Backrooms review – liminal spaces, everlasting nightmare fuel

A 20-year-old director. A creepypasta that started life as a single 4chan image. A studio that built over 30,000 square feet of practical set. Backrooms, released in UK cinemas on 29 May 2026, should not work as well as it does — and yet Kane Parsons has made something genuinely, uncomfortably alive.

The film opens on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), owner of the pirate-themed furniture warehouse Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Late one night, in his store’s basement, he phases through a wall and emerges somewhere else entirely — an endless maze of yellow-tinted office rooms lit by humming fluorescent tubes, where the carpet is faintly damp and the geometry refuses to make sense.

From 4chan image to A24 feature film

The Backrooms began as a single anonymous 4chan post in 2019: a blurry photograph of an empty office, mono-yellow and somehow wrong. Discussing Film notes that Parsons’ YouTube series, published under the channel Kane Pixels, amassed nearly 100 million combined views — which prompted A24, Atomic Monster, Chernin Entertainment, and 21 Laps to come calling.

The result is a production with an impressive pedigree: The Conjuring creator James Wan, Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) all serve as producers. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox, who previously shot Keeper (2025) and second-unit work on The Monkey (2025), brings a meticulously composed eye.

What the film actually does well

Parsons’ greatest achievement is atmosphere. Collider praised the production design — handled by Longlegs veteran Danny Vermette — for its unsettling brightness: this is a horror film lit with fluorescent light rather than darkness, and the effect is genuinely uncanny.

The second act contains what several critics are calling one of the year’s most visceral sequences. Discussing Film singles out a found-footage passage — shot to emulate a VHS camcorder, since the film is set in 1990 — that may stand as the most frightening thing audiences will see in a cinema in 2026. Remarkable, considering no analogue devices were reportedly used.

Ejiofor is outstanding: a sad-sack melancholic who gradually tips into obsessive mania as he plays liminal-space detective. Variety noted that Will Soodik’s script leans heavily on the cast to internalise and convey emotions that the dialogue does not spell out — and Ejiofor is more than up to the task.

Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, playing therapist Dr Mary Kline, proves she can anchor a Hollywood horror film with the same intensity she brought to The Worst Person in the World. IndieWire said she is both Final Girl material and a tragic figure in her own right.

Where it stumbles

High on Films identified the film’s central tension: the very things that make it compelling are also its undoing. The third act, while visually inventive with bursts of body horror and avant-garde imagery, begins to explain its mythology in plain dialogue — the single thing a film rooted in the unknowable should never do.

The approach also distances the film from Parsons’ original shorts. What made those videos so unsettling was their found-footage intimacy — watching them alone on a laptop at midnight. The budget-goosed maximalism of a theatrical production, as IndieWire put it, makes it less likely to scare the hell out of you than the original clips ever did.

Nightmare on Film Street described the film as more art piece than terror machine — a description that will delight some viewers and frustrate others expecting a conventional fright ride.

Legacy and the liminal space moment

Backrooms arrives in the wake of two other internet-born horror adaptations: Markiplier’s Iron Lung (2026) and Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 (2025). That three such films are appearing within 12 months is a cultural signal worth noting — internet folklore has become a viable source of serious cinematic horror, not just nostalgia IP.

The Hollywood Reporter compared the film’s central unease to Skinamarink (2022) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves — stories built on the disturbing idea that spaces meant to contain and protect can become infinite traps.

Scott Mendelson put it succinctly: unlike recent IP-adaptations that pander to fans at the expense of everyone else, Backrooms refuses to use its viral origins as an excuse for mediocrity. It is, he said, visually dynamic, exquisitely acted, and almost oppressively disconcerting.

Variety closed its review with the most useful observation of all: “Going forward, it will be fascinating to see how he fills those spaces.” Parsons is 20 years old. That should terrify Hollywood — in the best possible way.

Reported from publicly available interviews and verified press sources. Last reviewed 31 May 2026.