There is something unsettling about an empty hallway that looks almost familiar but feels completely wrong. That discomfort is at the center of Backrooms, Kane Parsons’ feature adaptation of the internet horror phenomenon he created as Kane Pixels. What began as a series of eerie online videos becomes a much larger cinematic experience, using liminal spaces, sound, and isolation to explore what happens when a strange dimension begins reflecting the darkest parts of the human mind.
Set in 1990, the story follows Clark, a struggling furniture store owner dealing with financial problems and growing emotional isolation. While investigating a strange flickering light in the basement of his store, Clark accidentally “clips” through reality and falls into an endless maze of yellow walls, stained carpets, and buzzing fluorescent lights.
Clark quickly realizes that the space does not follow the rules of the world he knows. When he disappears, his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, eventually ventures into the Backrooms to find him. Her search reveals that the dimension is more than a spatial anomaly. It functions almost like a physical subconscious, where trauma, repressed anger, and misplaced memories can take form.
The deeper Dr. Kline travels into the maze, the more the environment begins reflecting the people trapped inside it. The strange entities that inhabit the space are not simply monsters. They appear to be the Backrooms’ broken attempts to reconstruct human beings from incomplete or distorted memories, giving them an uncanny, almost unfinished quality.
That idea also gives the characters a more personal reason to fear the maze. Their surroundings can manifest their failures and unresolved emotions, meaning escape is not simply about finding the right door. They are forced to confront parts of themselves they would rather leave behind.
Rather than relying on constant jump scares, Backrooms builds its horror around uncertainty. Empty corridors stretch into darkness, familiar spaces repeat themselves, and the constant hum of fluorescent lights becomes almost as threatening as whatever might be hiding beyond the next corner.
What Works âś…
Sound and Visual Atmosphere: Sound is one of the film’s biggest strengths. Parsons understands that an empty space does not need much to become frightening. The buzzing lights, distant noises, industrial drones, and stretches of silence create an atmosphere that rarely allows the audience to relax.
The cinematography works in much the same way. The Backrooms are deliberately repetitive, but small changes in lighting, movement, and perspective make even familiar locations feel unpredictable.
The Backrooms as a Physical Subconscious: The film’s expansion of the Backrooms mythology is most effective when it connects the strange environment to the characters’ psychology. Instead of being simply an endless maze, the dimension becomes a place where suppressed emotions and painful memories can take physical form.
This gives the setting a purpose beyond atmosphere. The maze becomes an extension of the characters themselves, forcing them to confront failures and emotions they have spent years avoiding. It is an interesting way to give the familiar liminal-space concept an emotional dimension without completely abandoning its mystery.
Strong Lead Performance: Chiwetel Ejiofor gives Clark a grounded emotional presence that prevents the character from becoming just another person wandering through a horror setting. His financial problems and personal isolation give his experience in the Backrooms a sense of tragedy.
Renate Reinsve is equally effective as Dr. Kline. Her performance brings a quiet determination to the character, allowing her to react to the increasingly strange environment without making the film’s more surreal moments feel exaggerated.
Unsettling Entity Design: The creatures that inhabit the Backrooms are some of the film’s most effective visual ideas. Rather than feeling like conventional monsters, they appear almost like corrupted attempts to recreate recognizable human beings.
The film also avoids showing too much too often, allowing the entities to remain threatening without becoming overly familiar.
Faithful Analog Aesthetic: The larger production does not completely smooth away the roughness that helped define the concept in the first place.
The grainy imagery, muted colors, fluorescent lighting, and 1990s setting preserve the unsettling quality that made the original Backrooms videos so effective.
Where It Falls Short ❌
The Middle Section Loses Momentum: The film’s atmosphere is strong enough to carry its slower sections, but the second act occasionally becomes repetitive. Spending extended periods watching the characters move through similar corridors creates the intended sense of disorientation, but it can also make the story feel like it is standing still.
The original short-form concept benefited from its brevity, while the feature has to sustain that idea for much longer. At times, the difference is noticeable.
Too Much Explanation: The mystery surrounding the Backrooms is part of what makes the concept so effective, so some of the film’s explanations feel less interesting than the unanswered questions.
The addition of research groups, psychological explanations, and rules surrounding the entities gives the story more structure, but it also removes some of the uncertainty that made the original material so compelling. The film is generally stronger when it lets the environment speak for itself.
⚖️ Final Verdict: 4/5
Backrooms successfully expands Kane Parsons’ internet horror concept into a feature without completely losing what made the original videos work. Its strongest qualities are its sound design, oppressive atmosphere, analog aesthetic, and the way it turns the Backrooms into more than an endless maze.
The idea of the dimension functioning as a physical subconscious gives the story an unexpected emotional layer, while the strange entities become extensions of its broken relationship with human memory. The pacing becomes uneven in the middle, and some of the mythology explains more than it needs to, but the central concept remains compelling.
