“Backrooms” Takes the Box Office with Vibes, Character, and Intrigue

Fluorescent lights, carpeted floors, generic wallpaper, windowless rooms with nooks and crannies, and endless hallways with flickering lights. No, I’m not describing my grandparents’ basement—it’s the setting for the psychological horror film Backrooms, recently released by A24.

The film’s up-and-coming director, Kane Parsons, first gained recognition on YouTube with his channel Kane Pixels. He created a short film titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) in 2022, at the age of 17, inspired by images he saw on Instagram of liminal spaces that depicted eerie and surreal environments reminiscent of abandoned offices from the 1990s. These initial images were known in online spaces as “the Backrooms,” and the idea was that they were extradimensional spaces that you could stumble upon by accidentally entering through invisible doorways, similar to glitching outside of an environment in a video game. Parsons used the 3D and digital effects software Blender and Adobe After Effects to build digital renderings of the Backrooms environment to showcase in his short film. The video quickly gained popularity on his channel and led to him creating more videos and building out an entire web series.

Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark in Backrooms. A24

One year after the original short film, A24 announced that Parsons would be directing a feature-length film based on the series; it would be produced by James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring), Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, The Monkey), and Shawn Levy (Arrival, Stranger Things). With that all-star producing lineup and a $10 million budget, Parsons was given a dream scenario for his feature-length directorial debut.

If you’re not familiar with the original content on YouTube, I would highly recommend waiting until after seeing this film to watch the original series. The less you know, the more memorable the experience you will have with this movie.

The premise is simple: We follow a furniture store owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), as he’s struggling to keep his business and personal life afloat. One night after a power outage at his store, Clark finds an entrance to a liminal space outside of reality and begins to explore it. He drags others into the mystery, including his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve). As they traverse this alternate dimension, they come across odd and dangerous anomalies that challenge everything they know about the reality they live in.

Renate Reinsve as Mary. A24

The most impressive part about Backrooms is how atmospheric it feels. It stands up to films like The Shining, Annihilation, and The Lighthouse when it comes to making me feel like I’m in the spaces of a movie. The surreal setting seemed so familiar, yet so foreign. I could practically feel the texture of the carpet on my feet and the wallpaper on my fingertips. It truly did bring me back to my grandparents’ basement with one long, dark hallway, multiple branching rooms, and a large open space full of old junk and memories. It also brought me back to my job as a real estate photographer, snapping images of empty office buildings waiting to be inhabited again.

The biggest reason behind why the film’s setting feels so tangible might be because most of the spaces were built practically. The production team built more than 30,000 square feet of sets, which allowed the actors to explore and move through the environment. In the modern era of green screens and CGI, this approach shows the lengths a young filmmaker was willing to go to create a fully immersive and authentic world for his actors and audience. I was impressed by how far he expanded the liminal space that was represented in the trailer—it really felt like a maze of rooms where I had no idea what would be around the next corner.

Backrooms in production. A24

One aspect of the film that might go overlooked is the subtle, but powerful, character building. It spends a lot less screen time on exploring the characters than on exploring the setting, but that doesn’t mean that these moments aren’t just as impactful to the story. Chiwetel Ejiofor does an amazing job at portraying Clark, a man who’s struggling after a recent separation from his wife. The few scenes with him in therapy are brief but do a great job at showcasing his personality, faults, and trauma in a short amount of time.

When it comes to his therapist, Mary, we see visually driven flashbacks of her as a child dealing with her mom’s mental health. There’s not much dialogue in these scenes, which forces you to piece things together on your own. This is another effective way Parsons immerses his audience into the story. I appreciate how grounded and relatable the main characters’ struggles are, focusing on things like anger, loneliness, and selfishness opposed to the overdone and obvious trope of dealing with grief from a loved one’s death.

A24

Backrooms also evokes the mundane routine that so many people feel throughout their daily lives. Whether it’s at work or in our personal lives, many of us feel the suffocation of wanting to switch things up or try something new, but the society we’ve built makes it hard to do that. We cherish weekends and vacation, just to be thrust back into mundaneness after experiencing those brief moments of reprieve. The repetitive nature of this film’s setting creates a sense of being trapped and isolated, an exaggeration of the feelings many of us have on a daily basis.

A24

It’s not often that a horror film from a young director is that successful at the box office, but Backrooms had the largest opening weekend ever for a movie distributed by A24 and has now made more than $130 million domestically. It demolished the previous leader, Alex Garland’s Civil War, which made $25.5 million in its opening weekend in 2024. Kane Parsons has also become the youngest director to have a number-one film at the North American box office, at the age of 20. This success comes right after another horror hit this year created by a YouTuber, Curry Baker’s Obsession, which has grossed over $150 million domestically since its release in early May. If the following both of these creators have with their YouTube content is what’s getting people to come see their films in the theater, this is a huge shift in strategy when it comes to making movies and establishing directors. It’s very exciting as a film buff to see original content actually compete with the traditional box office successes created for kids and families.

A24

Backrooms exceeded everything I was hoping for when I first saw the trailer, which does not happen often. It kept me guessing throughout the entire story, and I was pleasantly surprised by all of the twists and turns. This is the exact type of movie that I love to experience and share with others, and I know it will be a top contender for my favorite movie of 2026.