Kane Parsons Gives Backrooms Movie Rating a Uneven Horror Test
Kane Parsons’ backrooms movie rating lands on a fitfully unsettling nightmare, but the film never convincingly builds beyond its creepy, dated-decor premise. The 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker turns an internet-born idea into a feature that reaches A24 backing and a theatrical release, yet the review leaves the adaptation looking more like a proof of concept than a clean break from its origins.
Kane Parsons and A24
Parsons, who previously posted under the name Kane Pixels, directed the feature after expanding the idea in a YouTube series that used a found footage approach. A24 greenlit the movie, a step that pushed a 2019 anonymous 4chan creepypasta into studio-scale territory.
The original post described the Backrooms as having “nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz”. That image still does the heavy lifting here: the film leans on yellow wallpapered walls and fluorescent lighting, and the review says it never convincingly grows into something larger.
Clark in the labyrinth
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the owner of Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture salesperson who discovers an underground labyrinth beneath his store. The setup gives the movie a clear character anchor, and the review notes Clark later describes the rooms as “by a bunch of construction workers on acid”.
Renate Reinsve plays Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, and she gets one of the film’s sharper lines in a session when she tells him, “We all have our loops, our habits,”. That kind of dialogue points to the movie trying to move beyond pure atmosphere and into character, but the review’s verdict suggests the script never fully makes the jump.
From creepypasta to feature film
Will Soodik wrote the film, and Osgood Perkins produced it, giving the project a more traditional horror-industry frame than its internet origins would suggest. Even so, the review positions Backrooms as part of a broader wave of liminal-space horror, where the concept is often stronger than the story built around it.
Earlier this year, Exit 8 used an entire subway corridor to work the same territory, and Backrooms is judged against that kind of narrow, uncanny setting-driven storytelling. Parsons has the platform, the cast, and the studio support; what this review says he still lacks is a feature-length shape strong enough to carry the premise all the way through.
That leaves Backrooms in a useful but limited place. The movie has turned an internet image into a movie, and the review suggests the next test is whether Parsons can make the idea feel inevitable rather than merely expanded.
