As a die-hard fan of online horror, as well as the world and aesthetic of liminal spaces, I was waiting with undisguised impatience to see Kane Parsons’s first project on the big screen —especially with the blessing of A24 Studios. However, walking out of the cinema, I found myself with rather mixed feelings about a film that seems to have forgotten precisely what made its source material so powerful.
Aesthetically, Backrooms (2026) is flawless. With its well-crafted textures and use of several found-footage sequences that so accurately convey the sense of oppression, strange familiarity, and danger associated with the original concept of Backrooms, it truly is a visual delight. I was so keen to rediscover the transition from the YouTube series to its Hollywood adaptation. Unfortunately, these scenes are far too few, almost too anecdotal to have any real impact. I had genuinely high hopes that the film would be largely based on this technique, in the spirit of the classic Blair Witch Project (1999).
However, setting aside the pure aesthetics, what I fear has disappointed me most is the gradual drift away from what makes the original Backrooms concept so distinctive. Online, the unease they inspire lies in their stark simplicity: an empty space, whose shifting, incomprehensible, unsettling and, above all, inescapable architecture constitutes the horror mechanism in its own right. What is frightening is not what inhabits the Backrooms, but their elusive logic, their strangely familiar yet brutally hostile appearance; it is the feeling that they are a sentient entity determined to lure us into their depths. And it is precisely this idea that the film seems to be progressively abandoning. In Backrooms, the characters move in and out of spaces almost at will. Creatures haunt and frighten them, and where the architecture ought to remain shifting and ungraspable, the main character ends up able to map them out as if they were, ultimately, a gigantic building following perfectly rational geometry. The film thus gradually transforms the unknown into a playground, whereas the original concept drew its power precisely from the impossibility of understanding the environment.
And it is in this same regard that the screenplay also falls short. Backrooms does not trust its audience: it explains what it shows, then shows what it has just explained. It hammers home its messages, emphasises its psychological metaphors, and repeats its symbols. In attempting to capture the spirit of the Internet’s urban myths, which do not always offer clear answers to their mysteries, the scenario descends into vagueness with a slight sense of disappointment, failing to ensure that this absence of answers opens an abyss of fear. Here, it mainly gives the impression that the film has little to reveal. It seems more intent on laying the groundwork for a potential sequel than on delivering its own grand finale. It lacks a truly daring climax that would have shifted the narrative into something uncomfortable, perhaps even downright unsettling.
I would nevertheless highlight some brilliant flashes of creativity in the final act, with touches of absurd and elegant references to the weird world of the late David Lynch, which make the film’s ending a fine tribute to the master of the genre.
Ultimately, I feel that the sensory experience overshadows the narrative. By conveying a claustrophobic tension through its refined sound design, its soundtrack, and its use of physical sets—A24 Studios had the brilliant idea of recreating Parsons’ 3D models in real life rather than relying solely on the convenience of CGI—the film anchors the intangible myth of the Backrooms in a very concrete reality.
I will therefore remember the promising debut of the young Parsons in Hollywood, a 20-year-old who cleverly brought his imagination to the big screen with ambition and a vision all his own. I sincerely hope that the next time his name appears in the closing credits, I will have been transported just as powerfully as I was when I first watched Kane Pixels’ The Backrooms (Found Footage) (2022) on YouTube, four years ago.
