Backrooms (2026) Is Old-School Suspense Trapped in an Internet Fever Dream

After a therapist's patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HjdiohVOik

I went into Backrooms with the kind of skepticism usually reserved for diet cheese and government efficiency. A movie based on an internet horror meme about weird yellow rooms? Sure. And maybe next week somebody will adapt a malfunctioning printer into a prestige miniseries. But here we are. A24 put real muscle behind it, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass signed on, and the premise is clean and creepy as a fresh razor: after a therapist’s patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she has to go in after him. That is good horror setup right there. No doctoral thesis required. Just dread, fluorescent lighting, and terrible life choices.

And then there is the part that still fries my brain a little. Kane Parsons is 20 years old. Twenty. At that age I was proud if I could program a VCR without creating diplomatic fallout. This guy took a viral Backrooms short, rode that creepy little yellow nightmare all the way from YouTube folklore to a full-length A24 movie, and according to the people who were actually there, he was not some mascot director wearing a headset for the yearbook photo. Mark Duplass has said Parsons was fully in control on set, and the production itself was built around Parsons’ own visual planning. So yes, the kid pulled it off. Somewhere there is a room full of middle-aged executives pretending they always believed in him.

What I liked most is the creep factor, because this movie absolutely has one. Not the cheap “boo, gotcha” kind that jumps out like a raccoon in a dumpster. I mean the slow, itchy, fluorescent kind. The kind that gets under your skin and hangs around after the movie ends, like an awkward church handshake from somebody who definitely held it too long. Backrooms understands that empty space can be terrifying if it is just slightly wrong. It takes the familiar and sands off the soul. Hallways feel off. Rooms feel off. Silence feels off. Even the geometry looks like it is lying to you.

Visually, it nails the unsettling atmosphere often enough that I was all the way in. This thing does not look like a bargain-bin streaming horror movie shot in a condemned office park next to a vape distributor. Parsons and the crew reportedly built about 30,000 square feet of physical Backrooms, and you can feel that in the movie. The space has weight. It has texture. It has that grimy, unmistakable sense that if you touched the wallpaper your hand would come back with emotional damage. No wonder people got lost on the set. I am not sure I would have wanted craft services down there either. That starts to feel less like lunch and more like a hostage negotiation.

I also appreciated that this plays more like old-school suspense than a gore buffet. It is horror with nerves, not just horror with a mop. Yes, the movie is rated R and there is some violent content and bloody imagery, so let us not act like Alfred Hitchcock wandered in and made Rear Window at the Carpet Warehouse. But the larger effect is still dread-first. It is the kind of movie that wants you uneasy, not just grossed out. There is a difference. One leaves you disturbed. The other leaves you wondering why the projector smells like a butcher shop.

Now for the part where I confess that there is some internet lore I was not familiar with, and my daughter had to catch me up like I was getting a classified briefing on hallway mythology. Nothing makes a man feel older than hearing, “No, Dad, that’s actually part of the Backrooms canon.” I am pretty sure I aged three calendar years in that sentence alone. The movie still works if you are not a full-time internet archaeologist, but I do think some of the extra context helps. There are places where you can feel the larger lore humming behind the walls, and if you are not already plugged into that frequency, you may spend a few moments catching up with the crowd.

As for the stars, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve do solid work selling a story that could have collapsed into pure concept art without real performers. Ejiofor brings weight and weariness. Reinsve gives the movie a human center when the whole thing threatens to slip into abstraction. Mark Duplass is one of those actors who can walk into a movie and instantly make you feel like something is either deeply comforting or deeply wrong, and sometimes both in the same scene, which is a handy skill in a film called Backrooms. Still, I wanted more character depth overall. Not a lecture. Not a 27-minute monologue about childhood wallpaper trauma. Just a little more so we care harder when the movie asks us to invest emotionally instead of just atmospherically.

That, to me, is where the movie gets shakier. The more it tries to explain feelings, formalize drama, and turn an eerie concept into a conventional two-hour narrative, the more obvious it becomes that Backrooms may fundamentally work better as short, internet theory, or experimental film than as a fully traditional feature. On YouTube, mystery feeds on ambiguity. People pause, replay, theorize, argue, and act like a flickering exit sign is the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a feature film, you have to carry a bigger emotional load, and sometimes you can feel the strain in the walls.

And then there is the ending, which I will not spoil, because civilization is hanging by a thread and I refuse to be one more guy cutting it. I will just say this: it surprised me, and not entirely in the “wow, what a home run” way. It hit with a suddenness that almost felt like somebody looked at the budget spreadsheet, looked at the hallway, and said, “Well, that’ll do.” But even with that complaint, I came away weirdly energized. Maybe that is the best compliment I can give it. I did not leave wanting to forget it. I left wanting more story, more world, more answers, and more nightmares. That is where the wider-franchise potential comes in. This concept is too elastic, too eerie, and too unfinished-feeling to stop at one movie and call it a day. Or maybe I just got no-clipped into sequel optimism.

So no, Backrooms is not perfect. But man, it is memorable. It is creepy. It lingers. It proves that Kane Parsons was not just another viral one-hit wonder with a good thumbnail and a comment section full of conspiracy theorists. He made a real movie, and a pretty unsettling one at that. In an era when so many films feel processed, focus-grouped, and assembled by committee like a luxury sedan, there is something refreshing about a horror movie this odd, this tactile, and this willing to be a little alienating. Even when it stumbles, it stumbles while trying to do something specific. That counts for a lot in my book.

Final rating: 7.0/10. Creepy enough to stay with me, stylish enough to admire, flawed enough to argue about, and promising enough that I would absolutely wander back into this nightmare world again.

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