A24’s Backrooms turns Kane Parsons’ viral analogue horror into a feature about Clark, a failed architect who discovers an endless maze of liminal rooms. As he descends into obsession, his therapist Mary follows, only to learn the Backrooms echo distorted memories and manifest Clark’s monstrous Id, forcing her into a brutal fight for survival and identity.
Horror has had an unhinged summer this year. Of course, everyone is talking about Obsession, director Curry Barker's low-budget nightmare about a young man whose twisted wish for love has devastating consequences for the woman he desires. Scream got a new instalment, and so did the 28 Days Later universe. Now, less than a month after Obsession, Backrooms is the trippy chiller everyone’s talking about.
A24's psychological horror film, directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, has opened to $81.5 million domestically in its debut weekend, the largest opening in A24 history. It’s trippy, it’s creepy, and based almost entirely on found footage clips (not real ones, of course). And oh, there’s an open ending too! Here is how it all comes apart.
If you’re online a lot, you might remember those creepy story-based reels about being stuck in the backrooms that blew up in 2022. Basically, the idea of Backrooms began as an anonymous 4chan post in 2019, when a picture of an empty, fluorescent-lit furniture store in Wisconsin was shared alongside a request for more images that feel "off". A user replied to the picture with a made-up story that became the foundational text of the lore: an endless labyrinth of "randomly segmented empty rooms," roughly 600 million square miles of them, with nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights… and the possibility of something else wandering the hallways nearby.
The story would stay archived on 4chan till a fifteen-year-old Kane Parson (then a video editor on YouTube known as Kane Pixels) got hold of it. Since January 2022, Parsons has been uploading "The Backrooms", a series of analogue horror-style shorts that reimagined the image as a science fiction narrative centred on Async, a sketchy research institute that accidentally discovers the dimension in the 1980s and sets about documenting it. The series (you can check it out here) attracted the attention of A24, who tapped Parsons as the youngest director in the studio's history to make his feature debut inspired by the story of his Backrooms videos.
Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a failing pirate-themed furniture store. He is also a failed architect, a recent divorcee, and a man spending a lot of time in therapy. In the basement of his store, he stumbles through a Harry Potter Platform 9¾-esque wall and enters the Backrooms: an endless maze of yellow corridors and rooms that seem to house a mysterious being. And like every dumb horror movie character, he starts visiting it every day to map it out.
But his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), doesn’t believe in this story, and he recruits two of his younger employees, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him map it and film their explorations for “research”. We now see through the grainy camera as the horrors in the Backrooms claim the trio one by one. His therapist, concerned by his absence at their sessions, comes to the store and investigates his disappearance.
Mary finds Clark, but he seems off. His mental state is unravelling fast, and as the unseen monster in the Backrooms approaches, he chokes Mary out; she wakes tied to a chair in a creepy dining room.
Clark has built himself a makeshift home in the Backrooms, surrounded by strange, humanoid creatures, people with their features glitched out of recognition. Clark explains that the Backrooms are an echo chamber of your memory. It recreates the places and people you remember, but over time, as you forget the details, the details get distorted. The places within it feel eerie because they are reconstructed from human recollection, which cannot hold the full image of anything
In the climax, Clark forces Mary to role-play a conversation with his ex-wife, using the therapy techniques she had employed on him. Mary resists, finally losing her calm and telling him, plainly, that he needs to take responsibility for the failures that drove his wife away. The brain he blames for everything is him, after all. The realisation hits Clark, but he is too comfortable in his misery to take a step for the better. He decides to let Mary go.
And then the monster appears.
The monster that has been haunting the Backrooms is Clark himself: a giant, physically distorted replica of him in his Cap'n Clark pirate mascot costume. The Backrooms have manifested Clark's Id into the thing he hates the most. And when the healed Clark tries to reason with him, Pirate Clark kills him, then turns on Mary.
A very final girl-esque chase ensues, ending in the Backrooms version of the furniture store. Mary beats the creature back with a chunk of cement she has been carrying throughout the film: it turns out, Mary’s mother had experienced the Backrooms too, when their house was torn down by contractors. This led to the woman’s institutionalisation, and the daughter has been carrying a bit of cement off their driveway ever since. She finds a narrow passageway Pirate Clarke cannot fit through and slips away.
But hold on a second, Mary is not free. A bunch of scientists are waiting on the other side, and they take her immediately to an interrogation room. A researcher named Phil (Mark Duplass) questions her, and we come to know that a former MRI machine manufacturer named Async first opened the door to the backrooms. Scientists have since been trying to understand the Backrooms, and as more and more of these portals open up, it could be the most significant research in human history (very mad scientist vibes here). Phil also tells Mary, with clinical detachment, that what happens to her after this conversation is not his decision to make. Now, if you go by popular film conventions, sketchy researchers have never had the best interests of other people in mind, and Mary is probably their latest guinea pig.
The last sequence is that all the people, living or dead, who appeared in the film have Backrooms made out of their memory. The film's final image is Mary's double, a half-rendered, Backrooms-generated version of her, sitting alone in a glitched replica of the interrogation room. She may have made it out. She might not have. But the memory is stuck there forever.
Kane Parsons has declined any interpretation of the open ending on principle. You can take any meaning out of the movie; it’s all up to you.
As for whether there will be a second film: The short answer is almost certainly yes. Parsons has said openly that sequels have been part of the plan since 2022. "This film is the first part in what I would desire to be several narrative steps,” he has said in an interview, “in terms of approaching what I consider to be the true heart of the idea." He has also noted that the first film could not contain everything he wants to do with the mythology, and that future chapters might span genres beyond just horror.