I know, I know, this isn’t an old forgotten movie, but it feels like the media gods want us to ignore this film and keep it moving. I thought “Backrooms”, a recently released psychological horror film that was released without much fanfare at the beginning of the Summer of 2026, was one of the most impactful horror films maybe of any genre, for me personally in years. Whoever the young filmmaker, 20-year old Kane Parsons is, I hope he never makes films with a different approach than he did with this one, he’s like the anti-M. Night Shyamalan. This film felt fresher than so much Hollywood formula drivel that we have all been subjected to in this film as fast food culture world we exist in now. What this movie lacked in formula and predictability it made up with energy and creativity. It was a joy to go to the movies again, as I had so many times as a youth in the 1970’s and 1980’s and not be able to guess what the fuck was about to happen on screen next. Now we are mass marketed Vacuous dinosaur movies that look like car commercials and super hero movies with masturbatory special effects that at their core are about……..nothing.
When people label “Backrooms” as a horror film, they are not wrong, but then this isn’t the same old, same old, this is a return to psychological horror that stays in your mind for days, weeks after seeing it. This isn’t repeating the experience of such stalwart historic scare-fests such as “The Exorcist” or “Halloween” or “Jaws” or slasher or alien films, even though there are some haunted house chase elements to this, there is not much borrowed here. The brand of horror that “Backrooms” embodies took me back to 1970’s films, as well as moments in my life in addition to times I felt the pull of collective consciousness. The type of 1970’s horror that “Backrooms” brought to mind for me were films such as the 1969 Horror-sci-fi Russian masterpiece “Solaris”, the 1973 dystopian sci-fi gem “THX-1138” from George Lucas, the 1976 Sci-Fi film directed by Nicholas Roeg titled “The Man Who Fell to Earth” which starred David Bowie, Kubrick’s “The Shining” from 1980 and Robert Altman’s 1972 psychological horror film, “Images” with Susannah York. All of these films involved an atmosphere of dread that you can’t outwit, you can only hopefully adjust and adapt. Such as when one stays with a nightmare long enough to potentially discover pragmatic solutions versus revulsion and panic.
“Backrooms” is an extremely smart movie, one I found endless quadrants of depth within. The premise of this tale derives not from a book, or play, or movie or show or any other form of past medium. The original source of the idea for this film comes from a photo someone posted on twitter in 2019 showing an innocuous and anonymous office space which looked nondescript and empty. Legend has it that a commenter on this posted photo remarked that there probably exists hundreds or thousands of miles of duplicate empty office space that exists in a parallel dimension, echoing the emptiness of the global society that man has built, or something to that effect. An endless mirror in sterile office space infinity.
From what I am able to understand, an entire online series of videos has emerged from the nihilistic tendencies of this inconspicuous and cryptic initial twitter post and comment, the video or two that I watched seemed like a first-person video game premise; a first-person in a bio-hazard suit is part of an armed squad in what looks like to be an endless maze/labyrinth of empty office spaces, the character is being pursued by a large and dark malevolent entity that is attempting to eradicate everything in it’s path. Watching a couple of these videos was an experience somewhere between a first-person shooter video game and a haunted house chase. The concept of these videos seems pretty easy to digest; another dimension has been discovered by scientists behind the walls of American strip malls and it contains frightening and feral slender-man type monstrosities that will pursue, trap and kill you if you enter this alternate realm, got it.
But this is the online culture’s mad-lib creation, not, as I would discover much to my fascination, the cinematic take. (Unless I am ignorant to “Backrooms” online legend and lore, which is entirely possible.) This film edition begins with a found footage video that is long enough to build tension, the video appears to be the property of some sketchy corporation. In this found footage clip, we do get the machinations of a haunted house type atmosphere fairly quickly. Somebody nervous is filming themselves being pursued by an entity that appears to not only be slender and stealth but relentless and quick. This unnerving opening we discover had been filmed in the early 1990’s in an underground, sterile and stark-looking location. We soon become introduced to a character named Clark (played by the indefatigable Chiwetel Ejiofor)
Ejiofor is dominant here, he’s vulnerable, he’s wise, he’s self-effacing, it’s a performance that heightens the material by him grasping it as if it’s second nature and not pre ponderous. His performance is full of pathos and self-loathing. We can see, hear and feel his inner pathology and his ever decaying sense of self-preservation. It feels like Ejiofor’s energy is the bell cow for the entire cast, he sets the intensity level, like a Peter O’Toole. The other lead of importance is a Female psychoanalyst, played by Renate Reinsve, a character as consuming as Clark, caught between her contemporary job, her haunting past involving her paranoid and mercurial mother and the oncoming dread she is experiencing being brought on by her interactions with her new patient, Clark.
I don’t know if I would label “Backrooms” a gimmick film, it’s style is cold on the surface, but for me that added to it’s effectiveness as a surreal thriller, one that glitches in and out of reality and the alternate world it has to show us chilled me to the core. This is where my comparison of this film in tone brings me to movies like “THX-1138”, “Solaris” and even “Ex-Machina”to a certain extent manifest as well, a sterile and unnerving backdrop and a crushing feeling that something is watching you and it’s not tethered to benevolence or sensitivity. It doesn’t have your best interest in mind, either, like the atmosphere portrayed in bible stories, folk songs and late night commercials from the church of Latter Day Saints.
I have seen people online refer to the feelings of dread, anxiety and paranoia that they felt watching this movie as possibly a metaphor for generational trauma. In an odd way, this particular comment in reference to this movie has made quite a bit of sense to me. Being someone of age who has lived through what feels like a transition from collective spiritual benevolence amongst the populace to a kind of detached and desensitized savagery has been jarring. I’m old enough to remember supposed galvanizing peaceful images of “hands across America” from the 1980s, or the 1970s Coca-Cola commercial where peoples of all walks of life sing a warm and fuzzy jingle together while drinking a Coke and holding hands. Since my childhood, traumatizing world events that seemed to shock the public into submission included the Manson Family murders, the Jonestown Massacre, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, the AIDS crisis, the first Iraq war, 911, Hurricane Katrina, the Newtown school massacre, the COVID pandemic and others. It felt like a slow transition, aided by the cyber world, changed people on the street’v view of their fellow human. We became a society that did not experience events together, we experienced them in spite of each other. People became entities that you don’t look to for assistance, you avoid them to skirt potential humiliation.
“Backrooms” spends several key scenes on an analysts’ couch, these scenes are well-done and speak to the tone of the film that we are alone in this society, that while it may not yet be actively pursuing our demise, it sure ain’t there to help us, in fact, it might not be there for us at all. While the film is set at a strip mall somewhere in Wisconsin in the early 1990’s, the themes here are familiar ones in my lifetime. Starting with the premise of an uncontrollable evolving society, the public has moved further and further from religion, philosophy, philanthropy, empathy and community. The film leans in on the construct of psychoanalysis, a form of therapy albeit one tied to commerce. A priest, a philosopher, a shaman will answer your pondering questions for free, an analyst will not. The crushing pressure and existence of financial expectation for all, especially the educated, is at times a cold and un-moving discipline, a self-defeating vocation that is pursued by the zealous few.
“Backrooms” introduces us to a world in another dimension that is endless, overwhelming and detached from human emotion. An endless labyrinth of modern-looking office space that seems potentially as vast as outer space or the ocean or the recesses of the human mind. I felt similarities in this movie to the infamous Twilight Zone episode where the little girl follows her dog under the bed and into another dimension, also akin to the set-up for Director Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” from 1982. The terror and feeling of anticipatory dread in this movie I had felt in life for decades before I saw this film. I was afraid as a child of the darkness in my own home, especially at night. Growing up in a tranquil neighborhood, I still recall moments at dusk, walking in my University influenced surroundings and thinking a presence was observing me. Not God, something more local.
When I myself worked in strip malls in later years, moments of solitude in the empty back storage and loading areas felt again like something was watching, but not something based in faith or understanding, something emotion-less, yet powerful. I worried about accidents occurring when nobody was around. Your instincts speak to you, they tell you when something is amiss. In one scene in “Backrooms”, Clark is wondering through the endless innocuous appearing catacombs and spots a figure in the distance. We hope that it is a human that can relate to us and give us some clarity about what the fuck is going on. Nope, it’s a cardboard cut-out of a person with a repetitive message being played from an electric attachment, we begin to wonder: Has Clark discovered some mysterious inter-dimensional place or has he lost his shit, or both?
Less than two years ago, I watched my amazing and beloved spiritual twin, my sister Courtenay, pass away, she lasted ten days after she could no longer speak or communicate. About Eight days before her final pulse, I had the option of staying the night with her caretakers and her in the house, which was now looking more and more like an old museum, something from a description in a Ray Bradbury novel, but by this point my sister was essentially gone. As my sister lay in bed, unable to speak or make eye contact, a radio had been left on next to her bed, I suppose to give cheery support to a most unhappy situation. The radio was playing a processed, artificial Holiday playlist of fake joyous Christmas songs as my sister lay there in some form of partial consciousness, the effect of the moment was jarring and overwhelming. I relived that spooky moment while watching “Backrooms”, that feeling of encroaching artificiality, especially in a moment of intense gravity. Moments and feelings of cultural deception and faux sincerity. Part of the effectiveness of the slow-burn terror that “Backrooms” induces is the idea that the backrooms carry your unresolved trauma with them through you.
Like that moment in my sister’s room in 2024, “Backrooms” terrified me with it’s insincerity, the thought that a lack of humanity and feeling would lead to an artificial world where the soundtrack for our end is on a pre-produced platter, cued for every season, that when we die, the platter keeps playing, we don’t even get a moment of remembrance anymore, not even a traffic-stopping Italian street funeral parade, our lives and deaths are insignificant to the machine. “Backrooms” oozes this encroaching artificiality upon humanity, which is in addition, self-inflicted. One of the truly chilling aspects of this film is the idea and detail that in this alternate world, everything acts like a mirror or duplicate of the world that has visited it and the dimension itself seems to duplicate the memories and items of the people that explore it. These duplications are always just a tiny bit off, like our memories. If someone takes off their shoes in this dimension and leaves them there, the next time the story returns to that room the shoes are still there but now they have begun to fuse to the floor. Each time the dimension duplicates itself, it’s just slightly off, again and again.
A Horror film typically gives the audience a monster which is separate from the known modern world, the monster is a blight upon an otherwise benevolent society. Here, the entire alternate dimension appears to be alive, just on the other side of Clark’s store basement wall, and it’s a world that appears relentless, unforgiving and pernicious. Once you have entered this realm, it’s not long before some shit is about to occur. some of it innocuous, some of it predatory, all of it is unnerving, the build-up here is perfect. To be fair, there is a direct stolen sequence from Ridley Scott’s 2000 film, “Hannibal”, but I only pondered that retroactively and the scene is still quite effective. There is an overriding theme here of modern society becoming an inaccurate mirror and deceptive scribe of our memories (and I would argue that our relatively newer dependence on computers, the internet and the cyber world to keep our memories intact is looking dubious at best), that every new translation and edition of what was thought to be common knowledge just seems a bit off from the last retelling.
If you haven’t figured it out, I am truly fond of this movie, it way out-performed my expectations, considering I went into this cold on a random early Summer night based on a feeling I got about the film simply based on a still and blurb I saw on the movie in a local paper. I have surmised that there were a handful of elements that stuck with me about this movie, beginning with the character and performer of the analyst role, played by the aforementioned Renate Reinsve,who gives a thoughtful and intense performance as a troubled and thoroughly educated professional therapist-analyst who we get snippets throughout the movie concerning her own PTSD-inducing childhood trauma that may or not be triggered by her encounters with her new patient, Clark.
As the analyst, Reinsve gives a physically heroic and strategically sympathetic performance, we find ourselves rooting for her as she is an earnest and courageous figure. Her inclinations initially are to be an establishment cog, but Clark’s demeanor and subliminal cries for help in their sessions trigger her character to respond and act. She is somewhere between a private investigator and an investigative reporter. She’s not a passive scream queen, yet the film loses none of it’s tension with this dynamic in play, the atmosphere of extreme anxiety and fear of a relentless unknown is palpable.
The next winning attribute of this film is the complexity of the character of Clark and the mesmerizing performance of Ejiofor, just a magnificent effort by the actor. Obviously, his past work had solidified him as one of the top performers of his generation, he is so comfortable in the character of Clark, just a magnificent turn. Ejiofor displays a doubt-riddled, neurotic and self-loathing version of himself and it’s dark and complicated. Ejiofor’s Clark is a great admission, a frustrated and lonely divorced architect aspirant who is putting off his career ambitions to sell discount furniture from a strip mall store. He discovers a portal one night in the back of his store’s storage room and the movie is off and running. You can feel the pain, strain and consternation in his voice in every scene. Without the fantasy off-ramp the film gives us, we would assume Clark is headed for a mental breakdown and yet the character still comes off as sympathetic and worth saving. Ejiofor’s performance is indicative of an actor truly understanding the complexities of his role and nailing it.
The idea that a 20-year old film director made this movie speaks to the movie’s freshness, its abstract beauty. This movie will be a cult movie, especially with teens and twenty-somethings now, for decades, it’s that impactful, memorable and trenchant. The film is a spectacular confessional of the fear of the modern world we live in and what murky and devastating plans it may have for us. Director Parsons’ use of space, slow burn tension, quiet and sparse music (by composer Parsons and Edo Van Breemen) induced the sensation of navigating a nightmare when you have some control within the framework; I felt engaged watching this film, as well as frightened, hopeful, slightly confident that these rational-thinking, educated characters would be able to vanquish their troubling surroundings.
The big takeaway watching this film for me was the creeping sensation the film raises about how society is choosing to remember itself and the transference of keeping data in hard copies and in our minds and changing that regimen to relying on the digital world to act as our inaccurate and uncaring scribe. Our lives and the world is being duplicated often and incompletely, even if only slightly with each repetition. When I was young, everything seemed so concrete and sacred, it made so much sense and seemed transparent. There was no question to as to shared communal values, or ethics or the well-meaning intentions of individuals. In the world of “Backrooms”, Christmas trees from the past are missing a bulb or two, mute and glitchy versions of past lovers stand like mannequins, mutated and augmented versions of ourselves stalk the endless halls of this seemingly infinite labyrinth, searching for us. People who think with added depth in regards to their existence will be talking about this movie in quiet corners for years, it will be a bonding ritual of the intellectually introspective.
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