Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Backrooms
Set in 1990 in the Silicon Valley suburbs, the film centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture salesman drowning in mass-produced recliners and liquidation clearance signs at his pirate-themed store, quietly falling apart from a failed marriage, a failing business, and vanished architectural dreams. He attends therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a self-help author who urges her patients to break the cycles keeping them trapped, all while being unable to break her own.
One night, flickering lights lead Clark into the basement of his showroom, where he discovers something that should not exist: a doorway opening into an infinite, labyrinthine expanse of office rooms and corridors. The Backrooms. He enlists his skeptical employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help map this impossibly constructed space. When Clark disappears inside it, Dr. Kline crosses every professional boundary she has and follows him in, confronting her own deeply buried childhood memories along the way.
What director Kane Parsons has achieved here is something genuinely rare in modern horror: a film that uses its surreal and intriguing surroundings to scare you, leaning far less on the tired mechanics of the genre than most. While there are a handful of jump scares, they feel earned rather than cheap, deployed sparingly against a backdrop of sustained, creeping unease that does the heavier lifting.
The horror lives in the drop ceiling, in the yellowing wallpaper that shifts patterns for reasons that don't quite add up, in the stop sign inside the Backrooms that reads in reverse, as if its emergence there has been lost in translation. It is like being inside a Dalí painting—you look at some detail and see a distorted image staring back at you.
The film doesn't fully explain everything, as if you are in a dream that cannot be fully figured out no matter how hard you analyze it, but its disturbing power lingers long after you wake up.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is extraordinary, portraying what could have been a purely conceptual film with human feeling. His Clark is not simply a victim. He is a man who finds something darkly comforting in the Backrooms, who lets this strange infinite space mirror his fractured psychology back at him. Renate Reinsve, fresh off her Academy Award-nominated turn in "Sentimental Value" (2025) is equally compelling. She plays a therapist who cannot heal herself, a woman watching her childhood home demolished to make way for suburban development. Her descent into the Backrooms carries the weight of genuine psychological collapse.
The technical achievement is staggering for a debut. Production designer Danny Vermette constructed 30,000 square feet of Backrooms across four soundstages, and the space doesn't just sprawl outward horizontally into an oppressive, maze-like infinity, it also reaches vertiginously upward, with one centerpiece set appearing to stretch 40 stories high, lined with M.C. Escher-like stairs leading nowhere. Anyone with even a passing fear of heights will find themselves gripping their armrest. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox shoots with a wide-angled scope that makes every human figure look small and swallowed, emphasizing the crushing spatial relationship between the characters and the indifferent architecture surrounding them.
This is not a film that wants to explain itself. It wants to get under your skin, rearrange something in your brain, and leave you checking the corners of ordinary rooms a little more carefully than you used to. It is scary, it is beautiful, and it announces Kane Parsons as one of the most distinctively unsettling new voices in horror cinema today.
"Backrooms" opens in theaters on Friday, May 29, 2026.
