Crew
Director – Kane Parsons, Screenplay – Will Soodik, Based on the Backrooms Web Series by Kane Parsons, Producers – Kori Adelson, Peter Chernin, Michael Clear, Dan Cohen, Chris Ferguson, Dan Levine, Shawn Levy, Robert Patino, Osgood Perkins, Jenno Topping & James Wan, Photography – Jeremy Cox, Music – Kane Parsons & Edo Van Breemen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edward J. Douglas, Visual Effects – Barnstorm Visual Effects (Supervisor – Hannes Poser), CoSA VFX (Supervisors – Brian Fisher & Tom Mahoney), Mr. Wolf VFX Inc. (Supervisor – John Pierce), Roxel Creative (Supervisor – Calvin Romeyn), Stormborn VFX (Supervisor – Goran Pavles) & Zoic Studios (Supervisor – Edwin Rivera), Special Effects Supervisor – Ole Veznia, Makeup Effects – Amazing Ape Productions (Designer – Werner Pretorious), Production Design – Danny Vermette. Production Company – 21 Laps/Atomic Monster/Phobos Productions.
Cast
Chiwetel Ejiofor (Clark), Renate Reinsve (Dr Mary Kline), Lukita Maxwell (Kat Taylor), Finn Bennett (Bobby Franklin), Mark Duplass (Matt), Ava Jogia (Naren Warne), Robert Bobroczyki (Pirate Clark), Krista Kosonen (Nora Kline)
Plot
Clark owns the Capt. Clark’s Ottoman Empire furniture store in Santa Clarita. Puzzling over the random power fluctuations in the building, Clark touches a wall in the basement area and is startled to find that he can pass right through it. He finds himself in a vast labyrinth of offices, hallways and other rooms built on a strange, akilter design scheme. Exploring the backrooms area, he discovers that there is something else in there with him. He brings his two employees Bobby and Kat back with a video camera to chart the backrooms, but things go wrong.
The Backrooms is an internet phenomenon that started on /x/, one of the boards at 4chan devoted to dealing with the paranormal. In 2019, someone posted an eerie image of a room with the familiar lemon-coloured interior that had been taken in an empty furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 2003. Following the posting of the image, several creepypastas grew up around this. In 2022, sixteen-year-old Kane Parsons, the son of a visual effects artist, used the open-source 3D graphics software Blender to produce a nine-minute film he called Found Footage (2022), involving a walk-through based on the Backrooms space and encounter with its unworldly denizens. Since then, Parsons has made twenty-four other Backrooms films, ranging from less than a minute to 45 minutes in length. These can be found under the YouTube channel Kane Pixels and have accrued some 197 million views between them. Through these, Parsons expands the mythology of the Backrooms from the video-camera equipped explorers to the employees at the company Async who are trying to study the phenomenon.
Backrooms comes backed with some impressive names on the credits. It is produced by no less than director James Wan and his Atomic Monster production company, director Osgood Perkins of Longlegs (2024) fame, and Shawn Levy and his 21 Laps production company. And it is distributed by the prestigious arthouse releasing company A24.
Here the now twenty-one-year-old Kane Parsons makes his feature-length directorial debut (becoming the youngest director to ever have a No 1 box-office hit around the world). Parsons gets to expand the idea with name actors. Where Parsons’ original backrooms were created digitally, he was given a budget of around $10 million when it came to the film, allowing the physical construction of 30,000 square feet of sets on four soundstages in Vancouver. Apparently, some 37,000 square feet of wallpaper and 29,000 square feet of carpet was used during the production.
Backrooms becomes uniquely disquieting from the moment that Chiwetel Ejiofor pushes his hand through the wall in the store basement and ends up in the backrooms. The landscape of the backrooms with its ever-present lemon-yellow colour scheme is eerily alienating – a Stop sign printed in reverse standing in the midst of a hallway; doors constructed in roofs; alcoves that narrow in a wedge shape to reach tiny dwarf doors; a room with shoes standing upright embedded in the carpet, or other rooms with couches and furniture buried in the midst of floors and walls. There is something unsettling as we go deeper into the labyrinth – endless regular offices but empty of people where dividers go nowhere; wall cabinets that extend the entire length of a hall; rooms of low-hanging chandeliers; a bathroom that feels more like a boiler room with a bath filled with bubbling water. And then the very uncanny scene where Renate Reinsve sits down with Chiwetel Ejiofor at a dinner table in a room where people are misshapen with multiple eyes and, as he reveals, seem to be made of rice, which he then serves up to eat.
I tried to think of what the precedents for Backrooms are. There have been other works about buildings with strange topographical features such as Last Year in Marienbad (1961), The Shining (1980), Cube (1997) and especially its sequel Cube2: Hypercube (2002), the motel room in the very unique tv mini-series The Lost Room (2006), some of Something in the Dirt (2022) and the recent Exit 8 (2025). You could extend this to alien topographical landscapes that appear in works like Stalker (1979), Annihilation (2018), In the Tall Grass (2019) and Portals (2019). Even before Backrooms premiered, there had been low-budget copies of the concept with Amityville Backrooms (2024) and The Frontrooms (2024).
What Backrooms made think of most of all was the hotel room in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – in particular, Arthur C. Clarke’s novelisation of the film where he has a great description of it as being a hotel room that has been constructed by someone who had only seen ever pictures of what it should look like. Although the classic work on eerie liminal spaces was Mark Dainielsky’s book House of Leaves (2000) about the documentation of a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Another work that I was reminded of was the book There is No Antimemetics Division (2020) by qntm – both that and Backrooms have the eerie sense of being in an alien mental space where the rules of the regular world no longer seem to operate.
The topography and sheer weirdness has a compulsive fascination. You watch the film to keep seeing what it turns up next. Perhaps the interesting thing is that though Backrooms is a film expanded from the web series, almost the entire film is an extended versions of one of the clips. The clips are little more than ventures inside the backrooms and encounters with the uncanny with no to few characters. The film adds the characters of Chiwetel Ejiofor and his divorce issues and psychologist Renate Reinsve and her flashbacks to her childhood (about which we never realise the significance) but essentially the entire film is the same exploration of the alien world.
We do get sort of explanation for the backrooms from Mark Duplass at the end (that is more questions and “we don’t know”s than it offers answers), as well as the scene where Chiwetel Ejiofor speculates about people being remembered with less effectiveness each time – something we see in the unsettling fade out image and its replications of the furniture store and characters. But for the most part the disturbingly off-kilter world that Kane Parsons creates just is without the need for any explanations.
Trailer here