By Thomas M. Puhr.
Watching a character look around in bewildered awe as they first encounter the backrooms gets old pretty quick. How many times must we see someone gasp as a part of their body disappears into that basement wall?”
Splotchy, coagulated gray fills the screen. Is this an abstract painting, we wonder, or maybe a desolate alien landscape? The answer, it turns out, is far more mundane. When a little girl’s hand reaches out and presses into the surface, we recognize freshly laid concrete.
Time passes. The girl, now a woman, watches as construction workers demolish a frame house and smash its front driveway to pieces. A sledgehammer edges closer to the old handprint: the last remaining trace of the woman’s childhood home. Later, the hand—salvaged from the wreckage—will rest on her bedside table.
Through this early scene, director Kane Parsons introduces the thematic preoccupations that propel his much-hyped debut, Backrooms (2026). Architectural spaces don’t just factor in our memories, these images suggest; they also contain them—are molded by the impressions (both physical and psychical) we leave on them. Concurrently, our innerworlds—our minds, our souls—are being degraded by the same stark homogeneity that defines many of the locations (offices, shopping centers, apartment complexes) in which we live.
Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a has-been architect whose floundering business—a tacky furniture store named “Cap’n Clark’s”—becomes his new home when his wife kicks him out. One sleepless night, Clark makes a shocking discovery in the store’s basement: A nondescript wall contains a portal into the titular backrooms, a seemingly endless maze of beige-saturated interiors that feels—with its fluorescent lighting, anonymous furniture, and increasingly surreal design—like a hellish office space as imagined by M. C. Escher.
If the film’s first half belongs to Clark, then its second largely centers on his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve)—the woman who, as a child, left that handprint in the cement. These two characters nicely complement one another. Whereas Clark’s background is intentionally vague (outside of a photo, we never really see his wife), Mary’s is fleshed out through a series of brief, startling flashbacks to an adolescence spent locked in a house with her mentally ill mother. Both characters, then, associate their lives with the spaces they inhabit: Clark with his failing store, and Mary with her childhood home (even her self-help books, with their new-agey references to the “pathways” and “windows” in one’s life, conceptualize human consciousness as a physical place). The backrooms seem to embody Clark’s and Mary’s worst fears.
Besides a pair of Gen Z Cap’n Clark’s employees who provide some (unnecessary and awkward) comic relief, Clark and Mary are the only characters for much of the screentime. Not surprisingly, Ejiofor and Reinsve carry the project through even its spottier passages. It’s so exciting to see Ejiofor—all too often playing secondary characters in films like Children of Men (2006) or, more recently, The Old Guard 2 (2025)—take center stage in a major genre release, and Reinsve gives perhaps her best English-language performance yet. (Remember how criminally underused she was in the 2024 Apple miniseries Presumed Innocent?) In the film’s balls-to-the-wall, borderline absurdist final act, Reinsve also proves herself an exceptional scream queen.
Parsons and Soodik leave many interpretive avenues open for discussion. Do the backrooms represent the characters’ disordered, fragmented mental states? Are they a commentary on our tech-saturated times?”
Of course, the backrooms is the real star of the show. What is this place, and why does Cap’n Clark’s lead into it? Besides its implication that the structure is somehow sentient—that it feeds off its occupants’ memories and rearranges itself accordingly—Will Soodik’s script mostly avoids trying to explain what’s best left uncanny. Instead, it gives the characters (and us) time to wander the liminal space and marvel at its beautiful, unsettling illogic. Danny Vermette’s production design—hallways become narrower and narrower, culminating in tiny funhouse doors; a pyramid-like structure of furniture sits in the center of an otherwise empty room; pieces of chairs, clothing, and even people are embedded in floors and walls—demands a big-screen experience in itself.
Nevertheless, the script—which is adapted from Parsons’s hit viral series of the same name[i]—is not without some narrative clunkiness. Watching a character look around in bewildered awe as they first encounter the backrooms gets old pretty quick. How many times must we see someone gasp as a part of their body disappears into that basement wall? (The answer, according to Soodik, seems to be three.) And a subplot involving Mark Duplass as a mysterious government worker monitoring the backrooms feels wholly unnecessary: an attempt, late in the runtime, to impose something like logic (or worse, lore) on the space’s inexplicable existence.
Parsons and Soodik leave many interpretive avenues open for discussion. Do the backrooms represent the characters’ disordered, fragmented mental states? Are they a commentary on our tech-saturated times? (It’s hard not to think of AI slop when observing the space’s clunky attempts at replicating objects from the real world.) Or—and I think this is the most appealing, if despairing, interpretation—do they embody the fear that regardless of which “pathway” you choose in this life, it’ll end up more or less resembling all the other options?
They say that when God closes a door, he opens a window. How depressing it would be to crawl through that window and tumble into a room identical to the one you just escaped.
Endnote
[i] Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the found footage YouTube videos so couldn’t tell you if fans will be satisfied with this adaptation.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.