Kane Parsons Turns Backrooms Into a Creepy Underbaked Feature — Backrooms Review
The backrooms review lands on Kane Parsons’ feature debut as creepy but underbaked, even as A24 pushes his internet-born horror concept toward a wider audience. Parsons, 20, adapted his own shorts into a 1 hour 50 minute film that opens Friday, May 26.
Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve lead the cast, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell also in the film. James Wan and Osgood Perkins produced the project, which gives a YouTube-origin idea a mainstream studio frame without smoothing away its oddness.
Parsons and A24
Parsons created the Backrooms-set short films when he was just a teenager, then turned that material into a feature with Will Soodik writing the script. The move matters because the property did not start as a conventional studio pitch; it began as a creepypasta and then picked up extra lore as fans built on it.
The review called the film “Unnerving but never quite frightening,” a neat summary of its problem and its appeal. Backrooms tries to stretch an online nightmare into a theatrical horror movie, and the result lands closer to atmosphere than payoff.
Clark in 1990
Clark, a failed architect in a quiet California suburb circa 1990, makes his living running Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire and sleeps at the store after his wife kicked him out after a bitter, booze-fueled fight. That setup gives the movie a grounded entry point before it tips into the maze: while fiddling with the breaker downstairs, Clark slips through one of the walls.
On the other side is a room lit in a sickly institutional yellow that seems to go on forever. The film’s unease draws comparisons to Skinamarink and House of Leaves, two touchstones that signal a deliberately disorienting style rather than straightforward jump scares.
Ejiofor and Reinsve
The cast gives Backrooms a stronger commercial address than the premise alone might suggest. Ejiofor and Reinsve put recognizable names on a movie built from internet folklore, and that combination is exactly what A24 has used before to turn niche ideas into broader releases.
Even with that packaging, the review’s central complaint remains that the film does not fully cash the premise it sells. A story about impossible office corridors and endless hallways needs more than dread in the walls; here, the architecture does a lot of the work while the scares stay one step short.
For viewers heading in because of the Backrooms mythology, the practical expectation is simple: this is Parsons’ first feature, not a polished final statement. The film reaches theaters on Friday, May 26, with a cast and producer lineup built to draw attention, but the review suggests the bigger test is whether that online legend can survive the jump from lore to full-length horror.
