Release Date: 28 May 2026
Directed By: Kane Parsons
Run Time: 110 min
REVIEW
What’s going on? Why is Hollywood making the best horror films right now?
Hollywood is meant to turn up late, copy what someone else did, balls it all up and sweep up all the undeserved money. Whatever happened to studios snapping up young talent only to strip them of any originality or individuality? Stupid, stupid A24.
Still carrying the whiff of the womb, director Kane Parsons is younger than YouTube and managed to master that platform with his Backrooms series – itself based on a single photograph. Now, he’s graduated to big school and what a first year project he’s made!
Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a frustrated architect running a failing furniture superstore. Separated from his wife and dealing with it badly via fractious meetings with his shrink, Mary (played by Renate Reinsve), Clark is now living in the store, bitterness gnawing away at him.
Adding to his frustrations is the appearance of three mysteriously wonky breakers on the store’s switchboard, which leads Clark to a freaky discovery in the basement. Meanwhile, Mary is increasingly out of touch with her surroundings, flirting with success but haunted by what may be dreams or memories of her obliterated childhood.
Overwhelmingly, this is a film that, like many recent studio releases, balances weight and fun in a way that manifests all sorts of scares. Where Weapons had a neat use of the uncanny, Backrooms’ entire first half relies on the ordinary looking not quite right.
Even the town in which Clark and Mary live seems off-balance somehow, augmented by the desiccated, pastel anonymity of early 90s’ suburban decor. To say nothing of the increasingly wyrd backrooms themselves. It’s a tangy mix of Stepford Wives, Punishment Park and Lynch that never feels crass.
However, for all that dressing, the visceral, emotional fun of a horror movie is there, almost throughout the film’s entirety. Parsons gleefully ratchets things up and wants to give us big scares and payoffs, which he does in spades.
The film’s set design and lighting have been rightly praised. It’s such a refreshing change and one that pays off emotionally as we’re put off balance throughout by their combined melding of conformity and anarchy, turning the asinine into pure threat.
Ejiofor and Reinsve anchor the film beautifully, especially when discovering the backrooms in two long, near-silent sequences. Both are the sort of reliable, grounded presences we need for such oddities.
There are things in Backrooms that look and sound like a twenty-year-old made it: he’s an architect! She’s a psychologist! Meaningful! Y’know what? Fine.
Is Parsons’ handling of the movie’s themes of loneliness and alienation callow and underwritten, or is he repurposing the backrooms’ liminal spaces as blank canvases for our own interpretations? Genuinely uncertain, but crucially, even when Backrooms threatens to explain itself, pay attention, and it never fully does. That’s smarter than fortysomething David Gordon Green ramming Halloween Kills’ pretentious, dunderheaded social ‘satire’ down your throat.
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