmaker Kane Parsons, who created a YouTube channel & series relating to that very subject. To be honest, I haven’t seen any videos/shorts from his channel, since I was hoping to see his feature film “Backrooms” (2026) without too many preconceptions.
Well, it’s been a few months since the movie debuted, and the media buzz has been so persistent that I couldn’t help but see images and whole scenes from the movie via internet osmosis. It’s become a phenomenon. Regardless, spoilers don’t ruin a movie for me. If surprise is a movie’s strongest selling point, then it’s usually a one-trick pony without much staying power. There has to be substance behind the surprise. With a screenplay by Will Sootik (“Westworld,” “Ash vs the Evil Dead”) and a cast led by high-profile British Oscar-nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Serenity,” “The Martian”) and Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”), I had an overall sense of the movie based on the buzz, yet “Backrooms” surprised me more with its depth and introspection than its jump-scares.
Having recently cancelled my HBOMax subscription (that’s a whole other column), I decided to rent “Backrooms” via YouTube instead. This was fitting, since YouTube is where director Parsons’ journey with “Backrooms” apparently began…
“Backrooms” (2026)
The movie opens with first-person video footage recorded in June of 1990, as a lone researcher (Avan Jogia) with the Async Research Institute documents being lost inside a series of extra-dimensional liminal spaces called “the backrooms.” Inside the backrooms are bizarre, half-formed pieces of furniture and other oddly recreated everyday objects. Soon the panicked researcher is killed by an unseen entity. His footage is watched by observers on a video monitor.
Note: As a Gen Xer, I can vouch that the low-resolution, early 1990s video is accurate, though I’m glad the entire movie wasn’t shot in this found-footage, ‘Blair Witchy’ format. Seeing a modern movie shot entirely in low-res, shaky-cam VHS video doesn’t work for my tired old eyes.
We then meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect and owner of Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture store in San Jose, California, as he attempts to record a commercial dressed as a pirate–with faux peg leg and stuffed parrot.
Note: Our protagonist Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is deeply resentful of his wife, who ran out on him due to his alcoholism and temper. What’s refreshing about Clark is that he’s not on a path to redemption nor is he about to become a superhero; he’s really seeking validation that his currently miserable life is okay, because it’s just how “he’s wired.” He doesn’t want to change and become a ‘better’ person.
With the assistance of his young assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), Clark struggles to record a TV commercial, which is an exercise in humiliation. Worse, the commercial is recorded during store hours, yet no one’s there to notice.
Before we meet Clark’s therapist Mary, we see her in a flashback as a young girl (Ember Ambrose) dealing with her own trauma, after her childhood home is demolished and her emotionally disturbed mother (Krista Kosonen) is institutionalized.
Note: It was hinted (for me, at least) that Mary’s mother might’ve been someone who’d seen “the backrooms” herself, which may have fueled her paranoia and insanity. It also aligns with Mary’s own fear of decaying, vacated spaces, after her childhood home was condemned.
The adult Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) in a therapy session with Clark. Mary role plays as Clark’s wife, whom he still resents, and accuses her of stifling his architectural ambitions to attend law school, refusing to take responsibility himself.
Note: A nice performance from Renate Reinsve, and we’ll see her cool objectivity slowly erode later on as Mary herself confronts the impossible firsthand. On a personal note, the movie’s early 1990s period detail is spot-on. In fact, I still have that same exact halogen lamp seen on Mary’s desk, which I received as an housewarming gift from an ex-boss of mine back in 1992. It’s on my home office desk today.
Unable to go home, Clark sleeps on a store display bed, and watches a display TV. When the power glitches on the TV, he goes downstairs to the breaker box, where two mysterious red switches appeared earlier. He then notices a glowing slit in the wall…
Note: As we see in both versions of “Dawn of the Dead” (1978/2004) and in “Backrooms,” there is a certain fantasy element with sleeping overnight in a department store, or in a shopping mall. Having that wide open space all to yourself, as well as having free rein in a place usually reserved for business. I remember from my retail management days seeing various customers ‘try out’ the store’s display beds, even though we didn’t sell mattresses or beds; only bedding. Perhaps they were indulging some part of that store sleepover fantasy. As an employee, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the store and go home.
Clark finds the glowing slit in the wall leads into a strange, extra-dimensional network of liminal spaces, with oddly stacked piles of piles of furniture, misspelled signs, automated greeters in many languages, and familiar yet bizarre recreations of everyday items…
Note: The movie’s production designer, Danny Vermette, does Oscar-quality work in this film; nearly everything in the Backrooms is familiar, yet surrealistic–like a furniture warehouse managed by Salvador Dali. Vermette does incredible things with within the limitations of the movie’s $10 budget (which is what “Star Wars” cost in 1977 dollars, which is closer to $56 million today).
Clark hears someone else in the Backrooms, and he’s soon finds himself being chased. He manages to find the portal and escape back into his store. He later uses colored tape to mark the perimeter of the portal’s location at both ends. Meanwhile, a surveillance camera leads to monitors back at Async, under the watchful eye of a technician named Phil (Mark Duplass).
After several nights of exploring the Backrooms, Clark is late to his therapy session with Mary. Operating on very little sleep, Clark tries to describe the Backrooms, and even makes a map, but Mary is coolly skeptical, since he sounds raving mad. Before storming out, he promises to show her proof, and says she’ll owe him a “big f**king apology.”
Note: Another suggestion that Clark is transposing the resentment he feels towards his wife onto Mary, as demonstrated by his barely-contained hostility with her, particularly after various therapy sessions where Mary role-plays as his wife.
To sate Mary’s disbelief, Clark goes to see Kat and Bobby for help. He offers to pay them overtime if they help him investigate the Backrooms. They suit up and get the camera…
Note: This has ‘BAD IDEA’ written in in bold caps all over it, kids…
With Bobby documenting everything with the video camera, Clark takes them to his taped-off portal, and they carefully enter. Once inside the Backrooms, they anchor Bobby with a tether line onto a bed as he descends down a steep corridor into a smelly, trash-filled room. Bobby is then killed by an unseen monster, and all hell breaks loose. Grabbing the camera, Clark and Kat are separated by a wall, which Kat can see through but Clark cannot. Kat screams for Clark to look behind him as an unseen being approaches…
Note: Despite being very well executed (forgive the pun), the killings and rampages are my least favorite parts of the movie, which does far more with its creepy desolate spaces and disturbing imagery than with traditional horror jump-scares. Nevertheless, this is a modern horror movie, so jump-scares and chases are virtual requirements. Also of note, the taped outline of the ‘door’ into the Backrooms is very similar to a chalk outline to another dimension that is drawn on a wall, from the classic “Twilight Zone” episode, “Little Girl Lost” (1962).
Mary receives a disturbing farewell message from Clark on her answering machine, prompting her to visit his store for herself. She locates the portal, and steps through. Finding a cryptic map drawn on the wall. Clark then arrives, and they hear an unseen being’s footsteps, and Clark tries to calm Mary… before choking her into unconsciousness. Meanwhile, technician Phil is watching TV with his kids when he recognizes Clark from his ad for the store.
Note: Another period cliché common to 1980s/1990s horror movies is faithfully preserved here; absolutely no one calls for help before entering a clearly dangerous place.
When Mary awakens, she is tied and seated across from Clark in a surreal dining room and kitchen. Three hideously distorted humanoid beings are there with him. Clark tells Mary that they’re harmless; in fact, they’re made of a fluffy, edible substance, which he demonstrates. Opening the fridge for a drink, we see Kat’s severed head, as well. Clark asks to continue their therapy, but Kate berates him instead–telling him that his refusal to take personal responsibility is the reason he fails. Clark pathetically confesses to Mary that he’s staying, because he’s accepted in the Backrooms–faults and all.
Note: This is the end of Clark’s journey. No heroic changes of heart. Clark is home. In this bizarre nether-realm, he’s released from the far scarier prospect of taking responsibility for his actions in the real world.
As he releases Mary from the ropes around her chair, a giant distorted manifestation of Clark in the pirate costume (Robert Bobroczyi) bursts into the dining room. Clark, instinctively recognizing it as an aspect of himself, tries to calm the creature, before it takes a chunk out of his neck and kills him. Mary finishes freeing herself and runs…
Note: Clark’s fate is very similar to the fate of Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) in 1956’s “Forbidden Planet,” who was attacked and killed by a giant, energy-based “id monster” created from the darkest corners of his own subconscious.
The pirate monster chases Mary through a multi-storied distorted version of Clark’s Ottoman Empire store, but with hundreds of extra levels, and a short flight of stairs leading awkwardly into a door on the ceiling. Upon entering the door, Mary runs past a simulacrum of her demolished childhood home, and grabs a piece of concrete from it to repeatedly smash the monster’s face.
Mary then accidentally triggers a tranquilizing gas trap, which alerts a group of Async technicians in hazmat suits, who take her in. As she’s carried away, we see the pirate monster’s presumed corpse being wrapped in plastic…
Note: Just as 1960’s “Psycho” handed off its lead character status mid-movie from Janet Leigh‘s Marion Crane to Anthony Perkins‘ antihero Norman Bates, “Backrooms” has done the reverse; handing off its lead character status from antihero Clark to ‘final girl’ Mary.
Mary awakens to find herself in an Async interrogation room, where she learns the company used to make MRI machines before it discovered the Backrooms, and now devotes itself almost exclusively to their study.
Async technician Phil (Mark Duplass) probes for details of how Mary first learned of the Backrooms, which she credits to her late patient Clark. Asking when she can be released, Phil says it’s not up to him.
Note: After the movie ended, I wondered where a company like Async would get continuous funding for Backrooms research? Perhaps the military hopes to ‘secure’ it somehow, for some idiotic purpose…
The movie’s coda goes inside the Backrooms, where we see distorted telephone poles with missing person flyers for Kat and Robby attached to them. The final image of the film sees a distorted simulacrum of Mary in an equally distorted version of the interrogation room; as misremembered by the Backrooms itself…
Note: The implication that the Backrooms are alive and can reflect images from their visitors’ minds/memories reminds me of the films of the brilliant Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986). Consciousness in unusual alien forms was a theme in two of his most renowned films, such as the sentient ocean planet from “Solaris” (1972) or the alien ‘Zone’ from “Stalker” (1979); a shapeshifting topographical area which surrounded a mysterious ‘Room,’ which was capable of reifying the wishes of anyone who could reach it.
The End.
Summing It Up
A $10 million passion project from creator/director Kane Parsons, “Backrooms” that makes effective use of mood and stillness in a way we haven’t seen much of since the heydays of directors like Stanley Kubrick or Andrei Tarkovsky. “Backrooms” shares DNA in common with movies like “Cube,” “Solaris,” “Stalker,” and “The Shining,” yet it’s unique and fresh in many ways. And despite occasional jump-scares, chases and surreal bits of gore, director Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox like to let their camera linger, which adds greatly to mood and suspense.
if it’s the last thing we ever do…”
As a visual effects artist, Parsons makes a satisfying, four-course dinner from budgetary crumbs. The presence of Oscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead significantly ups the dramatic stakes as well, making the movie feel full-bodied and legitimate. Parsons isn’t some young director hiring his friends; Ejiofor is a formidable presence, and that really helps. Ejiofor is ably assisted by Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, a psychiatrist who acts as Clark’s emotional sparring partner; figuratively taking on the role of his ex-wife, whom Clark actively resents. In its final quarter, the movie’s lead is effectively handed off from Clark to Kline, who is also dealing with the emotional baggage of her own past as the neglected child of a deeply disturbed mother.
There is much room (forgive the pun) for audience interpretation. Ten viewers might have ten very different takes on this movie, each of them equally valid. Sci-fi fans might see the Backrooms as an alien dimension taking its measure of humanity, much like the sentient ocean of the planet “Solaris.” Religious viewers might see the Backrooms as purgatory or hell. Less certain viewers might see it as simply unknowable. Even creator/director Parsons might not have the final word on his own creation, and that’s the best kind of art; the kind which fuels discussion and deeper imaginings, rather than leaving things too concrete and definitive. If there is a sequel someday, I would hope it leaves the enigma of the Backrooms as intact as possible.
In an age where our attention spans are routinely battered by short-form videos/content all screaming for clicks, “Backrooms” is a meditative, mature, surreal horror film rooted in trauma, regret and human weaknesses. It stays with you.
Where to Watch
“Backrooms” is currently streaming on the HBOMax app with subscription, and can also be rented from YouTube, GooglePlay, Fandango and Prime Video (around $7.99/US). The movie is also available on Blu-Ray exclusively through the A24 Shop.
