Backrooms Review

Kane Parsons started Backrooms in 2022 as a series of short videos on his YouTube channel, built on a creepypasta about an endless maze of empty yellow rooms. A24 and Chernin Entertainment financed his first feature for under $10 million, with James Wan and Shawn Levy among the producers. Parsons mapped the spaces in Blender, and production designer Danny Vermette built more than 30,000 square feet of them across four soundstages in Vancouver.

That physical maze is the star. Jeremy Cox's camera lingers on buzzing fluorescent tubes, sloping corridors and doorways that open onto nothing, and Parsons builds dread from sound and emptiness rather than jump scares. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives Clark a weary gentleness that slowly curdles, and Renate Reinsve makes Mary, his therapist, sharp and guarded, both doing a great deal with very few lines.

Will Soodik's script is the weak point. Its ideas about trauma, memory and a demolished childhood home arrive spelled out rather than felt, and the research institute watching the maze stays a sketch, so viewers who want answers leave with few. What is left is a triumph of production design around a thin film. It still opened to the biggest weekend in A24's history in May 2026 and became the studio's highest-grossing film.