Young director Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube series comes to the big screen with A24’s Backrooms, exploring the eerie mundanity of liminal space through the internal turmoil of its original characters.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is Clark, a failed architect who now owns a furniture store. He’s divorced and harbors a lot of resentment for his ex-wife, something he’s exploring with his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), who’s battling a traumatic past of her own. 

When Clark discovers a strange light behind the wall in the basement of his store, he stumbles upon the Backrooms, a seemingly endless maze of yellow-wallpapered corridors and faintly buzzing fluorescent bulbs. 

He’s immediately drawn in, completely fascinated by the labyrinthine world, but the Backrooms contain a lot more than just odd furniture and architecture. Soon, Clark and Mary face external threats as they confront their internal demons.

For those not chronically online, the Backrooms spawned from an anonymous 4chan image of an empty Wisconsin store with yellow wallpaper, a drop ceiling, and fluorescent lights. The photo was later reposted along with a creepy caption about accidentally falling into a parallel world of infinite mundane space called the Backrooms. The concept went viral, and eventually, a 16-year-old Parsons created his first Backrooms short as a VFX experiment to test his Blender and After Effects skills. 

From there, Parsons developed the idea into a wildly popular YouTube series of Backrooms videos, exploring layers of lore about a company called Async accidentally creating the portal, doomed employees researching the seemingly infinite space, unsuspecting victims no-clipping into the Backrooms, and bizarre entities lurking around the corners. Parson’s series has amassed over 216 million views and spawned an entire ecosystem of theory videos, games, and lore analysis. 

While the web series builds on the conspiratorial aspects of Async research and external threats lurking in the space, the film focuses on the Backrooms as a representation of internal peril. 

Both Clark and Mary are flawed people carrying around their own painful memories, things they’ve locked away in the back rooms of their psyche. Clark is barely containing his rage toward his ex-wife, and Mary is doing her best to suppress a painful, isolated childhood with her mother, who suffered from severe mental health issues.

The backstories add depth to the characters, but can sometimes make the pace sputter to a halt. We’re presented with a fascinating liminal horror filled with mystery, danger, and intrigue, but we’re pulled away from all that tension and unease to explore character trauma that can occasionally feel predictable. 

Childhood abuse, alcoholism, and messy divorces are template backstories for troubled protagonists, and the way those painful pasts manifest in the bizarre world of the Backrooms felt a bit too expected. Even the framing of the underground space as a sort of dark, mirrored version of reality feels like it was explored more creatively in Jordan Peele’s Us. 

It’s difficult for Backrooms to balance the larger lore of the series with the more character-focused story presented in the script from Parsons and writer Will Soodik. While we get the occasional glimpse at the answers to some of our questions, the film very bluntly opens the door (or portal) to a potentially infinite realm of sequels or spin-offs through the use of Mark Duplass as an Async employee. 

But despite the narrative stumbles, there is a lot to love about the filmmaking aspects of Backrooms. 

The visuals are impressive, using the larger budget to elevate the found-footage aesthetic of the original short film and create a genuinely unsettling vibe. Production designer Danny Vermette, VFX supervisor Edward J. Douglas, and director of photography Jeremy Cox worked closely with Parsons on the design of the sets and lighting, and art director Alan Derksen and set decorator Trevor Johnston spent three months building 30,000 square feet of Backrooms across four separate soundstages for the film.

Since Parsons created the music for the original series himself, he also co-composed the film’s score with Canadian musician and immersive sound producer Edo Van Breemen. The music works well with the haunting sound of occasional distant footsteps breaking the quiet room tones of the uncanny parallel world, and creating an unsettling soundscape that builds visceral tension. Backrooms is at its strongest when it lets us marinate in that feeling, questioning every unentered doorway or unexplored room.

It may not be a flawless translation from YouTube phenomenon to feature film, but at just 20 years old, Parsons shows huge potential with Backrooms. With Curry Barker’s record-breaking Obsession, Markiplier’s Iron Lung, and even Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, the YouTuber-to-horror-filmmaker pipeline could supply the next wave of cinematic storytellers.