Backrooms
Director: Kane Parsons
Writer: Will Soodik
Based on: Parsons‘ series
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia
Seen on: 27.6.2026

Plot:
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns a furniture store that is always empty, and always teetering on the edge of closing forever. Clark tries to vent his frustration and his anger at his ex-wife in therapy with Mary (Renate Reinsve), but therapy so far hasn’t felt particularly successful for him. Still, when he suddenly finds that one wall in his basement isn’t actually a wall but a portal into a seemingly neverending series of hallways, he goes to Mary to tell her about it. And then Clark disappears and Mary decides to go look for him.

Backrooms created quite a lot of buzz in advance, and I thought it was a really interesting debut feature, although it lost me a little towards the end. Still, there is a lot here that is worth examining and that makes one hopeful for Parsons‘ future works.

Backrooms‘ biggest strength lies in just those backrooms, the hallways that are almost but not quite right, losing perspective halfway through, taking impossible turns and suddenly bringing us to strange doors. The atmosphere is eerie, and as long as the film is exploring them, their singular soundscape as much as the visuals, it is easy to get caught up in it.

Things become a little more difficult when the film tries to give us an explanation, or at least Clark’s explanation of the situation. By that I mean, it becomes convoluted and frankly a little boring. I certainly started to drift off, despite Ejiofor and Reinsve making for a compelling duo as they discuss things. Maybe the film would have been better without any attempt at explanation.

Nevertheless, I certainly enjoyed the way the film takes liminal spaces and turns them into almost a protagonist, certainly a living thing. I mean, the furniture store alone is already a liminal space, and fueled by Clark’s alienation from his life, which is its own kind of liminal state, it just becomes the door to the much larger state of nowhere or inbetween that the Backrooms are. (Here, too, I can add a „maybe the film would have been better“ – if it had leaned harder into that aspect.)

Backrooms certainly shows promise, both in the way it creates tension and in the way that it uses its actors. So it will be interesting to see where Parsons goes next. But I am not fawning as much over the film as many other people seem to have done.

Summarizing: promising.