It’s notable that both Kane Parsons, who directed Backrooms, and Curry Barker, of Obsession fame, started their film-making careers on YouTube making scary shorts. They’ve both come up with what are often described as the best horror movies of the year. In the case of Obsession that’s clearly true: there’s much screaming, ick and yuk. But what about Backrooms, and its psychologically chilly commentary on the bleakness of everyday existence in the urban environment?
Parsons says he was majorly influenced by the video game Portal, and his intro – a first person “player” running around a puzzle-platform scenario – makes that obvious. We’re inside a vast empty succession of empty rooms with a frightened man, close miked and breathing heavily. He’s afraid; we’re afraid. Parsons shoots it on lo-def old school video (or that’s the look) for maximum authenticity.
Cut to a hi-def Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect and now owner of a vast furniture shed. He’s in session with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) and a roleplay game is revealing the depth of Clark’s resentment against his wife. Who may have a point – she married an architect-in-training but got stuck with a man who makes adverts for his store dressed as a pirate. (His failing business is called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire and whenever Clark is asked what pirates and the Ottoman empire have to do with each other, he has no answer.)
One night, at the back of Clark’s store, where he is camping out having, presumably, been kicked out of the family home, he falls through a porous wall. And finds himself in the vast succession of rooms we saw in the film’s opening moments. The hideous yellow decor, the suspended ceiling, fluorescents flickering and humming.
This, largely, is the film, analogue tension and chills generated from atmosphere rather than events. At a certain point shrink Mary – another unfulfilled life – will be worked more properly into the story, and we learn a bit about her childhood growing up with a schizophrenic mother. Mark Duplass turns up as a scientist who has something to do with that other realm. Eventually Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and stoner boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) will enter Cap’n Clark’s realm, and the realm behind the realm, to find answers.
There are three visual aesthetics. The video game, the found footage of the “backrooms” world and what might be called the normal film-making of the real world of shrinks and furniture. Parsons is good at them all but, fascinatingly for a YouTube guy, best at the “real” film-making. Again and again he makes something out of nothing with precise placing of his camera – just off enough to unsettle without being obviously wonky is probably the best way to describe it. Kubrick was the master of this. Parsons is brilliant at it too.
Again, it’s Cube in the mix. And more recently Exit 8, Hokum or Skinamarink, films that go for a subjective, intensely psychological take on horror. “Hell is other people” as the saying goes – but it’s also yourself, if you’re lost.
Parsons constructs his film in surges, as if we’re always building towards an advertising break that might feature Cap’n Clark. After “the break”, Parson cuts to something unrelated, and starts building his surge again. The claustrophobic sound design by Eugenio Battaglia really helps. The score of drones, woos, echoes and tinkles by Parsons and Edo Van Breemen (who also did The Monkey for Osgood Perkins, a producer here) adds a hostage vibe.
The vast hinterland of the human unconscious as a vast unexplored space behind an already huge furniture warehouse. Without ruining things overly, Parsons gets more overt about his metaphor towards the end, subjecting the shrink to a bit of an ordeal, while also putting Clark through it as his id returns to wreak hideous revenge. All that bottled rage against his wife, and by extension all women, here it is manifesting in physical form.
You’ll never look at soft furnishing in the same way again. You’ll wonder if Parsons, aged 20 when he shot this, really is the new Stanley Kubrick – all those corridors. You’ll marvel at Reinsve and Ejiofor – a bit more arthouse than this, usually, but utterly committed. And you’ll probably utter an “Ooh, that’s good” here and there as Parsons works a new angle on found-footage material.
Best horror film of the year? Well, it’s not really a horror film. But yes.
Backrooms – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
