Backrooms is an unsettling, recursive, liminal world. It’s so horrifying at times and atmospheric permanently, it felt like the blair witch project meets the sunken place from Get Out meets the Severance hallways if they were a chartreusey yellow.
The headline is that Kane Parsons is a revelation. He’s 20, and he’s A24’s youngest director ever. Four years ago at 16 he was a kid in his bedroom playing with free VFX software, uploaded a 9-minute clip called the Backrooms to YouTube, and 77 million views and a full web series later, it’s a feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. If you have not seen the original clip on his YouTube channel yet, stop what you are doing and go watch it! Essential viewing before you see this film.
The technical feat for the film alone is staggering. The original web series was entirely digital. For the film they built the backrooms in real life. 30,000 square feet of it across four soundstages. I read that every cast member got lost on set. The crew was given daily printed maps just to navigate it. There was a vertigo room that stretches 40 stories high with mc Escher staircases. They spent a month on the wallpaper alone, 50 prints and 50 camera tests just to nail the exact shade of yellow. Kane reverse-engineered the original 4chan image down to the exact camera, geography, and shadows.
The music is pitch perfect and note perfect. Kane co-composed the score himself with Canadian musician Edo van Breeman, sampling vintage synths and old versions of absynth and reaktor. Edo is self-taught, by the way, he scored his entire 22-volume web series alone in his bedroom. There is a new track in there I think that hasn’t been officially released yet and it has not left my head since I walked out of the theater. And he didn’t just build a world, he built a language for it. No clipping nor still lifes. An entire vocabulary of the internet now speaks fluently. That is not a viral video. That is a mythology. It is so wild, and he’s just 20 years old!
The film is set in 1990 Silicon Valley. There is a deep-cut callback to 90s furniture commercials. The architecture, the drop ceilings, the buzzing fluorescents are not memories you can’t quite place. They are memories you can place exactly, if you grew up in the 90s. There is something psychological and deeply eerie about liminal spaces that this film weaponizes beautifully. What is it about an empty room that scares us this much? A place stripped of purpose, devoid of people, that should feel safe but instead feels haunted. Backrooms understands that the absence of meaning is more terrifying than any monster.
Now to what it’s actually about. The central question of this film is: how do you break out of victimhood? The movie does not quietly insist on its answer. It terrifyingly insists that no one can help you but yourself. People in victimhood often do not even want out. That is a culturally enormous idea for a 20-year-old to channel and I couldn’t help but wonder…did it land because this message has to land right now? The conscious collective is asking this exact question, so many people are doing the hard work of waking up to it and Kane just made a horror movie of it. Backrooms is anxiety chic, heart pounding, wonder, awe, horror and somehow very funny. The world itself is addicting. You are always wondering what is next. And it is a little terrifying how addictive it is, because that is exactly how we are with our own thoughts. The scariest, most horrific place in the world is actually our own minds. My theory on why the rooms keep changing is this: we build boundaries and walls in our own heads and then live behind them in real life, and they shift constantly with what we are thinking. Things in there get misremembered as improvements on the originals. That might be the most haunting concept in the whole film. This is the kind of psychological smart horror I have been hungry for since Heretic and I think A24 has another big franchise on their hands if they want to continue this mythology on the big screen.
Kane is sharp, self-aware, and meticulous. He knows his world the way Scorsese knows New York. You can tell exactly why every department head trusted him at 20 years old.
Chiwetel was blown away working with him. As a director himself, he loves working with directors who know exactly where they are going, and Kane absolutely does. Renate gives one of the most quietly devastating performances of the year, and this is her first horror film ever. The parallel between sentimental value, and her character’s relationship to home in this one is doing something nobody is talking about yet.
Aesthetics, theme, performance, world-building. it is all there. But think it could have gone a half-step deeper into the philosophical undertow. Nevertheless, still a masterful production. A24 has a franchise on their hands. and I cannot wait to see what comes out of Kane Parsons brain next.
Video – New films today are pitch perfect with very little film grain present. Colors are strikingly rich especially the predominant “yellow” color of the walls.
Sound – With Edo’s mystical score and the haunting sound effects, this soundtrack is very interesting. The sound field is very active especially the surrounds. Plenty of LFE low level activity as the bass will shake your room.
VIDEO ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(out of five)
SOUND ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
MOVIE ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
OVERALL ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️