A24 continues to bet on visionary filmmakers, with 20-year-old director Kane Parsons bringing his own viral short film concept to the big screen. James Wan and Osgood Perkins signed on as producers precisely because they recognized raw talent — and the film's unsettling visual language proves that instinct wasn't wrong.
Insiders say test screenings were rough — audiences reportedly sat through the 1 hour 50 minute runtime confused about what was actually happening. The monster roar teased throughout apparently lands with a whimper in the final act, and there's chatter that the marketing department had to scramble after early reactions questioned whether anyone would care.
Runtime: 1 hour 50 minutes, rated R. Stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark (a failed architect running Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire) alongside Renate Reinsve as therapist Mary, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell. Written by Will Soodik based on director Kane Parsons' own short films created when he was a teenager.
The Backrooms might be better left to the internet whispers where they originated — this adaptation proves that not every creepypasta needs a blockbuster budget to succeed.
A24 has made a career out of taking weird, niche concepts and turning them into critical darlings. But their latest venture into liminal horror with 'Backrooms' — which dropped Friday after mounting buzz around its all-star pedigree — may have stumbled into the trap that ensnares so many genre experiments: beautiful to look at, hollow at the core. The film comes saddled with serious credentials.
Produced by James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring) and Osgood Perkins (who knows a thing or two about mounting dread after Longlegs), it marks the feature debut of 20-year-old director Kane Parsons. That's not a typo — Parsons created his Backrooms short films as a teenager, which explains both the fresh perspective and, according to The Hollywood Reporter's review, the underdeveloped storytelling that comes with inexperience. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Clark, a failed architect reduced to running a dead-end furniture store called Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire after his wife boots him out following a booze-fueled blowout.
The setup is deliciously creepy: Clark discovers he can slip through the walls of his store into an endless extra-dimensional maze of yellow-lit office rooms, hallways that shouldn't exist, and staircases leading nowhere. It's the kind of premise that tickles primal unease — spaces designed to protect us becoming traps that refuse to obey physics or reason. The review notes Parsons nails the aesthetic: backwards stop signs in dark rooms, shoes mysteriously embedded through floors at impossible angles, tape recordings in foreign languages emanating from cardboard cutouts.
But here's where things fall apart for this $50+ million A24 production backed by Chernin Entertainment and 21 Laps. The longer viewers spend in the Backrooms, the less frightening those oddities become. "They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing," writes THR's critic — and that guesswork only works until audiences realize no meaningful answers are coming.
The characters fare even worse: Clark, Mary (Renate Reinsve), and supporting players played by Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell are reduced to single-trauma archetypes with "no self-preservation instinct" between them. The real disappointment emerges in the third act. Rather than maintain the subliminal dread that made early sequences work, 'Backrooms' pivots to what THR describes as "more explicit but also more generic thrills" — an action-y climax that exists solely to fulfill expectations of how a mainstream horror movie ends.
The monster that's been building throughout? Its roar grows louder and more frequent, sure, but the violence remains curiously bloodless for an R-rated film. "The Bottom Line" verdict: "Unnerving but never quite frightening." Ouch.
The irony is palpable — a film about infinite spaces that should contain infinite terror instead feels claustrophobically small in its ambitions. Parsons' concept, born from the creepypasta community where lore grew organically through collective imagination, gets stripped of mystery when forced to explain itself onscreen. As THR notes: "This is a realm better left to the shadows." Whether audiences will follow A24's gamble into these endless yellow rooms remains to be seen — but early word suggests this particular door might have been better left closed.
