‘Backrooms’

Backrooms (2026) is a psychological horror. The film is directed by Kane Parsons, who previously worked on YouTube shorts. He has faithfully adapted his YouTube ‘backrooms’ videos for cinema.

In Backrooms, Clark’s big dream is to be a successful architect, but his ambitions have led to failure, alcoholism, and the collapse of his long term relationship. Now he lives in the furniture store that he manages. When he discovers a portal to another world he takes a journey into a strange land. The journey (like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness) accelerates his mental decline.

The story takes place in 1990, in an analogue, pre-internet world. It uses the ‘liminal spaces’ YouTube meme, which is a kind of distorted parallel reality. This world is accessed through an invisible portal in a wall, in the basement of his furniture store.

What are the backrooms? The environment is a place of creepy surreal horror, a metaphor rather than a space for absolute science fiction. It’s more Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than 2001. Visually, it’s part computer game glitch, part Freudian psycho-geography, and part abandoned space. There are echoes of the zone in Stalker and the area in Annihilation. ‘Found footage’ and effective sound design enhance the atmosphere.

What is the story? Clark’s nowhere life leads him to the discovery of the backrooms – a nowhere place. The backrooms are a classic nightmare experience, a labyrinth with a monster, or a haunted house with ghosts. This strange place is a test of his resilience and a visual metaphor for Clark’s mental disintegration or ‘miss-rememberings’.

The film picks up in the last twenty minutes with a mind blowing MC Escher moment and a monster that’s both frightening and comical. It’s a slow build story. The pace may alienate some people, but it pays off in the end.