Backrooms

BACKROOMS 🚪 (2026)

Twenty-year-old Kane Parsons now joins brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me) and Curry Barker (Obsession) as filmmakers who’ve successfully made the jump from YouTube to the cinematic experience, seemingly determined to move past the old guard and into something new.

This year’s surprise box office hit BACKROOMS stems from a relic of early internet culture: 4chan creepypastas.

Parsons expanded that idea through a series of YouTube videos, transforming what was essentially an internet message board comment into a major horror phenomenon. Those videos were adapted into a feature film, headlined by Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. Landing actors of that calibre for your first feature is an achievement in itself, but then there’s the film itself.

The story follows a furniture store owner who discovers an otherworldly space beneath his store before mysteriously disappearing. After days without contact, his therapist arrives for a wellness check, only to be pulled into the same endless labyrinth.

If you’ve read about my original theatrical experience with the film, you’ll know it wasn’t the greatest. That had nothing to do with the movie itself and everything to do with the opening-night crowd I saw it with. Luckily, thanks to some friends of the page (and everyone who reached out from press to production teams), I got the chance to revisit it. And honestly, I needed time to sit with it because of how much the film is trying to unpack.

As someone who’s dealt with depression, concussions, therapy, and periods where it felt like my mind wasn’t entirely my own, I connected with a lot of what BACKROOMS is attempting to convey.

But let’s be honest: this movie feels incomplete. Not in a careless or poorly made way, but because it plays like a prologue—the beginning of the beginning, rather than a fully realized story. It feels like setup more than payoff, like there’s more story waiting to be told, and that keeps it from being great. But the mind maze that thing becomes? That’s where it finally hooks you.

There’s something about its endless liminal spaces that feels like the perfect representation of losing your mental centre.

An uncanny, real-world paralleling environment where different versions of yourself exist simultaneously, but not necessarily the versions capable of helping you navigate the reality you’re in. It becomes a constant process of adapting, code-switching, and reshaping yourself to fit every environment until eventually the self gets buried beneath all the walls you’ve built.

That becomes even harder when those same walls are protecting unresolved trauma.

That’s where these characters find themselves: a therapist helping a furniture salesman process the collapse of his marriage while simultaneously attempting to work through her own trauma through her patients.

At its core, the film feels like it’s about trying to dismantle our programming. No matter how much we grow, we often find ourselves trapped in the same cycles, returning to familiar patterns and behaviours that keep us walking in circles. We all have our loops. Habits that once protected us but eventually become prisons. The neural pathway of least resistance can become a place we find comfort in, but can also do us more harm than good.

The film begins with a therapy session and ultimately ends with something resembling a confessional between those same two people. Therapy is about breaking down walls to better understand yourself. But sometimes the walls coming down were there for a reason. It also explores the darker side of "help me help you” where support can become enabling, where comfort is found in victimhood, and where accountability becomes easier to avoid than confront.

What I appreciated most was the film’s abstract nature. Not necessarily what it tells us, but what it leaves unanswered.

There’s an unsettling idea running beneath the surface that part of us doesn’t actually want to change. That there’s comfort in familiar pain. That we sometimes push back against the people trying to help us and, in the process, drag them into our struggles as well.

It reminded me a lot of my experience with Skinamarink, where the anticipation of something lurking around the corner was often more effective than whatever eventually emerged. That same creeping tension exists throughout BACKROOMS. It’s consistently uneasy, uncomfortable, and visually striking. The film creates a space that feels simultaneously grounded and surreal, using nostalgia and abstraction to mirror reality in a deeply haunting way.

Honestly, if it had simply been a cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek nightmare within this liminal space, I probably would’ve enjoyed it more. The tension is there, and visually it’s completely unhinged in the best possible way.

There’s also an interesting idea buried within the film that society has become too self-aware. Doors to understanding are opening everywhere, yet nobody seems any closer to making sense of themselves. It also leans into something uncomfortable: the idea that self-awareness doesn’t always save us, it can trap us in loops just as easily as ignorance. Sometimes being a little disillusioned might actually be healthier than endlessly dissecting every aspect of your existence.

Those questions are what make BACKROOMS so fascinating.

But as I always say, a film is only as strong as its ending—and this one slips away from the core story at the final stretch.

A sudden shift in tone jolts the film’s energy, but without the emotional groundwork to support it. It feels like it arrives too abruptly, leaving key transitions undercooked and the narrative missing a bit of connective tissue to fully land.

I'll admit this may be a movie that becomes more rewarding in retrospect, once we get the second and third installments. The lack of a true ending here could make the eventual conclusion feel all the more satisfying.

Even with that all of that being said, BACKROOMS remains a genre-defining success story. Despite its narrative stumbles, it creates a compelling world that feels ripe for endless exploration and confirms Kane Parsons as one of the most exciting new voices working in horror today. 

Enjoy!

6.8/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 1hr45mins

Where: Now Playing In Theatres

The Richmond Reviewer Backrooms Review - June 7th, 2026.

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