# The Backrooms (2026) Review: Liminal Dread, Real Grief > The Backrooms is Kane Parsons's feature debut, a liminal-space horror film that turns an internet legend into slow-burning dread rooted in grief and neglect. Canonical: https://celluloidscore.com/reviews/backrooms-2026-review/ Published: 2026-05-30 Last updated: 2026-10-02 Author: Kaiser Khan — Founder & Editor Language: English Review basis: direct-viewing Spoilers: none Editorial approval: 2026-10-02 Viewing confirmed: 2026-10-02 ## Verdict Yes, with reservations. It is a patient, unsettling horror film for viewers who prefer atmosphere to jump scares, even if its mythology thins at feature length. ## Is The Backrooms worth watching? **Yes. The Backrooms is a genuinely eerie horror film that takes an internet legend seriously, and it finds more feeling inside those empty yellow corridors than most viewers will expect.** Kane Parsons trusts silence, space and the hum of fluorescent light to do the work that louder horror films hand to jump scares, and a strong adult cast gives the dread emotional weight. The reservation is that the mythology, so potent in short bursts, stretches thin across a feature, and the film sometimes spells out ideas it had already made clear. ## What is The Backrooms about? [The Backrooms](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/backrooms-2026/) starts from a simple, disturbing idea: an ordinary door that should lead somewhere mundane opens instead onto an endless maze of empty office rooms, damp carpet and buzzing lights. When people vanish through it, the effort to find them becomes something far stranger and more existential than a rescue, and the film uses that search to explore grief, damage carried from childhood, and the failures of institutions that are supposed to help. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve lead the cast, with Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell in support. It is an American production in English, it runs 111 minutes, and it marks the feature debut of Parsons, who built a large online following with his found-footage Backrooms web series. ## Parsons knows exactly what makes these spaces frightening The Backrooms began as a collaborative internet legend, a single unsettling image of an empty yellow room that grew into a shared mythology. Parsons understands that its power lies in absence. Nothing needs to jump out when the space itself is wrong: rooms that repeat, doorways that lead nowhere, a quiet that feels monitored. The film's best sequences hold on these spaces for longer than is comfortable. The camera drifts rather than cuts, the sound design keeps a constant low electrical drone under everything, and the analogue texture carried over from his web series gives even simple wide shots a sense of found evidence. It is [horror](https://celluloidscore.com/genres/horror/) built on mood and architecture, and on the big screen it is often deeply unnerving. ## Ejiofor and Reinsve give the corridors a human cost What separates the feature from the videos that inspired it is emotion. Chiwetel Ejiofor brings his usual gravity and restraint, and his performance anchors the story's larger ideas in a recognisable person under pressure. Renate Reinsve matches him with a quieter, more inward kind of grief, and the scenes between the two are where the film's real subject comes into focus. The supporting cast is used sparingly but well. Mark Duplass is a welcome presence, and the younger performers help widen the story beyond a single point of view. The script's interest in trauma and neglect gives the maze a metaphorical weight, so the fear of getting lost becomes a fear of being forgotten. ## Where the maze runs long The concept that makes the Backrooms so haunting in ten-minute videos is harder to sustain over nearly two hours. The middle section circles, and whenever the film leans toward explanation, the space loses a little of its menace; the unexplained version is always scarier. There are also moments where characters say aloud what the imagery has already expressed, which softens the film's hold. Viewers expecting a fast-paced [sci-fi](https://celluloidscore.com/genres/sci-fi/) creature feature will find it slow. ## Who should watch The Backrooms? This is for horror fans who prefer slow-building dread to shocks, for anyone who has followed the Backrooms legend online, and for viewers who like genre films with grief at their centre. Set aside just under two hours and, ideally, watch it in a dark room with the sound up. Expect disturbing imagery, moments of creature horror, and themes of addiction and childhood trauma that may be difficult for some viewers. Two companion pieces: - [Get Out](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/get-out-2017/), for studio horror that uses its genre machinery to say something about the real world. - [Resident Evil](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/resident-evil-2026/), another 2026 horror release that brings a property born outside cinema to the big screen. ## The verdict The Backrooms proves that an internet myth can become a real film, thanks to a director who understands atmosphere and two leads who give the empty corridors a human heart. It loses some of its grip in the middle and over-explains at times, but it remains one of the more thoughtful and unsettling horror releases of the year. ## Related title - [The Backrooms (2026)](https://celluloidscore.com/movies/backrooms-2026/) ## Editorial - [Editorial standards](https://celluloidscore.com/about/editorial-policy/) - [Report a correction](https://celluloidscore.com/about/corrections/)