Friends of mine who don’t like horror movies often ask me how I could watch a certain movie and not be scared by it. I always say horror movies don’t scare me, but I can appreciate the craft of a well made horror movie the same as I can any other genre. Watching the evening news or thinking about what this country is becoming scares me. Horror movies, not so much. And the truth is, if something really sinks its hooks into me, I’m scared quite easily. But there’s a frustrating sameness to a lot of horror movies, even in our current era, where we find no shortage of talented and exciting horror filmmakers. A lot of movies borrow from others, and you can often predict which cards are in the deck before they’re played. And yet, it’s been ages since I’ve left a horror movie feeling as genuinely unnerved and unsettled as when I left my screening of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms this afternoon.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns a discount furniture store in San Jose, Texas, and it’s summer 1990. Barely anyone shops there, it’s full of the most hideous furniture you’ve ever seen. Clark was going to be an architect, but his dream career never quite materialized. He’s working through the aftermath of a divorce with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve). One day in the basement of the furniture shop, he discovers a portal to an unknown dimension, a never ending maze of rooms that resembles a bland, stifling office space with ugly yellow wallpaper. When he doesn’t come back, Mary must attempt to find him before whatever’s down there claims him forever. 

Backrooms is based on a series of YouTube short videos from 20-year-old Kane Parsons. This is his first feature, and it’s clear we’re witnessing the birth of another tremendously exciting horror filmmaker. We talk a lot about nightmare fuel when we talk about horror movies, and Backrooms is capturing something very specific about the nightmare that a lot of these movies don’t understand. A nightmare can be the thing where you’re running from the masked killer, but it also is often simply trying to get to a place, and you keep getting further and further away from where you want to go, things keep going wrong on the way there, and the cycle never ends. A nightmare can also look familiar, like a version of the world you know, but everything is a little different, a little off. And that can be genuinely unsettling. Backrooms is an unnerving, surreal and disorienting nightmare that somehow manages to feel both mesmerizing and profoundly evil. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are both previous Oscar nominees, the caliber of actor I wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a film like this. I’m a fan of both, particularly Reinsve, who has given, in my opinion, a few of the best performances of this decade in her work with Joachim Trier. But as the story goes on, it’s clear what attracted Ejiofor and Reinsve to Parsons’ vision. And the film gives both actors a lot to work with. You’re never sure if you’re supposed to root for either of them. Both make choices that don’t fully make sense over the course of the runtime, and both have complexities I wasn’t anticipating. Sure, a lot of their performances are them reacting to things, as baffled and bewildered as the viewer is. But there’s also something good in that structure, it’s a smart choice to not have the viewer be one step ahead of anything the characters are experiencing or learning. This effectively adds to the dread and unease felt throughout.

There’s a lot to like in those central performances, but the thing that sticks out to me most about Backrooms is the craft on display. There is so much specificity and detail in Danny Vermette’s production design, so much that I would be surprised if he wasn’t acknowledged come award season. I’m not sure where they got all this ugly furniture, if they created it, or if it was sourced somehow, but it’s all very specific. It’s fascinating the way the furniture in these rooms is just strange enough to be uncanny valley and off putting. And the way this changes and evolves over the course of the runtime, it’s kind of thrilling to behold. There’s a recurring thing where a piece of furniture is sunken halfway into the ground, that managed to irk me every time I saw it.

And cinematographer Jeremy Cox’s camera effectively keeps you on edge and in a perpetual state of unease throughout. Kane Parsons composed the score with Edo Van Breemen, and that’s very impressive as well, mostly because the score isn’t doing too much. It’s not telling you how to feel in every moment, and a lot of the time, there is no score. The film uses silence incredibly efficiently, and gets significant mileage out of impeccably executed dread. This is obviously a credit to sound designers Eugenio Battaglia and Robert W. Booth.

I said this before but it bears repeating. Director Kane Parsons, a YouTuber who is making his feature directorial debut with Backrooms, is 20 years old. His collection of Backrooms YouTube videos have amassed millions of views, and having watched a few of them after seeing this film, I was impressed with how much he achieves with so little, but I’ll confidently say nothing he has made previously holds a candle to this film. Parsons and his screenwriter Will Soodik create a world that intrigues you, aims to pull you in closer until you’re screaming, running for the door. And it’s always a risk when a short film becomes a feature, that the proceedings will feel repetitive or like they didn’t have enough ideas to justify a feature length runtime. That is not the case here. Backrooms is paced so well, and escalates to an almost unbearable level of tension and urgency. And the final shot could haunt me for the rest of my life. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Backrooms is the latest in a trend of YouTubers turned horror auteurs, and the success rate of this trend is higher than I would’ve thought. I’m sure Kane Parsons will want to return to this world. We’re left with a lot of questions about the specifics of this world, but in my opinion the movie explains just enough of what’s going on. I gave myself a couple days to mull over everything before I wrote this review and I think if we knew more at the end about what was really going on here, it would’ve hurt the movie. So because of that, I don’t want sequels, I don’t want to know more. But regardless, I’ll be excited to see whatever Kane Parsons does next, even if it’s more of this. Backrooms is a profoundly unsettling experience, a deranged, demented art installation dressed up like a horror film. And it’s a movie I think people are going to be talking about all summer long.