The hype is absolutely in place for the horror “Backrooms: No way out” (“Backrooms”), just like in the case even better “Infatuation”. Horror genre with feature debut Kane Parsons achieves another triumph in 2026 after the films “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple“, “Send Help“, “Hokum” and the mentioned “Obsession”, continuing the horror renaissance of the past years (“Substanca”, “The moment of disappearance“, “Give it back to me“…).
Likewise, “Backrooms: No Way Out” confirms the trend of ex-YouTubers becoming low-budget horror directors, with Parsons taking over from Chris Stuckmann (“Shelby Oaks: A Ghost Town“), Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach (“Iron Lung“) and Curry Barker (“Infatuation”).
This film has its roots in Parsons’ web series of horror shorts on YouTube that caught the attention of producers James Wan and Jason Blumthat is, the company A24. With their support, Parsons gave birth to a rather unique cinematic experience despite the visible influences.
Geometric and floor plan shots of the corridor Stanley Kubrickthe surreal red room of “Twin Peaks” and the abstract minimalist sets of “Dogville”, the pre/post-millennial anxieties and claustrophobia depicted in the conceptual SF thriller “The Cube”, Japanese and “found footage” horror films with fear from (VHS) recordings such as “The Circle”, “Blair Witch” and “Skinamarine”, psychological “mindfuck” films such as “Vivarium”…
In Parsons’ horror film, all that and more is printed. “This is every place that has ever existed,” we hear in a film that is all-encompassing in horror while offering its own creative vision of the genre and the world around us. By “this” we mean the endless labyrinthine space on the other side of the basement of the furniture showroom that causes repeated “WTF” in the characters, just like the discoveries of the protagonist of the horror movie “Weapons”.
It is accidentally found by the owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), going through the wall of another dimension/portal/alternate reality about as Schwarzenegger in “The Last Action Hero”. Frustrated by his failure as an architect and traumatized by his recent divorce from his wife, Clark drinks whiskey, sleeps in the parlor…
His life is stuck in one place and is spinning in circles. This is why Clark regularly visits psychotherapist Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who herself has childhood traumas, and she does not believe him when he tells her what he discovered – the store continues as if it were a copy of itself. Spatial discovery becomes his obsession and he hires cameramen Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell) to go with him behind the wall to prove that he is not making things up.
When the two disappear after someone or something appears, “Backrooms” looks like it could become “The Blair Witch Project” of furniture showrooms (subjective and grainy shots), but Parsons and his director of photography Jeremy Cox they don’t fully use the camera “found footage” expression, nor do they achieve horror with sudden “boo” scenes and loud sounds.
On the contrary, this is one of the “lightest” horror films (like “Festival of Fear”), which takes place in an environment painted yellow like an empty office building built on a trip and slowly raises the tension from the appearance of someone or something in a far corner or behind a small door of endless corridors.
Horror is driven by intrigue and mystery (curious movements of the camera), i.e. fear of the unknown, but also of one’s own psyche (is it worse to stay alone in such a place or with someone/something?) and only towards the end is body horror introduced with “misremembered” people who have a creepy combination of the faces of the characters from “Top Secret” (a crumpled villain and a librarian without a magnifying glass).
Although “Backrooms: No Way Out” loses momentum towards the end when it starts to explain itself more than it should and sets the mythology for potential sequels, the franchise (“We want to know at least a fraction more”), Parsons still stops when needed and tickles the imagination, i.e. allows the viewer to “read”.
Clark explains to Mary (and the viewer) the concept of a nightmarish, surreal environment that defies the laws of physics like the work MC Escher it’s like describing a dog to someone who has never seen it and telling them to draw it. It seems that this environment “from the other side of the glass” could have been designed in his mind by an (unsuspecting, mentally unstable) architect with the aspirations of an avant-garde artist, given the randomly stacked furniture and clothes in the style of a kind of art installation.
The landscape of the mind is accentuated by the camera as it passes through the floors of the building, the ground floor, the basement and below, which seems to descend deeper and deeper into the levels of the subconscious. The titular “backrooms” can be a reflection of the individual’s psyche, from Clark to Mary (“You are your own mind”), who have created parallel lives and a distorted perception of themselves stuck in their imaginations, but also a reflection of the vanity of consumerism, and the isolation and loss of modern man in a world that projects an ever-increasing sense of hopelessness. Horror for rethinking existence. ****
