Some movies start with a pitch meeting. Backrooms started with a single image posted to 4chan in 2019, a slightly off photo of an empty yellow room that someone described as disquieting. From that one post grew an entire internet mythology about noclipping out of reality into endless mazes of liminal spaces, fluorescent lighting, and the smell of old carpet that you can somehow feel through a screen. Kane Parsons, working under the name Kane Pixels, turned that idea into a YouTube series starting in 2022 that became massively popular in its own right.
Now Parsons has directed a full theatrical adaptation for A24, and it just became the studio’s biggest opening ever. Parsons is also the youngest filmmaker to reach number one at the box office. For a concept that started as an unsettling internet image, that is a wild trajectory.
The Story
The film follows Mary, a therapist played by Renate Reinsve, whose patient goes missing after apparently slipping into another dimension entirely. Mary ends up following him into the Backrooms themselves, a seemingly endless network of empty office spaces, hallways, and rooms that should not exist but somehow do. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, watching recovered footage from 1990 as part of the framing device, and the cast also includes Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, and Avan Jogia.
The found footage influence is obvious and intentional. Parsons built his entire reputation on YouTube videos that looked like recovered camcorder footage from the early 90s, and the film carries that aesthetic through in smart ways without feeling like a gimmick stretched too thin.
What Works
The atmosphere is the whole show here, and it delivers. The Backrooms as a concept work because they tap into something genuinely unsettling about familiar spaces slightly wrong. Empty offices. Hallways that go on too long. Lighting that hums at a frequency that gets under your skin. The film understands that the horror is not in what is chasing you, it is in the space itself being wrong. Parsons translates that from a YouTube video into a 110 minute theatrical experience surprisingly well.
Renate Reinsve, who broke through internationally with The Worst Person in the World, brings real weight to Mary. She is not just a vehicle for jump scares. There is an actual character here with actual stakes, and that grounding helps the more abstract horror elements land harder.
What Does Not Quite Work
The film is, by nature, an adaptation of a concept rather than a story, and that shows in places. The Backrooms as a YouTube series worked partly because it left so much unexplained. A feature film needs more narrative connective tissue, and some of that connective tissue feels thinner than the atmosphere around it. There are stretches where the film is clearly more interested in environment than plot, which is true to the source material but occasionally tests patience in a theatrical runtime.
The found footage elements also occasionally clash with more conventional filmmaking choices elsewhere in the movie, and the transitions between those modes are not always seamless.
The Numbers
None of that has stopped audiences. Backrooms opened in the United States on May 29 and has already grossed over 135 million domestically and more than 210 million worldwide on a 10 million dollar budget. That is an extraordinary return, and it puts the film just behind Obsession as one of the biggest horror successes of the year. For a concept that began as a single creepy photo on an anonymous imageboard, becoming one of the highest grossing horror films of 2026 is remarkable.
The Verdict
Backrooms is not a perfect translation of internet horror to the big screen, but it is a genuinely effective one. The atmosphere is the best thing about it, and it is strong enough to carry the film through its weaker narrative stretches. Reinsve and Ejiofor both bring more to their roles than the material strictly requires, which only helps. If you have ever felt that specific dread looking at a photo of an empty mall at night, this movie knows exactly what you are talking about and builds an entire world around it.
Backrooms is now playing in theaters. Rated R. Distributed by A24. Directed by Kane Parsons.
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