A purgatory with no one home
by GP
★★★½ out of ★★★★

_{Dir. Kane Parsons. Written by Will Soodik. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. A24.}

There is a particular kind of dread that doesn’t announce itself with a monster. It comes instead from a room that was built to be full and isn’t — an office with the lights on and no one at the desks, a showroom staged for customers who never arrive, a corridor that goes on slightly too long. Backrooms, the feature debut of twenty-year-old Kane Parsons, is two hours of that feeling, and the remarkable thing is not that a internet-born horror premise survived its trip to the big screen. The remarkable thing is that the kid who made it understood his own material well enough to bury a metaphysical argument underneath the yellow fluorescents — and then had the discipline not to explain it.

The setup is almost insultingly modest. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a failed architect who now owns a dying furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a man marinating in alcohol and a recent divorce, sleeping among his unsold inventory because his wife has thrown him out of the house he won’t stop reminding everyone he pays for. He sees a therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). The electrical bill is too high. The lights flicker. And one night, in the basement, Clark finds a slit in the wall, pushes his hand through it, and falls into the place the internet has spent half a decade mythologizing: an apparently infinite expanse of liminal rooms, sourceless light, and furniture rendered slightly, sickeningly wrong.

(What follows discusses the film in full, ending and all. The spoiler architecture is best entered cold; consider this your slit in the wall.)

What elevates Backrooms above its found-footage ancestry is that Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik refuse to decide what the place is. It plays two registers at once and never blinks. The Backrooms may be a literal alternate dimension — there is, after all, a shadowy institute called Async that has been mapping it since the late 1980s, complete with infrastructure and prior casualties. Or the Backrooms may be the externalized interior of a collapsing man. The film’s horror depends precisely on both being true simultaneously, and on the audience never being granted the mercy of choosing.

Consider the furniture. The space doesn’t contain random clutter; it is copying Clark’s world — his store, specifically — and doing it badly. His inventory comes back to him fused into piles, stacked in arrangements that obey no human logic, malformed. Clark himself supplies the film’s best description of the phenomenon: it’s like a drawing of a dog made by someone who has never seen a dog and is working only from a verbal description. The Backrooms reproduce from secondhand memory, so everything emerges a little incorrect. And here is the quiet brilliance of the conceit, the thing that makes a 2026 horror film feel like a nerve struck rather than a trend chased: this is the exact uncanniness of machine-generated imagery. A reality reconstituted by a process that has no comprehension of what it’s reconstituting. Parsons has made a film whose central monster is bad reproduction itself, and he did it without once saying the letters “AI.” A furniture salesman’s mediocre merchandise, copied by something that doesn’t understand furniture, in an infinite badly-designed building — the perfect hell, it turns out, for a man whose entire life was the failed design and furnishing of spaces.

Ejiofor is extraordinary, and the role asks for a specific and difficult arc: he has to be sympathetic enough that we follow him down, and then curdle. Clark’s tragedy, as Mary keeps gently surfacing in their sessions, is that he is a man who has already decided who ruined his life — the ex-wife, the career, the store, the world — anyone but the man telling the story. The Backrooms offer him a seductive rewrite. He is not a failure; he is an explorer. Not stuck; chosen. Not lost; the discoverer of the secret architecture beneath reality. Ejiofor lets us watch a wounded man fall in love with the one story that finally casts him as the hero, and then lets that love rot into something monstrous.

By the time he has dragged his two employees into the maze and lost them to it, and lured Mary in after, the curdle is complete. The film’s most disturbing sequence is also its thesis statement on Clark’s psychology. He has captured Mary, tied her to a chair, and he wants her to continue their therapy — to role-play, on demand, the argument that ended his marriage, so that this time he can win it. Therapy as hostage situation. The entire value of the discipline is that the therapist won’t simply validate you; Clark’s solution to that inconvenience is to remove, physically, her ability to refuse. He muses that you can eat the copies down here. He scalps a copy of his ex-wife and presses the hair onto Mary’s head, redecorating his therapist into his wife so he can keep arguing with a woman who left him — and then, naturally, segues into the old beer story, the grievances narrated as ever without arriving at his own name. It is the furniture-store logic applied to human beings: people as raw material, to be stripped, consumed, and rearranged into whatever the story needs. The horror isn’t that Clark is fighting anyone. It’s that he’s furnishing, and the people around him are the furniture.

Reinsve is the film’s other engine, and her arc is the inverse of Clark’s. She begins as the one who interprets — who listens, re-frames, contains, holds the patient’s loops at a safe professional distance from a chair across the room. Backrooms will not permit that distance to survive. She ends up inside the very maze she’d been trying to name from outside it, and the collapse of analytic remove into lived terror is its own kind of dread: what happens when someone else’s psychological labyrinth becomes real enough to trap you too. Her own trauma supplies the film’s second emotional architecture — a childhood home demolished to make way for a denser apartment complex, a mother lost to institutionalization, a fragment of cement she pries from the broken driveway bearing her own childhood handprint. She carries it in her pocket the entire film like a relic.

And then, in the climax, she doesn’t hold onto it. She beats it into the skull of the monster.

The climax is where the film earns its half-star above respectable. Mary, tied to the chair, finally stops absorbing and tells Clark the truth to his face: he blames everyone but himself, and that is why his wife left. And here is the cruelty of the construction — Clark hears it. He accepts it. He comes briefly to his senses and moves to free her. At the precise moment of his only genuine self-knowledge, the rage he has been incubating arrives in person to kill him. It takes the form of Captain Clark: a towering, deformed manifestation of his own fury, mutated out of the pirate mascot from his store’s own commercial, his offspring, his self given teeth. It tears into his throat in a tableau the film stages as a direct echo of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. Growth and annihilation land on the same beat. The diagnosis is correct, the patient finally hears it, and the hearing is what finishes him. Self-knowledge as a thing that arrives too late and kills you on the way in.

The Goya reference rewards pressing on. Saturn devours his child out of terror of being overthrown — the creator destroying his creation to protect himself. Backrooms inverts it: here the son devours the father. The rage Clark built over years to shield his ego, the engine of “it’s everyone else’s fault,” could only sustain itself so long as he refused responsibility. The instant he drops the blame, it has nothing left to feed on but its maker. The consumer becomes the consumed — the logic of the place, and of his own life, closing on him at last.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Async, and to the film’s most unsettling performance, which belongs to a man being merely pleasant. Mark Duplass plays Phil, the Async scientist who watches all of this on surveillance monitors and files it as data. Async, we learn, was once an MRI company — a business built on imaging the inside of the human body — whose mission changed when it accidentally drilled into a place that images the inside of human memory. The same logic, scaled up and gone wrong. When Mary finally escapes the maze, she is caught not by a creature but by Async’s hazmat team and brought to Phil for interrogation, where he delivers the film’s only approximation of an explanation: the Backrooms function as an echo chamber for memory, which is why everyone and everything inside is an imperfect, misremembered copy. He notes, with mild conversational calm, that more doors are opening in the surrounding area. He declines to say what will happen to her once she’s finished answering his questions.

Duplass is doing something craftier than affable-guy-as-secret-villain. The banality is the menace. A man whose institute has watched people die in this place for thirty years, who clips it all into footage and maps and a tidy briefing, delivering it with the bland, slightly rambling reasonableness of a software onboarding — there is no relish, no monologue, no villain energy, just a pleasant person explaining the void’s filing system. Against Clark’s screaming personal collapse, Phil is the cold procedural counterweight: the institution that processes suffering into a spreadsheet. The horror is that he’s nice about it. And his explanation is engineered to dispel nothing — it gestures at a scientific framework precisely so the film never has to commit to literal-or-psychological. He names the mechanism without touching the mystery. The final shot, a slow pan down through the layers to reveal a new Still Life beginning to form, undercuts even his containment. Async believes it’s studying the Backrooms. The last image suggests the Backrooms are still working.

Sit with that ending and a genuinely vertiginous reading opens up, one a film this unassuming has no business supporting as well as it does. Strip the science-fiction veneer and what Async has drilled into is the architecture of purgatory — a liminal place, neither salvation nor damnation, where souls are detained and made to confront what they couldn’t resolve in life. The Backrooms even run on the right currency: memory, guilt, the unfinished. Clark is held until he reckons with himself, exactly as the doctrine promises. But the doctrine promises one more thing the film withholds: redemption. Purgatory is supposed to have an exit, a door marked up, suffering with a purpose that ends in purification. Here there is none. Clark confronts his truth and is devoured. Mary is not absolved; she is captured. No one ascends. What science found, in this reading, is the full apparatus of judgment and reckoning with the judge removed — a purgatory that is all process and no grace, all waiting room and no one behind the desk.

That is a more frightening proposition than hell, which at least implies a moral order. It is, if you want the philosophical company, the precise nightmare Nietzsche meant when he called the death of God a horror rather than a triumph: the structures of meaning hollowed out but still running, still demanding reckoning, out of sheer habit, with nothing at the end of them. It is also the exact thing Kant insisted we could not afford to believe — he argued we must postulate a moral order beyond death or the ethical life becomes incoherent, and Backrooms calls that bluff by handing us the afterlife he postulated and revealing it to be a memory-eating labyrinth with no accounting whatsoever. A horror film smuggling that question in under liminal-space aesthetics is, frankly, doing more than its genre asks of it.

And underneath even that, there is the matter of who made this, and what it says. Parsons is twenty, and Backrooms is fixated on a past he never lived. The aesthetic is built entirely from late-twentieth-century commercial architecture — spaces a man his age has encountered only as degraded photographs. In the exterior shots, no car is newer than 1990; the cutoff is enforced frame to frame, a curation too precise to be accident. Async records the void onto cassette. The production design turns old Pioneer receivers into improvised all-purpose radios with a tinkerer’s evident affection. This is nostalgia for a world the director was born too late to touch — and more specifically, nostalgia for physicality itself. For the last fully analog era, when copying something meant a tape head dragging across oxide and the loss was real and measurable and audible, rather than an algorithm confidently hallucinating a dog it has never seen.

The film’s deepest contradiction lives right there, and it may be its most honest generational statement. Its monster is reproduction-without-comprehension — the bad copy, the misremembered world. Its craft is reproduction-with comprehension — analog gear lovingly rendered by people who plainly understand exactly how it worked. Parsons is anxious about the lossy, hallucinated copy and simultaneously demonstrating the careful, faithful one, reaching back across the 1990 border to film the analog world with enormous tenderness. A generation that grew up inside lossy digital reconstruction has made a horror movie about a dimension that reconstructs you badly, and shot it with a fetish for the last objects that aged honestly. Even the institution studying the memory-eating void does its recording on the one medium that wears its own decay on its surface.

So: where do the missing half-stars go? Backrooms occasionally over-explains the very ambiguity that is its great strength — Phil’s briefing flirts with lore-delivery, and a film this committed to unresolvability doesn’t always trust the audience to sit in the dark. The middle section sags slightly under the mechanics of getting everyone into the maze. And there are moments where the analog reverie tips from texture into indulgence. These are the complaints of someone arguing with a film he admires, which is the only kind of complaint worth printing.

Because the final verdict is simpler than all the folding above it. This is a film with real bones — a structure that holds weight when you lean on it, that supports the empty-purgatory reading and the AI-era reading and the generational reading without buckling under any of them. A lesser film tears when you start folding it. Backrooms creases and holds. Whether its twenty-year-old director intended nine-tenths of what’s here is unknowable and largely beside the point; intention rarely is the point. What matters is that the architecture bears the load. The oragami crane stands up.

Most horror this summer wants to make you flinch. This one wants to make you homesick for a world you never had, in a building God already left — and then politely, on cassette, take notes on your reaction.

★★★½

Butch Addendum. If you want to explore the subject more, Why Files does a whole episode on ‘Liminal spaces: transitional areas, such as empty hallways, parking lots, or waiting rooms, that evoke feelings of eerie nostalgia, uncanny familiarity, and surreal disorientation’