Last Updated on June 3, 2026 by Angel Melanson
I think we all — at least the film fans, the film journalists, and the filmmakers — have been cautious about the future of the medium through the short form video internet era. “Attention spans are shorter!” “The kids don’t know their film history!” “Vertical video and AI slop are permeating all of it!” But after seeing what the youthful YouTube and Reddit generation have produced, from Talk to Me to Obsession and now Backrooms, I think we can agree: the kids are alright.
The strange internet meme from which this film emerged was popularized by director Kane Parsons’ YouTube series, but it predates his work. The mysterious image of a yellowish fluorescent-lit room made it onto the internet at some point in the 2010s, making its way through 4chan, creepypastas, and eventually its own Reddit pages. Then, in early 2022, Parsons uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and the rest is history. Comments on his shorts, as they tend to, predicted that soon there’d be a big budget adaptation and now in 2026, we have Backrooms, a blissfully bleak mind bender about a cryptic collection of ugly wallpaper and carpet.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a miserable sod plucked from Death of a Salesman. He’d rather be pursuing architecture, but he needs money, so he’s strapped to his failing furniture store. Between days of trying to figure out why his electricity bills are so high and shooting corny public access commercials, he meets with his therapist (Renate Reinsve) to parse the dissolution of his personal relationships. His life is otherwise mundane until one day, when fighting with the circuit breakers in the store’s basement, he finds himself falling through a wall and into a seemingly infinite maze of backrooms filled with unsettling oddities. Obsessed, he brings his employees along for the ride — and eventually his therapist, who tries to save him and herself from this mysterious expanse.
Parsons, who wasn’t even born until 2005, sets his film vaguely in the ’90s, which allows for set decoration painted in yucky muted pastel shades. What’s more, the prevalence of the handheld camcorder and the ubiquity of direct sales commercials allows him (and director of photography Jeremy Cox) to weaponize the grainy POV shot for a blended found footage effect. The shapes of the rooms are unexpected and unpredictable, so by locking the viewer into tight, directional shots, they’re able to create a persistent feeling of vulnerability. This, paired with the sound design and not knowing what’s in the distance, has an unsettling and chilling effect. Then dropping the handheld for a glossily shot story allows them to fill out a different sort of narrative.
Unfortunately, the narrative is where the film is lacking. It’s mostly nonsense and quite mature in theme (though it was written by Will Soodik, who was decidedly around before 2005). Some expanded plotting would have filled out the feature, but it’s a bit flimsy and will not likely satisfy a call for more universe expansion and explanation.
Internet memes jumping into mainstream cinema is pretty special, and a shiny A24 tag is an even larger marker of the grand adoption. Other memes have broken that barrier, but there’s just something about this generation and liminal horror. House of Leaves imagined a labyrinth existing within a home, then Beyond the Walls sent a woman into an expansive dimension within the walls of an empty house, and nearly half of the seasons of Channel Zero (also built on creepypastas) involved some sort of hidden realm lying atop our own. I could make a long list — from Vivarium, to Skinamarink, to Exit 8, The Stanley Parable, Severance, heck, The Shining and Inception — all which bask in the unsettling feeling of unexplainable architecture and the horror they can draw from it. Parsons crafted the shiniest singularity, marrying the fresh internet language with a horror sub-genre to make something that’ll pull on audiences from different spaces.
Backrooms is the special kind of horror able to leave an audience shoulders up while they watch a man stomp around an empty space and anticipate what might happen. A manic Ejiofor and a stoic Reinsve give weight to the story, and the craft teams create a mind-bending visual spectacle you can’t look away from. I’m not sure it lived up to the challenge of filling itself out, but it’s nonetheless haunting and beautiful in its disgust. There’s a chest-pounding nature to the experience of seeing someone explore a potentially endless space filled with an unreliable and crooked reality. I’d trade all the plotting and world-building for a couple more hours of watching someone walking through every oddly placed door. Maybe it’s time for another lap around that YouTube series.
