Kane Parsons turns a viral creepypasta into a Lynchian fable about the urge to stop feeling. Which is why Backrooms is this summer’s smartest horror.
Every furniture showroom is already a haunted house. I learned this young, trailing a parent through the Sunday cathedral of a big-box store, past staged bedrooms where some imaginary family slept, kitchen tables laid for a dinner that belonged to strangers, bowls of plastic fruit gleaming under panel light. You wander those rooms and rehearse a life. You picture yourself in the leather recliner, finally happy. Then you walk out with your hands empty and drive home to the furniture you actually own.
Kane Parsons knows this feeling in his bones, and Backrooms — his astonishing, exhausting, deeply strange debut — turns that exact ache into a doorway.
A wall, a store, and a 20-year-old who already owns this aesthetic
Parsons is 20, which makes him the youngest director of an A24 feature, and he built this film out of the KanePixels web series he started uploading at 16. In fact, the premise descends from a 2019 creepypasta: one snapshot of an emptied-out office, expanded by a forum into a vision of hell as infinite fluorescent vacancy. Eventually, A24 saw the 190 million views and handed him a budget. He spent it like a craftsman.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a divorced furniture-store owner who simmers over the wreckage his life has become. For example, he sleeps in the store he runs, Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and hawks it in TV spots dressed as a pirate who keeps confusing himself for a sultan. He sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (a wonderfully patient Renate Reinsve), and the two rehearse the night his wife threw him out, trading lines in a role-play that curdles every time he reaches the part where he was drunk and broke the glass.
So one evening, chasing a fault in the store’s wiring, Clark drifts toward a wall and straight through it, into a yellow, carpeted, bottomless elsewhere that copies his store and keeps copying, room after room after room.
(Warning: Minor spoilers for Backrooms ahead)
What the film reaches for
Parsons sets the whole thing in the 1990s Bay Area, and that choice does heavy lifting. From my own window in Silicon Valley, the gag lands with a chill. This is a region that turns the unknowable into a product line, monetizes the uncanny, and ships the result as slop. Backrooms understands that impulse from the inside.
The film’s clearest statement of purpose shows up as dialogue, when a researcher named Phil (Mark Duplass, all rumpled menace) explains that the place remembers the real world. And that the more often it remembers a thing, the worse the copy grows. A man in a striped shirt becomes a man in a striped shirt rendered slightly wrong. Copies of copies, sanded down toward garbage.
The film’s genius move ties that idea to self-loathing. Clark eventually marvels that the warped figures down there feel past feeling. They hold no thoughts, no pain, no ego, no fear, and he envies them with his whole chest. “They simply exist,” he says, “like furniture.” A furniture salesman, peddling the dream of comfort to first-time homeowners, wanders into a realm of things that have surrendered the burden of feeling. And he wants to stay.
The AI-slop reading of this film and the trauma reading of this film turn out to be one reading. The degraded copy that escapes pain is the dissociated self that escapes pain, which is the algorithm that escapes meaning. All three describe the same yearning: to go quiet, to go blank, to become object. Mary spends the movie naming the neural pathway Clark wears smooth. It’s the loop that keeps him pushing people away so they leave before they can wound him. Backrooms simply gives that loop a floor plan and lets him move in.
How well it lands
Mostly, gloriously well. Ejiofor anchors the film with a morose, boozy gravity that earns every detour. You follow him into the murk because his hunger for catharsis reads as your own. Reinsve grounds the surface world with a therapist’s wary stillness, and her scenes with Ejiofor give the dread a human stake.
The craft astonishes for the money on screen. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox conjure the camcorder grain digitally, in Blender — the free tool Parsons learned on YouTube — and the trick reads as completely physical.
Similarly, the production design convinces you that you stand inside this place, breathing its mildew. Parsons shares early David Lynch‘s love of industrial sound and the menace of faulty electricity. In other words, he wrings true terror from the simple fact of enclosure. One second-act descent on a rope, into a sublevel of stacked laundry and wet dark, ranks among the scariest sustained sequences I expect to meet in a theater all year.
Parsons borrows openly, and I respect the honesty of it. The found-footage handheld nods to The Blair Witch Project; the social-allegory dread descends from Night of the Living Dead; the level-to-level architecture plays like Resident Evil rendered as art film, each doorway a new stage in a video game you slowly realize wants you lost. Still, he executes that emulation with real fluency.
Ultimately, the film only falters when it tightens bolts the dream wanted left loose: a few stretches linger past the point where mood becomes endurance, and the screenplay occasionally pays off an object or a clue with a neatness that sits oddly against all that beautiful mystery.
Bottom line
To that end, the script works best when it trusts the fog and lets us do the explaining. The film aptly recurs to a lovely image for his own method. Describing the place feels like describing a dog to someone who has only heard the word. And then they have to draw the dog with the right number of legs and everything else askew. The film thrives whenever it keeps drawing that wrong, haunted dog and resists the urge to explain more.
Credit a strong team for steadying a young director: a deep producer bench, an editor and composer who hold the tone, collaborators who clearly mentored Parsons through it all. Because of this, the result carries an almost altruistic generosity. Because it’s a movie that wants to give you a genuine experience rather than a content delivery.
Backrooms, likes Obsession just weeks before it, proves that a kid from YouTube can walk into the multiplex and out-think nearly everyone there about the exact anxiety eating their generation alive. Yes, it runs long and tidies a few things it should leave ragged. But still, it remains, beat for beat, the smartest and most felt horror film of the early summer. Pair it with Obsession for a double feature that announces a whole new class of filmmakers. The ones saying things about this moment that the rest of us still struggle to phrase.
Backrooms is now playing in theaters. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of A24. Cover image artwork by Jon Negroni.
