The Backrooms Review: A24's Psychological Horror Masterpiece Explores the Terror of Liminal Space
June 4, 2026
By Matty Haze
Genre: Psychological Horror / Sci-Fi / Analogue Horror / Found Footage
Step into the stillness
Imagine walking home from a gathering that stretched deep into the dead of night. As you turn onto your usual street, an unnatural quiet settles over the concrete. There isn't a soul in sight. A few distant streetlights hum, casting a weak, static glow. The parked cars, the rows of houses, the familiar storefronts, they all look exactly as they always do, yet everything feels entirely alien. When you turn around to look back, the path behind you has vanished, swallowed by an endless, creeping fog. You wander for hours, aimlessly drifting down streets that repeat in an impossible loop.
Discomfort and claustrophobia begin to tighten around your chest. Deep down, you know there is no physical predator actively hunting you, but the total absence of life in a space built for crowds is profoundly deafening. It is a suffocating desolation that feels fundamentally wrong, yet strangely, intimately nostalgic.
This is the psychological realm of the liminal space. It defines those transitional, eerie environments, places that once thrummed with human activity, now left vacant, carrying only the ghosts of memories and history. To be trapped inside a liminal space is to confront ahaunting paradox: a deep, visceral discomfort intertwined with a bittersweet yearning for a past you may or may not have actually lived. Over the last decade, this surreal aesthetic trend blossomed into a massive internet phenomenon, serving as the foundational bedrock for a new era of digital storytelling known as analogue horror and creepypastas.
The digital landscape remains chock-full of independent creators willing to lend their distinct ideas to make this eerie aesthetic grow, each adding their own unsettling spin to the collective lore. Among these, the most famous and culturally impactful is the found-footage phenomenon known simply as The Backrooms. Originally sparked by a viral video crafted by a then-14-year-old prodigy named Kane Parsons under his YouTube moniker, Kane Pixels, this innovative form of horror helped spawn an entire genre of atmospheric dread. People all over the web have since contributed their own expanded lore, crafting intricate webs of levels, survival rules, and anomalous inhabitants. Now, with Parsons making his monumental first venture into traditional cinema, stepping up as the world’s youngest feature-film director at the age of 20 under the prestigious A24 banner, a crucial question emerges: does this viral online nightmare translate well to the grand scale of the big screen?
When a broken life slips through a broken wall.
The cinematic adaptation of The Backrooms anchors its reality through the tragic, grounded story of Clark, portrayed with magnificent vulnerability by Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Doctor Strange). Clark is a failed architect whose grand creative ambitions have dissolved into the mundane reality of owning a struggling discount furniture
store, the ironically named Ottoman Empire. Feeling utterly trapped in a suffocating, dead-end
existence, he seeks therapeutic guidance from a psychiatrist, Dr. Mary Kline, played by
Cannes winner Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World). True to the melancholic
tone of the film, Mary is an empathetic professional who is no stranger to her own deeply
troubled past and unresolved emotional baggage.
During an intense therapy session, Clark lays bare his profound personal failures, revealing
that he was recently kicked out of his home by his ex-wife, a humiliation that has forced him to
secretly live within the warehouse walls of his own furniture store. The boundary between
sanity and nightmare shatters late one evening. While inspecting the dark, deep recesses of
his basement inventory, Clark discovers a strange, shimmering anomaly in a hidden partition
of the wall. With a terrifying ease, he phases directly through the solid structure, no-clipping
out of reality entirely, and wakes up on the other side. He awakens within an endless,
labyrinthine complex of damp yellow rooms, fluorescent hums, and unmapped corridors.
What follows next is a cinematic descent that is nothing short of deeply surreal and profoundly
unsettling.
A24 managed to secure an exceptionally notable ensemble of talents to ensure the film feels
like a prestige psychological drama rather than a cheap jump-scare fest. Chiwetel Ejiofor
delivers an amazing performance as Clark, perfectly embodying a bitter, disillusioned man
down on his luck who habitually blames everyone around him for his stagnation. Renate
Reinsve matches his intensity beautifully, doing an incredible job portraying a supportive
anchor who must simultaneously navigate the fractures in her own psyche. Rounding out the
primary cast is Mark Duplass (Creep, Safety Not Guaranteed) as Phil, an enigmatic scientist
operating under the banner of a mysterious, bureaucratic organization researching the
anomaly. Duplass injects a chilling, calm pragmatism into the narrative, serving as a brilliant
foil to the raw, human panic of the civilian characters.