Kane Parsons brings the Backrooms to life in new A24 film

An empty set of hallways with a lone cardboard box in the center

If you’re fascinated by the Backrooms but not quite ready to noclip out of our reality, director Kane Parsons delivers the next best thing: a film set in the eerie world spawned on 4chan in 2019. If the proverbial uncanny valley were a place, then this movie would have been filmed on location. Backrooms is genuinely unsettling and definitely worth a watch.

For an overview of the Backrooms phenomenon, check out this deep dive. Parsons’ original webseries (under the screenname Kane Pixels) can be found on YouTube, and the wiki is full of content.

That being said, it’s perfectly fine to go into the film with no knowledge of the lore. It’s a strong piece on its own. The basic premise is a simple portal story: Clark, a down-on-his-luck, divorced architect is stuck running a furniture store. One day, he falls through a wall in the basement into a world of twisty, yellow hallways that make no sense. His explorations are interspersed with therapy sessions where he tries to figure out where his life went wrong.

When Clark disappears, Mary, his therapist, follows him into the Backrooms. The version of Clark she finds is all too content with his new home and new companions. Mary, though, is determined to escape – but if there’s an exit, will she be able to find it?

Parsons handled the challenge of creating a story with a coherent narrative without losing the fundamental disjointed nature of the backrooms deftly. Clark’s failing furniture store is the perfect portal to serve as the liminal space between reality and Backrooms’ imitation of it. One of the stars of this film is the set design, which makes the whole place look like a videogame glitch.

A cornerstone of Backrooms lore is nostalgia, mostly for the 90s and early 2000s. The film nails the aesthetic, both in the “real” world and through the wall. Often, community Backrooms art comes with the tagline: “you can go back, but no one will be there” imposed over dead malls, streets with incandescent Christmas lights, and empty school hallways.  The film draws heavily on this imagery, using it to create tension between the comfort of familiarity and a deep sense of wrongness.  

Clark’s therapist often alludes to the loops we often find ourselves in. The Backrooms themselves are the perfect metaphor for being stuck in your own history and warped memories. This film warns millennials that our collective fascination with the past has a dark side. You can get stuck there – and not everything that lurks within is friendly.

Backrooms is in theaters now.