REVIEW

Lynchian Curio ‘BACKROOMS’ Is Like Being Trapped Inside Somebody Else’s Bad Dream

By Matt Oakes · May 27, 2026

Backrooms is what happens when you give a twenty-year-old YouTube horror wunderkind from the Creepypasta trenches an A24 budget and virtually zero creative restraints. Expanding upon his wildly popular web series, writer-director Kane Parsons crafts a horror film that operates less on traditional narrative logic than pure subconscious nightmare fuel. Like the work of David Lynch, Backrooms is more interested in cultivating a suffocating sense of dread through eerie architecture, fractured internal mythology, and disorienting dream logic than pelting audiences with cheap jump scares. The result is deeply unsettling: a fluorescent-lit descent into distorted realities and uncanny spaces that feel wrong on a cellular level. That deliberately disorienting approach may prove frustrating for horror fans expecting tidy explanations or clean mythology. But for viewers willing to wander through Backrooms’ labyrinthine corridors and simply submit to its wavelength, Parsons delivers one of the more uniquely distressing genre experiences in recent memory.

An expansion of Parsons’ viral horror series of the same name, Backrooms follows sad-sack Mark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the lonely owner of a struggling discount furniture store whose aesthetic is trapped somewhere between pirate kitsch and Ottoman palace cosplay. Mark spends his therapy sessions unloading grievances onto Mary (Renate Reinsve), lamenting the failures and disappointments that have left him isolated and adrift. But after discovering a hidden portal beneath his store leading into a sprawling underground maze of impossible architecture, Mark becomes obsessed with charting its bizarre geography and uncovering whatever meaning may lurk within it.

The backrooms themselves are the film’s greatest achievement: grotesque distortions of ordinary infrastructure assembled in ways that feel cosmically unnatural. Chairs melt into floors and ceilings. Hallways narrow into dead-end cornices. Doors open into spaces that shouldn’t physically exist. Parsons taps into the uniquely unsettling horror of banality, weaponizing ugly office carpeting, flickering fluorescent lights, cheap furniture, and endless pale-yellow walls that seem to crawl infinitely in each and every direction. There’s nothing inherently monstrous about these environments aside from their corkscrew nature. They’re horrifying in part because of how oppressively mundane they are.

Working alongside Parsons, production designer Danny Vermette constructed over 30,000 square feet of massive practical liminal-space environments for the film, with additional spaces expanded digitally through VFX – a huge part of the film’s production budget. The result is extraordinary in the weirdest way. The backrooms feel tactile and physically oppressive in a way many modern horror films fail to achieve, evoking the impossible architectural geography of The Shining, where rooms take on haunting dimensions with hallways that exist outside the confines of spatial logic.

But the backrooms are more than just eerie liminal spaces. Parsons increasingly frames them an emotional and psychological prisons; distortions shaped by loneliness, resentment, and fractured self-perception. Mark is not some noble explorer descending into the unknown, but a deeply bitter and isolated man whose view of himself becomes less trustworthy the deeper he travels. This idea is reinforced through his therapy sessions with Mary – a roleplaying exercise excising his failed marriage gradually reveals the simmering anger and self-serving narratives lingering in his emotional backrooms. Like the architecture surrounding him, Mark’s reality begins to warp the longer he spends exploring its caverns.

Both performances are fascinatingly off-kilter. Ejiofor is subtly unnerving as Mark, imbuing the character with a simmering discomfort that makes him feel fundamentally unsafe. Hollow. Even in stillness, there’s something slightly alarming in his physicality and demeanor, as though Mark is constantly performing a version of himself he desperately wants others to believe but we catch glimpses of his rage laying just beneath the surface. Meanwhile, Renate Reinsve brings a grounded emotional intelligence to Mary, a therapist clearly wrestling with insecurities and traumas of her own while attempting to rationally process experiences that exist far outside logic or conventional understanding. As the boundaries of reality begin to erode, Mary increasingly functions as the film’s moral and psychological anchor, desperately trying to preserve some sense of human ethics and empathy within a space that seems to dissolve both. It’s an unconventional pairing of performers for material this strange, but both actors prove compelling guides through Parsons’ nightmare.

Set in 1990, Backrooms cleverly juxtaposes grainy VHS-style found footage aesthetics with more contemporary filmmaking techniques. Parsons gets the best of both worlds: harnessing the first-person immediacy and long-shot unease of found footage horror without fully confining the movie to that perspective. The effect is dizzying and persistently unnerving, if a bit well-worn.

To its credit, Backrooms contains relatively few conventional scares. There are no gotcha! stingers or overly-engineered audience jolts. Instead, Parsons sustains an almost unbearable atmosphere of dread through the film’s cryptic geography and a script that continually pulls at new strange narrative threads without fully resolving them. The film grows ever weirder and more abstract as it spirals forward, culminating in a final horrifying sequence that outright refuses to provide neat explanation or really any kind of immediate catharsis. Parsons understands that the ambiguity itself is a primary driver of his brand of horror. That that hangs out in the shadows is less scary when brought into the light. The unknown lingers whereas explanation dissolves tension.

In terms of traditional storytelling, Backrooms barely concerns itself with conventional structure at all. These characters drift through the film more than they arc through it. Yet despite running nearly two hours, the movie rarely feels boring because Parsons maintains a constant sense of unstable momentum. You’re forged to the edge of your seat awaiting what fresh hell will drift through an oversized doorway or climb into the frame. Not everything here works but enough of it connects to make it stick.

That said, many audiences are likely to find the experience maddeningly opaque and/or emotionally distant. This is not a film interested in answers, lore dumps, or narrative closure. But for viewers not trying to “solve” the many puzzles of Backrooms and instead surrender themselves to its suffocating nightmare logic, Parsons’ film offers a uniquely unsettling meditation on loneliness, warped self-perception, and the terrifying subjectivity of human experience. It’s less a puzzle box than being trapped inside someone else’s bad dream that you just can’t wake up from.

CONCLUSION: Kane Parsons’ ‘Backrooms’ is a disorienting nightmare that derives its horror as much from its kaleidoscopic, alien architecture as its unsettling meditation on loneliness and self-imposed isolation. Atmospherically haunting and deeply unnerving, even if its unconventional approach may alienate viewers craving clearer answers.