Backrooms

Out On A Liminal

Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons
USA/Canada 2026 
A24

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Okay... so I finally caught up with this year’s successful horror(ish) movie Backrooms. It’s based on a viral and free youtube series, called The Backrooms, also written by Kane Parsons who, at the young age of 19, directed this feature film reboot (or possibly a continuation but focusing on different characters) and giving A24 what is, to date, their most successful movie. So I guess we’ll be seeing more of these... especially since it’s predicted that a trend in modern horror movie releases seem to be following this route of ‘liminal horror’... which I’m not 100% quite understanding but I think I get the vibe of it, right enough. 

The film stars the great Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark who, honestly, is always a joy to watch but I found the American accent he’s putting on for this totally changed the way I responded to him. I dunno, I seemed to have less respect for him with that accent but, given the path the character takes by the end of the movie, perhaps that’s just as well. The film also stars Renate Reinsve as Mary, his psychiatrist and, the plot is as follows...

Set in 1990, Clark, who has been kicked out by his wife and now lives in his unsuccessful furniture store... Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire... is having problems not with just the lack of customers but, also, various power outages and manifestations within the store. Then, one night, he finds a part of a wall in a basement which one can just magically pass through into... the backroooms. A bizarre, somewhat minimal and extremely surreal, vast place which is very unsettling and, as we find out, can be very deadly to anyone who gets lost wandering its corridors. On another trip into the realm, Clark takes his cameraman employee said cameraman's girlfriend (who both work at the store), played by Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, to document things so he can prove to his psychiatrist he’s not mad. None of them make it out of the place on this journey in and so, when he disappears, Mary goes looking for him herself and... also stumbles on to the portal... where she also finds herself wandering the backrooms. 

And... it’s genuinely terrifying. For me anyway. I’ve talked to at least one person who didn’t find it scary at all and I can certainly understand that... it’s not full on jump scares and so on. There is a small amount goriness though and the absolute suspense of waiting to see what’s lurking around the next corner is going to affect people differently. And even though I was onto the director’s old, clichéd trick of showing something terrible happening in the opening sequence so the audience can fill in the blanks and know, before the main protagonists do, that there is something to fear in this environment... it still worked for me and I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film. 

One of the unsettling things about it is the surreal nature of the objects and creatures populating these spaces. They have been created by a force which doesn’t quite get things right. It immediately, when Clark first grabs a chair which is fused into another, made me think of the great Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, where the manifestation of the dead wife doesn’t have buttons on her replicated dress. In this movie it’s explained by the idea of describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then having them draw it. It’s pretty cool and I’m glad people are revisiting this kind of concept. 

And, when Mary finally finds Clark in the warren of backrooms... things take a turn and are ramped up quite a bit. It’s here that the film reaches the height of surrealism and ultimate nastiness, as we try to reframe the main protagonists and their relationship to reality. All leading to a conclusion which some people have found a little unsatisfying but I thought the film did land the ending quite well. So, nope, not everything... or anything for that matter... is explained at the end of the film but, if the writer/director had done that (and I don’t think he would want to or even knows what’s going on himself) then I don’t think you could get away with the inevitable sequel... which I’m sure this film will have. This is clearly going to start a franchise (plus be a figurehead for liminal horror for the future) and I can’t see that launching very successfully if everything were tied up in a neat little package by the end of the first film. You need something for the audience to come back to otherwise... well, otherwise they won’t. 

So that’s me done with what was, for me, a truly unsettling movie (I’m glad to say). Backrooms perhaps deserves all the fuss and box office breaking popularity its received and I’d give this one a hard recommend.