Backrooms: when escape becomes a trap
There are places we pass through without paying much attention, such as an office corridor, a furniture showroom or a waiting room. We recognise their materials, know how to move through them and assume we will be able to leave whenever we want. Yet the moment we can no longer find the way out, that familiarity becomes unsettling. Even though the carpet and the lights remain the same, we begin to look at every door differently, because we no longer know where it leads.
Backrooms explores that loss of trust in the everyday. We loved the way it makes a seemingly unremarkable room awaken both the desire to keep looking and the need to get out. As the story unfolds, that tension is complicated by its protagonist’s fascination: a dangerous place begins to appeal to him because it allows him to step away from a life he does not know how to face.
Behind the film is Kane Parsons, a young American filmmaker and visual effects artist known online as Kane Pixels. In 2022, when he was sixteen, he uploaded The Backrooms (Found Footage) to YouTube, a short film inspired by a collectively developed horror story that had begun circulating on 4chan in 2019. It originated with a photograph of an empty, yellowish interior, accompanied by a text imagining the possibility of accidentally slipping out of reality and becoming trapped in an endless space. Parsons developed his own version of that idea, turning it into a series of videos whose popularity soon attracted the attention of the film industry.
The move into cinema followed a process of discussions and development during which Parsons sought to protect the work he had built. As he explained in an interview, he was concerned about losing the ability to continue his series or seeing the project lose its identity. With professional advice, he began working with production companies Atomic Monster and 21 Laps, before pitching the project to several studios and eventually reaching an agreement with A24, with him directing.
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, and written by Will Soodik, the film brings that universe into a story where the reasons for entering become as important as the possibility of leaving. Through its characters, the disorientation of moving through unfamiliar rooms merges with a more relatable concern: the extent to which we can mistake a way of escaping for a place where we might end up trapped.
A doorway out of one’s own life
Clark, played by Ejiofor, is a frustrated architect who runs a furniture shop. Following his divorce, with his business struggling and sessions with his therapist, Mary, seemingly doing little to ease his unhappiness, he discovers an entrance to an unknown world in the basement of his shop. Crossing it, he finds a succession of rooms and corridors whose extent is impossible to gauge and which gradually begins to occupy all his attention.
Although the place is unsettling, Clark feels a fascination that draws him further into exploring it. There, he finds something to devote himself to and the chance to distance himself from the problems waiting outside. What appears threatening to us therefore takes on the appeal of a refuge for him, to the point where his desire to return begins to outweigh the danger.
When Mary, played by Reinsve, enters that world to try to rescue him, she is driven by a very different need. She wants to find her patient and bring him back, but her search brings her face to face with someone increasingly absorbed by what he has discovered. Their relationship thus adds another difficulty to the journey: finding a way out may not be enough if Clark continues to see reasons to stay.
Through that tension, Backrooms invites us to consider how the desire to escape can end up trapping us even further. As Clark finds new rooms to explore, the problems that brought him there remain unresolved, however distant they may begin to seem.
When we can no longer recognise the way
Architecture plays a fundamental role in that sense of disorientation, because we are used to finding our way through spaces without thinking too much about how we do it. When we enter a building, we look for a reception desk if we need help, move towards a window to work out where we are or follow a corridor trusting that it will lead to another room. Experience allows us to interpret those cues and move with a degree of confidence, even in places we are visiting for the first time.
In Backrooms, however, that confidence begins to falter. The rooms look like spaces we know, but as the characters move through them, it becomes harder to understand how they connect or what they are for. One corridor leads into another, and the rooms resemble one another so closely that what might help us recognise the way only adds to the confusion.
It is during that journey that the unease grows. At first, we believe that paying attention will be enough to find our bearings; then repetition makes us question the reference points we have been noting along the way. We no longer know whether we have been through a room before or are standing in another almost identical one, and we begin to suspect that continuing to walk might take us even further from the exit.
For those of us interested in design and architecture, that transformation of the everyday is one of the film’s greatest attractions. Parsons makes us regard with suspicion interiors we would normally barely notice. The longer we remain in them, the more closely we watch the distance to a door, what lies around a corner or the length of a corridor, because any detail might help us understand where we are.
When a refuge becomes a trap
The unease Backrooms provokes connects with fears we can recognise: losing control, being left alone or failing to find our way back to somewhere safe. Although the film leaves room for different interpretations, Clark’s experience allows us to approach those feelings through a specific situation: his dissatisfaction with his own life and the fascination he begins to feel for what he has discovered.
Exploring that world allows him to concentrate on something that takes him away from his problems. It is an understandable impulse, because devoting ourselves entirely to an activity can offer some relief when everything else weighs on us. Yet that relief can also lead us to postpone conversations and decisions that remain necessary. In Clark’s case, the attraction of the rooms grows until the danger seems to matter less than the possibility of staying there.
That is why watching him is so uncomfortable: while we perceive a threat, he finds reasons to return. The film takes that contradiction to a terrifying extreme and makes us wonder at what point a place we turn to in order to feel better begins to become a trap.
Adding to that tension is the appearance of elements connected to the characters’ lives. Production designer Danny Vermette explained that the sets incorporate references from the real world, including Mary’s childhood home. Memories therefore enter this strange environment too, although recognising them no longer offers the reassurance we might expect.
It is within that mixture of familiarity and threat that the backrooms can act as a mirror for our own ghosts. What we see reminds us of something, awakens a fear or prompts us to search for an explanation; even so, none of those associations guarantees that we understand what is happening. That uncertainty sustains the fear even when we believe we have found a familiar reference point.
From an image on the internet to a physical space
The universe of Backrooms began online in 2019, when a photograph of a yellowish interior accompanied an anonymous post on 4chan. The text imagined someone accidentally slipping out of reality and ending up in a place like that. Building on the idea, other users began contributing stories and interpretations, gradually creating a collective imaginary world that Parsons would develop in his videos. In 2022, his short film The Backrooms (Found Footage) gave that vision a decisive boost.
Part of the photograph’s appeal lay in how little it revealed. Although the space was recognisable, nothing explained why it was empty, what had happened there or what might be hiding in the adjoining rooms. That absence of answers invited people to imagine a story and allowed each person to fill in the scene with their own anxieties.
In bringing that universe to cinema, one of the challenges was to build the spaces that had previously taken shape in images and videos. To do so, production designer Danny Vermette and his team constructed sets across four sound stages, incorporating platforms, slopes and changes in level that the actors could move across during filming.
That decision meant that much of their interaction with the environment genuinely took place in front of the camera. The actors had to make their way through those corridors and adapt to the changes in level, so the effort and difficulty of moving through them became part of the scene. The sets therefore helped convey the feeling of being trapped in a place that was becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and understand.
Sound builds the fear too
In Backrooms, sound helps ensure that we never feel entirely safe. As the camera shows rooms and corridors, we hear the hum of the lights, the characters’ breathing and noises whose origins we cannot identify. That lack of information keeps us alert to whatever might be happening beyond our view.
This is why the tension continues even when nothing seems to be happening. A single noise is enough to make us look towards a door or expect something to appear at the end of a corridor. The film uses that reaction to extend the fear beyond what it shows.
Where to watch Backrooms
Backrooms is available on Filmin. Its edition includes the short film Liquidación total after the credits, so it is worth letting it play on to discover this extension of its universe.
We recommend watching it for its spatial imagination and for the unease it brings to the desire to escape. Clark finds something that allows him to look away from his life. The film lets us observe how that fascination takes hold and consider how difficult it is to recognise a threat when we are also hoping to gain something from it.
We want the characters to get out, yet we remain eager to discover what lies around the next corner. That contradiction sustains much of the experience: the very place that unsettles us manages to hold our attention.
Backrooms is disturbing because of what lurks in its corridors, but also because of Clark’s fascination: the possibility that a terrifying place might feel easier for him to inhabit than his own life.
Highly recommended.
