BACKROOMS — MOVIE REVIEW

🔥 The Headline

A 20-year-old YouTuber makes his feature film debut with a $10 million budget through A24 — and promptly shatters the studio's all-time opening weekend record with $85M+ domestic and $118M worldwide in just three days.

This is not hype. This is not a fluke. Backrooms is the horror event of 2026. Full stop. 💀

🎥 Film Details

🌟 Cast

📖 The Story — What Is This Actually About?

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a man at complete rock bottom. Divorced. Failing furniture business. No direction. No hope. Then one ordinary day, behind an ordinary door in the basement of his ordinary store, he finds something that should not exist.

An endless maze of flickering fluorescent corridors. Stale yellow wallpaper stretching in every direction. Empty office spaces that go on forever. No exits. No logic. No other people. Just the low hum of broken lights and infinite, suffocating silence.

He disappears into it.

Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, notices he has vanished. And then — against every instinct of self-preservation — she goes in after him.

What follows is one of the most atmospherically terrifying films in recent memory. Halfway through the film, Clark describes the Backrooms like this: "It's like describing a dog to someone and asking them to draw it — they'd get the basics right, but the details would be off. And probably in a deeply unsettling way."

That one line is the entire film in a nutshell. 🟡

🎬 Direction — A 20-Year-Old Just Schooled Hollywood

Let's address the elephant in the room immediately. Kane Parsons is 20 years old. He is now the youngest filmmaker in cinema history to have a number one opening weekend — beating Josh Trank who was 27 when Chronicle opened in 2011.

He started as a YouTuber making creepypasta-inspired short films in his bedroom. A24 and Chernin Entertainment saw those videos and handed him a feature. The internet thought it was a gimmick. The box office has thoroughly disagreed.

What Parsons does that most horror directors twice his age cannot is weaponise emptiness. He understands that the true terror of liminal horror is not what lurks in the shadows — it is the endless, uncanny nothingness surrounding you. The flickering fluorescent lights. The corridors that seem to breathe. The rooms that should be familiar but feel cosmically wrong.

This is not a film that screams at you. It suffocates you. Slowly. Deliberately. Patiently. With complete conviction.

Critics have compared it to David Lynch's Lost Highway, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. For a debut feature. At 20. Let that land for a second. 🎯

Actor Mark Duplass quickly shut down any online rumours questioning Parsons' control on set, writing publicly:

💬 "When I was there, Kane was 100% in control — more so than many directors three times his age."

🌟 Performances — Chiwetel Ejiofor Carries This Film on His Back

Ejiofor is sensational here. Clark is a man whose broken-down life doesn't make sense to him anymore — and as he is drawn deeper into the Backrooms, Ejiofor communicates a quiet, devastating searching quality. He's not just scared. He's a man looking for meaning in a place that has none. The morosely bearded, hollowed-out performance is the kind of quiet greatness that awards bodies tend to overlook in horror films. They shouldn't.

Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline provides the film's emotional counterweight — warm, grounded, increasingly desperate — and the chemistry between the two as their paths converge deep inside The Complex is genuinely moving amidst all the dread.

Together they give Backrooms a human heart that stops it from becoming pure abstract art horror. You care about these people. Which makes being trapped in those corridors with them all the more terrifying. 💔

😱 The Horror — Does It Actually Scare?

Yes. But not in the conventional way.

There are no cheap jump scares here. No gore for shock value. No loud musical stings every five minutes to wake you up. Backrooms operates on a completely different frequency — it builds an atmosphere of festering, creeping wrongness that gets under your skin and stays there.

The monsters, when they finally arrive, are unlike anything in mainstream horror right now. Towering, distorted figures. Humans with several faces crumpled into themselves. Clark's own reflection turned into something ancient and broken. Parsons delivers these images with restraint — you don't see too much, too soon. Which makes every reveal land like a nightmare you can't shake.

Audiences in packed theatres have been visibly disturbed. Critics have described walking out into daylight and feeling briefly disoriented. That is the highest compliment you can pay a horror film. 😰

If you go in expecting a conventional rollercoaster — you may leave frustrated. If you surrender to its logic and let it pull you under — you will not sleep well tonight.

⚠️ The Honest Criticism — It's Not Perfect

No film this ambitious gets everything right, and Backrooms has its weak spots.

Clark's backstory — the divorce, his emotional wounds, his pre-Backrooms life — occasionally feels underwritten. The human drama in the real world doesn't fully match the extraordinary craft of what happens once he disappears. A few critics noted it reads like personal trauma written by someone who hasn't quite experienced enough of adult life yet. Which, at 20, is entirely forgivable — but noticeable.

Some audiences seeking a more conventional narrative structure will also find the film's deliberate pacing and resistance to easy explanation frustrating. Backrooms does not hold your hand. It does not explain itself. It trusts you to feel rather than understand — and not every viewer will be on board with that deal.

This is a remarkable debut, not a perfect film. There is a meaningful difference. 🎯

📊 The Box Office Madness

In three days, Backrooms outgrossed the entire worldwide lifetime of every other 2026 horror film — including 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, The Mummy, Iron Lung, and Send Help. Gen Z showed up like it was a Marvel event. And they brought everyone they know with them. 🚀

🌶️ What Critics Are Saying

💬 "A startlingly assured debut. Mesmerizing as it is terrifying." — Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus

💬 "A waking nightmare that prioritizes atmosphere over jump scares, suggestion over explication. Casts a surrealistic spell unlike anything else in contemporary cinema." — The Daily Beast

💬 "Parsons has created a virtual masterpiece. Each frame is carefully constructed to reveal frightening images that are nothing short of nerve-wracking." — FilmBook

💬 "You sit back and settle into the maze — knowing the film is going to keep raising your eyebrows." — Variety

💬 "Actually shockingly funny at times. There were moments clearly going for a laugh, and it hit." — Jeremy Jahns

💬 "The physical spaces are far more realised than the internal ones." — Seattle Refined (the lone dissenting voice)

📋 Final Scorecard

🎯 BACKROOMS is a once-in-a-generation debut from a filmmaker who has absolutely no business being this good at 20. It is not a conventional horror film — it is an experience. A sensory, psychological, deeply unsettling crawl through a world that feels fundamentally broken. Chiwetel Ejiofor is outstanding. The atmosphere is unlike anything in cinemas right now. The monsters will live in your head rent-free.

Go watch it on the biggest screen you can find. Bring a friend. You're going to want one. 🚪🟡💀

🎟️ Now Playing in Cinemas Everywhere 🏆 A24's Biggest Opening Weekend in 14-Year History 🚫 No OTT Date Announced — Big Screen Only For Now