Backrooms (Photo – A24)
If you ever come across a wall you can walk through, think twice before you do.
Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
This is one lesson taught by Backrooms, a new horror film that is the kind I like: one that disdains the tedious slasher and overworked body-horror aspects of the genre and goes for something atmospheric, creepy, and even artistic.
Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its fair share of shocks.
The Backrooms in question are those underneath a discount furniture store named Captain Clark’s, located in Santa Clara in 1999. The eponymous store owner, Clark, has, in addition to his personal problems, financial ones that oblige him to sleep in the store basement, which is plagued by strange electrical issues.
Clark (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) sees a narrow vertical strip of light one night on a wall, a light with no apparent source. His hands, pressed against the wall, meet no resistance.
On the wall’s other side, he explores a labyrinth of low-ceilinged rooms. They are lit with bright, insomniac yellow light, with furniture sometimes jumbled together or isolated without any context. He walks, stoops, crawls, and finally returns to the spot on the wall that allows him to pass back into the “real world.”
“Have you ever had to 5150 someone?” he subsequently asks his therapist, Doctor Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who has her own issues. She listens with as much sympathy as she can summon, but he storms out, aware that she’s no help. When he apparently vanishes, she goes to the store, finds the same passage, and has the same kind of experiences.
The director, Kane Parsons, frequently uses a hand-held camera and tight third-person shots to create an atmosphere both claustrophobic and labyrinthine. References to other films may have been deliberate, instinctual, or just me. Some shots had an austere distancing effect that suggested Stanley Kubrick or Michelangelo Antonioni. Other times I felt as if I were watching something like The Blair Witch Project run through the sensibility of an artist like M.C. Escher.
There was an eerie precision to the set dressing and the quality of the lighting, and special mention must be made of the spooky ambient soundtrack composed by the director and Edo Van Breemen.
I felt there was an underlying point to the movie. Toward the film’s end, a technician who is investigating and mapping the Backrooms confesses that he succeeds only to “the best of my abilities,” which to me suggested that even the most sophisticated attempts at reproduction—or at capturing the essence of another being—have pitfalls. A shadow falls between subject and object. The idea of “as above, so below” isn’t as easy as it sounds.
This is how I interpreted the various dead gulls and feathers that litter the Backrooms’ hallways, as if the filmmakers were asking how a subterranean consciousness could faithfully capture the essence of something that flies. One character notes the difficulty of describing a dog to “someone who’s never seen a dog and then have them draw it.”
Films like this, or like Mulholland Drive (and the late David Lynch might also be an influence), are what delight me most about cinema: the chance to see something that feels new.
It’s not too early to begin compiling a list of the best films of 2026.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, Regency Academy Cinemas, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, Regal UA La Canada, and Laemmle Glendale.
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