It’s wild to consider that Backrooms (now on HBO Max) is only the second biggest horror phenom of 2026. The first, Obsession, defied the norm with its week-to-week escalating ticket sales (it landed at $426 million worldwide), but was the more structurally and thematically conventional of the two. Backrooms followed a more typical box office journey to its $364 million take, but offers a more challenging narrative, one based on 20-year-old director Kane Parsons’ YouTube series, which creeped out millions of viewers with its surreal explorations of empty yellow office spaces where the laws of physics apparently don’t apply (they’ve been dubbed liminal spaces, and the media is known as creepypasta, two buzzy neo-internet-derived phrases that makes an aging Xer feel increasingly among the olds). The challenge Backrooms faces is whether the story surrounding it is more compelling than the film itself — something I found mostly true, thus pushing it into the realm of the overrated. But that doesn’t mean the movie isn’t worth watching, not at all.

BACKROOMS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: I once spent what felt like weeks trying to get rid of Wallpaper Like That. Yellowy beige ugliness that got yellower and beiger as the years went by and then we bought the house and made everything in it significantly less yellow and beige. Removing wallpaper is a horrible painstaking job requiring patience and solvents and scrapers and spackle to patch the scars afterward, and that’s why the thought of it has become a nightmare (of sorts) that was invoked by this movie right off the bat, when an unnamed carrier-of-a-camera worked their way through a bizarre labyrinth of corridors and office-like spaces lit with sickly yellowish fluorescence and adorned with furniture either piled up like a pretentious art installation about the still-useful things humans throw away, or weirdly embedded in floors, walls, and ceilings. Then a mostly unseen threatening thing emerges to apparently kill the temporary protagonist, their POV lost and focused on an empty space, leaving us to hear the noises and imagine what awful shit might be happening.

We get a brief glimpse of a hint that some white-lab-coated types were watching this person’s fate (Mark Duplass plays one of them), before we shift to the story of Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the manager of a sad, sad strip-mall furniture store that’s like Unpainted Arizona if it was vaguely pirate-themed and had no customers to speak of. Clark visits his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), and grouses about his broken marriage. Dr. Mary prompts him to roleplay the night his wife kicked him out, and it sure seems like he let his angry feelings dictate the conversation instead of being reasonable, and he has yet to acknowledge his role in the split. His life may be more sad than the sad, sad furniture store, as he now sleeps in a bed in the showroom, likely because furniture store guys can’t afford open-ended hotel stays.

It’s during those depressing nights that Clark experiences strange electrical phenomena wherein the lights blink on and off unpredictably. This prompts an exploration of the lower-level showroom, where there’s a wall that looks like a wall but is actually a doorway. He vworps through the yellow beige that should be drywall but isn’t and finds himself in a series of spaces just like those in the cold open, and something compels him to explore their deeply disturbing emptiness — accompanied by the similarly uneasy drone of the lights — instead of, you know, doing anything else. He tells Dr. Mary all about what he’s discovered, which almost certainly elevates her concern for his mental health. He takes his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her camcorder-wielding boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to the backrooms to help him explore, with predictably bad results. And eventually, once Clark’s expeditions into the metaphor for the unknown mazes of the mind render him AWOL for a therapy session, Dr. Mary ventures forth to investigate, notably by herself, and I do believe there have been better ideas throughout human history than this one. Oh, and it’s also 1990, possibly because cell phones would’ve royally effed up the story. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Backrooms is in the same surreal-unreality dream-state lineage as The Shining (those hallways!), Mulholland Drive (and Twin Peaks), Being John Malkovich, Synecdoche New York and I Saw the TV Glow, with furniture stacking that reminded me of book stacking in Ghostbusters and a crawl through a perspective-be-damned hallway to a tiny door just like Ned Flanders did in the episode of The Simpsons where the hurricane destroys his house and his friends and neighbors rebuilt it in the most hilariously inept way possible. But I also hesitate to say Parsons is the next Kubrick, Lynch, Gondry, Jonze or even Schoenbrun, because we just aren’t there yet.

Performance Worth Watching: Gotta say, there’s something about watching Renate Reinsve vault from ugly-ass couch to ugly-ass couch while wearing ugly-ass early-’90s brown loafers (but please don’t ask me what that something is, because we should be examining the psychological peccadilloes of this movie’s characters, not mine). But she honestly isn’t given much else of interest to do, and Ejiofor is in a similar boat, although he generates some compelling unspoken complexity for his character within the margins of this very odd screenplay. 

Our Take: Backrooms’ most obvious strength is the surprising technical proficiency of Parsons as a filmmaker. Between him and Obsession director Curry Barker’s ability to wind tight the coiled spring of suspense, we can safely discard our prejudices against Those Damn YouTubers (although Mark Fischbach’s gruesomely tedious Iron Lung tells us not all “content creators” are ready for Hollywood glory). The true stars of Backrooms are the production design, art direction, cinematography, sound design, and musical score, which Parsons assembles to create a distinctive horror-movie atmosphere that generates dread with neutral colors, in broad daylight and via the unease we feel when confronted with the implications of examining our individual subconsciousness. The implication being, our fears are self-generated, a conglomeration of the certainty of our pasts and the uncertainty of our futures.

So conceptually, the film can be quite affecting, in the sense that it invokes elements of the common dream/nightmare in which one desperately walks through a mazelike hellscape, running into dead ends and wandering through endless corridors, in a fruitless attempt to escape (see also: flying, speaking to a crowd while naked, teeth falling out, desperately dialing your cell phone but you keep mashing the wrong buttons — or maybe that last one is just me?). But the core idea is also rather obvious in its metaphorical machinations, a Psych 101 concept where the backrooms seem to reflect the various psycho-baggage of the people who enter it. You know, the old trope that the worst thing in there is what you take with you. 

Has enough thought been put into the concept? Doesn’t seem like it. It’s the banality of evil manifested as office space left for dead by a Covid-inspired acceleration of work-at-home trends, AI usurping human jobs or whatever else fuels the existential unease of Parsons and his fellow Gen Zers. Some of the film’s more upsetting images are clearly derived from eerie creepypasta memes and reality-distorting circa-2024 AI slop. Your mileage may vary with such stuff. One could further explore the Backrooms universe via Parsons’ array of YouTube videos, which explain things that the film leaves tantalizingly vague, but as a newcomer to his work, the more I learn the less effective the film becomes. 

As a standalone story, the movie is baseline functional, although I’m left with the feeling that the concept hasn’t been fully backstoried. Parsons’ concept for the Backrooms web series was retrofitted piecemeal, and the movie seems to reflect that, in the sense that a Method actor imbues a character with all kinds of thoughts and experiences that aren’t in the film, thus generating space for subtext. Parsons and scripter Will Soodik clearly spent more time conceptualizing the horror spaces than the characters, who are stock sketches of traumatized middle-aged adults almost fully removed from the contextual cues of real life — a greater understanding of who they are ultimately makes their fears more tactile, and the dramatic tension more effective, thus offering more significant rewards for enduring the film’s intentionally plodding pace. There are moments when Parsons uses his camera and instinctive sense for generating atmosphere to inspire rather scary moments — a memorably askew scene lit by a Christmas tree finds the sweet spot between creeping dread and jump scare — and that’s when Backrooms reaches its full potential. And as strangely fascinating as the film can be, and the fact that this is the work of a highly skilled 20-year-old YouTuber, the movie doesn’t reach that potential often enough.  

Our Call: Backrooms gets all the technical components right, but the story? Who cares. That’s not enough to dissuade anyone from watching what might end up being an influential film. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.