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Backrooms is A24's Most Unhinged Film of The Year
- Sakshi D
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Kane Parsons just announced himself to Hollywood, and I need everyone to pay attention
I have been on the internet long enough to remember when Backrooms was a single creepy 4chan image and nothing else. A photo of an endlessly repeating yellow-walled room with that specific fluorescent hum and the feeling that something was very wrong.
The internet took it and ran, built entire mythologies around it, and Kane Parsons made a YouTube series about it at 17. Now he's 20, and A24 handed him a feature film.
The setup is deceptively simple. Clark, a furniture store owner who is clearly one bad day away from completely losing it, discovers that the basement of his shop has a doorway into something else. A dimension of endless rooms, mustard walls, hissing lights, and the specific dread of a space that looks almost familiar but is fundamentally wrong.
His therapist Mary, who has her own trauma she's actively avoiding dealing with, follows him in. What unfolds is less a traditional horror film and more a slow psychological unravelling that gets under your skin and refuses to leave.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿/5
What is Kane Parsons Up To
This is atmospheric horror done with genuine craft, and I want to be clear about that because atmospheric horror is extremely easy to get wrong. The kind that just shows you empty corridors for ninety minutes and calls it dread. A24's Backrooms never feels boring. That’s more than what I can say for the last Conjuring movie.
Every room introduces something new to be unsettled by. The production design is the star of the whole film and deserves its own conversation. These spaces feel wrong in a way that's hard to articulate. Objects appear that shouldn't exist. Structures don't line up. The geometry of the place refuses to make sense, and that wrongness accumulates into something genuinely oppressive.
What is Working in A24's Backrooms
The sound design is doing enormous work throughout. That constant low hum of the fluorescent lights. The way silence is used so deliberately that you can hear a character's shoes on carpet from across the room.
The score has this dark, droning quality that never arrives anywhere; it's just an endless creeping dread that sits underneath every scene. I had goosebumps twice, and I'm not someone who says that lightly.
The found footage sequences are the best parts of the film. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, given how played out that format is, but the way Parsons integrates it here feels completely intentional and earned. The switch between found footage and traditional cinematography is seamless, and the most genuinely terrifying moments happen in those camcorder sections.
The Casting Choices
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark is exceptional. He plays a man who was already fraying before any of this started, and A24's Backrooms simply accelerates what was already coming. You believe his mental state is unravelling completely.
Renate Reinsve as Mary brings a grounded intelligence to a role that could easily have been thankless, and the two of them together have a dynamic that carries the emotional weight of the whole film.
The script doesn't always serve them as well as they deserve, but they work harder than they need to, and it shows.
Where it Loses Its Footing
Things get messy in the third act, and I won't pretend otherwise. A film that has been so patient and so controlled starts rushing in ways that feel like someone panicked.
There's a scene at a dinner table that introduces character motivations that felt completely disconnected from everything that came before it. The ending also extends past its natural conclusion point, and the final section with Mark Duplass, while not bad, feels like it belongs to a different film entirely. Like the first 15 minutes of a sequel accidentally got attached.
The characterisation outside Backrooms is the weakest element throughout. We get enough to care, but not enough to feel genuinely devastated when things go wrong, which limits the emotional ceiling of the whole thing.
My Final Verdict
Backrooms is genuinely impressive filmmaking from someone who grew up on the internet, making things because he had something to say.
The influences are worn openly, Lynch, Gilliam, Burton, and the Caretaker, but what Parsons does with them is distinctly his own. He's expanded the concept of liminal spaces beyond internet meme territory into something that's actually about something.
Watch it. Then sit in your car afterwards and think about it for a bit. That's the only appropriate response.
Are you going in as someone who knows the Backrooms lore or completely fresh? Tell me in the comments because I think it genuinely changes the experience.