Published: June 2026

A personal review — not a critic’s, just a person’s.

I am not a film critic.
I walked into the theater alone, sat down among rows of teenagers, and watched.
That is all.

What follows is simply what I felt, what I noticed, and what stayed with me after the lights came back on.

Before We Begin — What Is This Film?
The Backrooms had its world premiere in Los Angeles on May 7, 2026.
It opened in South Korea on May 27 — two days before its wide North American release on May 29.
Distributed by A24. Directed by Kane Parsons. Written by Will Soodik. Co-produced by James Wan’s Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps Entertainment, and Chernin Entertainment.
The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline, Mark Duplass as Phil, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. It runs 105 minutes and is rated R in the United States.
The director is twenty years old.
Kane Parsons was born June 18, 2005. At sixteen, he uploaded a found footage short to YouTube under the name Kane Pixels. It reached over 70 million views. He built every shot himself using Blender — a 3D graphics program — without formal training, without film school. He composed the music. He did all of it alone, in his room, as a teenager.
At seventeen, A24 called.
He became the youngest director in the studio’s history.
The Backrooms grossed $81.5 million in North America in its opening weekend — the biggest opening in A24’s history. Worldwide, it earned $118 million.

It holds an 87% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Origin — What Are the Backrooms?

The Backrooms began as a single photograph.
Posted to 4chan on May 14, 2019, accompanied by a short block of text. Beige wallpaper. Worn carpet. Fluorescent lights humming at a frequency that feels subtly wrong. A corridor that stretches in every direction with no doors, no windows, no exit.
The text read, in part: if you are not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you will end up in the Backrooms.
That is it. That is where it began.
What grew from it was a mythology shaped entirely by the internet — by thousands of people adding rooms, rules, creatures, lore. The Backrooms is not one place. It is a space that expands to contain whatever fear you bring to it.
Kane Parsons built his own version. His YouTube series — posted to the channel Kane Pixels beginning in January 2022 — frames the Backrooms as a real phenomenon, documented by a government research agency called ASync. The series is filmed as found footage: grainy, institutional, without dialogue. It is deeply unsettling in a way that has very little to do with monsters.
Parsons has said that this film exists within the same universe and timeline as his YouTube series.
If you wish to enter that world before watching, his channel is here:
Kane Pixels — YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels
A note: the series is dialogue-free found footage, institutional and cold in tone. It is very different from the film. Enter slowly.

The Story — Spoilers Included

The film is set in the 1990s.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) once wanted to be an architect. He is not one. He runs a pirate-themed furniture store called Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire, drinks too much, and is recently divorced. His life has the shape of a man who made too many concessions to a world that did not notice.
One day, he finds a strange passage in the back of his store.
He steps through.
He begins mapping the Backrooms alone — obsessively, quietly, like a man who has finally found a project worthy of his abandoned ambition. He tells his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, what he has found.
She does not believe him.
So Clark goes back. He convinces his employees Bobbi and Kat to come with him — extra pay, he promises. Proof, he needs. Something goes wrong.

Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) carries a small stone. A piece of concrete with a handprint pressed into it — hers and her mother Nora’s, made together when she was a child. Nora suffered from paranoid delusions. She covered the windows with newspaper. She hid from the world and took her daughter with her into that hiding.
Mary became a therapist.
She walks into the Backrooms to find Clark. She finds something else first.

Phil (Mark Duplass) is a researcher at ASync. He believes the Backrooms is the greatest discovery in human history. He is mapping it. He is calm about everything. He is the most frightening person in the film.

The ending does not close.
The room Mary escapes into — the one that looks like safety, like home — may simply be another room the Backrooms has constructed from her memories.
The door opens. The film ends. You sit with it.

What the Film Is Really Saying

The Backrooms is not about a place.
It is about what happens when a person stops fighting to find their way back.
Clark is not consumed by a monster from outside. He is consumed by the decision to stay — to stop wanting the life he lost, to let this strange nowhere become ordinary. The entity that takes him does not arrive from the darkness. It arrives from the moment he chooses comfort over return.
Mary’s stone is her past made physical. Her mother’s handprint beside her own. The weight of a childhood spent beside someone who could not distinguish the world from her fear of it. The stone must break before Mary can fight. The past must be held — and then released.
Phil is modern numbness given a name and a salary. He is not evil. He is simply unbothered by something that should be terrifying. The film suggests, quietly, that this is its own kind of disappearance.
The film’s lines — “every place that has ever existed,” “the result of distorted memory,” “the window inside” — point in the same direction. The Backrooms is not a dimension you fall into. It is what the mind builds when it has been left alone with its own distortions for too long.
The film does not explain this.
It trusts you to find it.
For the generation that grew up inside this mythology — the teenagers who filled the theater around me — that trust probably felt like recognition. For those of us who arrived without the map, it felt more like standing outside a room where everyone else already knew the language.

What I Actually Felt

The theater was full.
I cannot remember the last time I saw that.
The teenagers around me were quiet in the way people are quiet when something is holding them. Not bored. Held.
I was less held.
Not because the film is bad. It is not bad. The production is genuinely extraordinary — a set of over 30,000 square feet was built for filming in Vancouver, large enough that crew members reportedly got lost inside it. The atmosphere is patient and strange in the way that good dread should be. And the performances, particularly Ejiofor’s slow unraveling and Reinsve’s careful stillness, give the film a human weight that its concept alone could not carry.
But I kept feeling the gap.
The space and the story did not quite breathe together. The symbols arrived and departed without fully connecting to the people in the room. I understood what the film was reaching for. I could not always feel it reaching.
There is a particular frustration in a film that opens everything and explains nothing — not because openness is wrong, but because openness without warmth can feel like abandonment. The film gestures toward big things. It trusts the audience to close the distance. Sometimes that trust is generous. Sometimes it reads as impatience.
The film is rated R in the United States. In Korea, audiences 15 and older can watch it. But its psychological weight — paranoid delusion, the dissolution of self, the specific despair of a life that did not become what it was supposed to — sits heavier than either rating fully suggests. I found myself wondering what this film might have been if it had been permitted to go further. Stranger. Harder. Less concerned with landing safely.
Perhaps that is Kane Parsons’ next film.
I will watch it.

A Final Note

The Backrooms is, at its core, a film about the danger of accepting the wrong place as home.
Clark does not die fighting.
He dies settling.
That is the thing that stayed with me, long after the lights came up and the teenagers filed out talking fast and loud and alive.
Not the monsters.
Not the maze.
The settling.

Published: June 2026
Film: The Backrooms (2026) | Director: Kane Parsons | Screenplay: Will Soodik
Distributor: A24 | Rating: R (US) | Runtime: 105 minutes
Production: Atomic Monster · 21 Laps Entertainment · Chernin Entertainment
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor · Renate Reinsve · Mark Duplass · Finn Bennett · Lukita Maxwell
Korean Distribution: By4M Studio · Revive Contents