One night, a furniture store owner discovers a hidden room behind one of his showroom walls. That hidden backroom leads to another, and another, and yet another room. Some rooms are barren. Others have piles of furniture, but arranged in a very peculiar manner. One room has a traffic stop sign, but the word “STOP” is spelled backward. Some rooms have doors, others have hallways that narrow and expand. The rooms are endless, and the deeper the store owner explores, the more questions he gathers and the fewer answers he finds.

Backrooms, the feature-length directorial debut of Kane Parsons, offers a premise fit for a Haruki Murakami novel. Who built these rooms, and who put these things in there? Are they really endless? Is that possible? And, of course, who else is here?

But while Murakami sends his protagonist down wells and into parallel dimensions in search of something particular—a lost cat, a vanishing girl—Parsons sends his store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), through these endless rooms with no motive beyond exploration. And because the longer you inhabit an empty space, the greater the tension for the moment when something else occupies the space with you. Parsons captures both, but forgets the resolution. There is no ending to Backrooms, only more backrooms.

Parsons—who came to prominence with his YouTube short, 2022’s The Backrooms (Found Footage)—seems to be more interested in cinema’s voyeurism than the medium’s ability to illuminate. Based on the opening scene’s first-person POV and the way the camera hovers behind Clark as he explores the backrooms, video games are a clear inspiration.

Still, there is something devious about Backrooms’ structure. The screenplay, written by Will Soodik, gives the characters just enough backstory to make their pull to exploration believable. Clark, a middle-aged man with a drinking problem and a string of mistakes behind him, is a dropout architect with a mind for design. As he explores the backrooms, Clark maps them out in an attempt to make sense of something that cannot be grasped. This grasping is echoed in his therapy sessions with Mary (Renate Reinsve), who makes Clark replay the same moment over and over again in hopes he might see the instance when he went left instead of right. But Clark goes left every time. You can’t change the past. Sometimes you can’t even understand it.

That sets the backrooms up to be a physical manifestation of an emotional experience. But Parsons never quite settles on any one thing for the backrooms. New developments and twists provide jump scares, but they also reduce a complex labyrinth into a traditional house of horrors.

It isn’t spoiling things to say the backrooms Clark discovers is a labyrinth of his own making. Well, sort of. Mary goes looking for Clark and finds her way into the backrooms, only to encounter her own past, while another, Phil (Mark Duplass), monitors them both and— I really shouldn’t say. Hell, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

What the backrooms mean depends on what you want them to mean. I don’t think there’s a more concrete answer beyond that. They are impressive—hats off to production designer Danny Vermette, art director Alan Derksen, and set decorator Trevor Johnston for making the backrooms look like M.C. Escher designed an office building, and your grandmother wallpapered it in yellow chevrons and flowers.

Backrooms is fascinating—frustrating, sure, but fascinating nonetheless. There’s some psychology at work thanks to the relationship between Clark and Mary, but I’m not buying it. It feels too convenient to exist in a world where anything convenient should be dealt with a healthy amount of concern. That might be the hole at the center of Backrooms, the one that leaves me at the movie’s closing image with a “Huh” instead of the chill Parsons intends.

Backrooms (2026)
Directed by Kane Parsons
Screenplay by Will Soodik
Based on the series by Kane Parsons
Produced by Kori Adelson, Peter Chernin, Michael Clear, Dan Cohen, Chris Ferguson, Dan Levine, Shawn Levy, Kane Parsons, Roberto Patino, Osgood Perkins, Jenno Topping, James Wan
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell
A24, Rated R, Running time 110 minutes, Opens May 29, 2026

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