A24’s Backrooms Reviews Are In: Kane Parsons Made a Horror Film at 20 That Critics Can’t Stop Arguing About

In 2019, someone posted a photo to 4chan. Just a photo — a big, carpeted room with fluorescent lights, everything cast in a sickly shade of yellow. A second poster gave it a name and a mythology in a single paragraph:

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

That’s it. That was the whole thing. No author. No story. Just dread in paragraph form.

Five years later, a teenager named Kane Parsons turned it into a YouTube web series that got 78 million views. Now he’s 20, and A24 just released his feature film.

The Movie

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is not doing well. His furniture store — Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — has no customers. His wife kicked him out. He’s been sleeping in the shop and seeing a therapist named Mary (Renate Reinsve) to cope. The film is set in 1990 California, and the specificity of the period and setting gives it an anchored, lived-in feel before everything comes apart.

One night, checking the circuit breaker in the store’s basement, Clark walks through a wall.

What’s on the other side is the Backrooms: never-ending chambers lined with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lighting, like vacant office spaces designed by someone who only half-remembered what offices look like. There are piles of furniture. Shrunken doors. A stop sign. A cardboard cutout with a cassette player saying hello in different languages. Clark eventually describes the place as though it was “made by a bunch of construction workers on acid.”

James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers. The cast is genuinely arthouse-caliber for what started as a meme.

What Critics Are Saying

The reviews are split in an interesting way — not good-vs-bad, but more like: the first two acts versus the third.

Collider was the most effusive, calling it a “near-flawless horror film that demands to be seen” and pointing to the broader wave of YouTuber filmmakers making serious genre work — the Philippou Brothers with Talk to Me, Mark Fishbach’s Iron Lung — as evidence that Parsons isn’t an outlier. He’s the next wave.

Polygon was nearly as enthusiastic, putting it alongside Zach Cregger’s Weapons as the best horror of the year so far: “deeply unnerving… haunting… leaves lingering shivers and ongoing anxieties.” The key observation there is that the film is smart enough to leave mysteries intact — not every corner of the Backrooms needs to be explained, and Parsons knows it.

Hollywood Reporter took the more cautious read. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are bona fide arthouse stars, the studio is buzzy, the concept is genuinely unnerving — but the storytelling is “underbaked.” The Backrooms, as internet mythology, was always more atmosphere than narrative, and the film has trouble converting that into a satisfying third act.

CBR landed somewhere in the middle: the dread is real, the thread gets lost. MovieWeb used almost the same language — “eerie and atmospheric” but “loses its own message.”

The AP review cut to the core of it: “Where Backrooms came from is more interesting — and potentially meaningful — than the result.” That’s not a dismissal. It’s an acknowledgment that the origin story is genuinely remarkable and the film captures something genuine — it just can’t quite figure out what to do once it has you inside.

Why Kane Parsons Matters

To understand the scale of what Parsons has done, you have to understand where he started. His YouTube channel (Kane Pixels) began posting Backrooms shorts when he was still a teenager. The videos are found-footage fragments — mostly atmospheric, mostly unexplained, almost no conventional narrative. They suggest a larger world without building one. They scared people anyway. The most popular episode hit 78 million views.

CBR noted the context directly: “We’re in a veritable golden age of indie original horror, and 2026 might be its apex.” The year has already produced Iron Lung, Hokum, and Obsession. Backrooms is the one with the most mythology behind it and, now, the most debate in front of it.

Twenty years old. A24. Chiwetel Ejiofor. A 4chan post from 2019.

Whatever you think of how the film sticks its landing, that sentence is still going to need a minute to sink in.