Bay Area content creator Kane Parsons pushes back on conventional storytelling, and his hypnotic approach results in one of 2026’s most exhilarating debuts, a existential head trip that GoPros us into a human subconscious besieged by misshapen memories that trap and hold you hostage.
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Painful shards from the past cut deep and take on nightmarish properties in the titular Escher-like “backrooms,” hidden behind a basement wall at an underperforming 1990s San Jose furniture store. It is there that emotionally stunted, rage-roiled store owner Clark (Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor) makes his memorable journey. He’s a defensive single guy bemoaning the death of a relationship while shouldering a twilighting Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire business he owns. After exploring those backrooms himself, he persuades two 20something shop assistants (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) to enter the mouth of madness where room upon room vibe to the strangeness of David Lynch’s Red Room from “Twin Peaks.”
The yellow-ish, claustrophobic spaces and serpentine corridors they stumble around in are often spartan but contain cluttered piles of discarded furniture, clothing and more. Freakier than all that is a menacing unseen but very vocal entity that walks loudly and can make the blood run cold. Production designer Danny Vermette created these escape rooms, which align to the dark spirit of director Jonathan Glazer, Tod Browning and, of course, Lynch and Stephen King, the landscape of purgatory-like nightmares. But this is no copycat even if it does shadowbox with the same freaky, trapped circumstances of Genki Kawamura’s “Exit 8,” and other works identified with liminal spaces genre.
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Parsons’ hugely popular viral 22-volume YouTube “Backrooms” creepypasta web series serves as the creative mojo for screenwriter Will Soodik (“Westworld”), and both have chosen not to clutter the film with dense slabs of explanatory dialogue, and it’s all the better for it. They clearly trust their audience to sift through the meaning and mythology of “Backrooms” and debate about it afterwards. (The sound design, visual and special effects, and particularly the eerie soundtrack from Parsons and Edo Van Breemen accentuate and stimulate the strangeness.) The conduit for exploring what influenced Clark’s shaky mental state comes in the form of the seemingly calm and put-together therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve, an Oscar nominee for “Sentimental Value”), author of the self-help tome “The Window Within.” Telling more than that spoils what happens. And even though the film’s third act works from a psychological and thematic standpoint, it doesn’t quite zap you with scares. No matter. “Backrooms” is like a psychological Rubik’s Cube you’re trying your darndest to figure out. It’s worth all the mental gymnastics. Ejiofor and Reinsve keep pace with the material and are both ever so facile at bringing to life two characters who are more and less than what they seem. “Backrooms” keeps you off balance but one thing is clear — Kane Parsons is enormously talented and a voice we’ll be hearing from in the years to come. An extra treat for Bay Area fans is spotting all the local references (a Santa Cruz shirt worn by Clark, the street location of the store), even if it wasn’t filmed in the South Bay.
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Details: 3½ stars out of 4; opens May 29 in theaters.
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