Impossible rooms with anonymous walls lit by sterile neon lights, partial objects crammed and stacked according to distorted logic, entities that are grotesque syntheses of something else. With Backrooms, young filmmaker Kane Parsons discovers a brilliant intuition, delivering perhaps the most unsettling and concrete cinematic representation of Artificial Intelligence we've seen on screen so far.
But to truly understand Backrooms, you need to start with the internet. That vast digital collective unconscious that transformed an apparently innocent image into one of the web's most celebrated creepypastas. The phenomenon began with a photo posted online in 2019: an empty, yellowish, endless office, accompanied by the terrifying idea that by "exiting reality the wrong way," you could end up in a liminal space with no exit. From there emerged the myth of the "Backrooms"—environments suspended between the familiar and the alien, spaces of transition stripped of humanity. Young Parsons—known online as Kane Pixels—transformed that idea into a series of found footage videos uploaded to YouTube starting in 2022 (you can find his channel here), which went viral thanks to their ability to evoke fear with minimal elements.
The term "creepypasta" refers to horror stories spread online in viral form, modern digital urban legends. The "Backrooms," meanwhile, are based on the concept of "liminal space": places designed for passage—corridors, offices, waiting rooms—that, emptied of human presence, suddenly become disturbing. Parsons constructed an entire visual language around this sense of abstract unease, culminating in the leap to cinema produced by A24 in collaboration with James Wan's Atomic Monster.
The film tells the story of Clark, a failed architect and furniture warehouse owner, financially ruined and recovering from a failed marriage. In therapy with psychologist Mary, a woman marked by trauma from her mother's illness, Clark discovers that in the basement of his shop exists a portal to an impossible dimension: an infinite labyrinth of empty rooms, identical corridors, and environments seemingly devoid of logic. Obsessed with the discovery, he decides to explore that space deeper and deeper, until he mysteriously vanishes. It falls to Mary to track him down, realizing that what Clark had described was real—and infinitely more dangerous than she could have imagined.
In his original videos, Parsons used found footage set in the 1990s, speaking of dimensional rifts and the mysterious "KV31 Project," leaving much to imagination. The film, however, offers a more layered and surprisingly contemporary interpretation of the phenomenon. The Backrooms become an extension of the subconscious of those who traverse them: a space that absorbs memories, fears, personal details, and returns them in altered form.
And that's where the film becomes truly fascinating.
Because the Backrooms function exactly like artificial intelligence. They absorb information, store it, process it, and return it in synthetic, distorted form. Like an AI attempting to recreate something it has never truly experienced. The environments end up "almost right," but wrong in the details; the creatures seem imperfect imitations of human beings, with an appearance that feels like a synthesis of Clive Barker's and David Lynch's imaginaries; the spaces recall real rooms but fused together without truly understanding their meaning. It's the famous "drawing of a dog by someone who's never seen one." Interpreted this way, Backrooms becomes a powerfully disturbing horror about the artificial processing of human experience. And perhaps that's precisely what makes it so unsettling.
Visually, Parsons demonstrates extraordinary talent. It's no surprise Hollywood noticed him while he was still a teenager. The film maintains continuity with the videos through 1990s analog language, creating a fascinating short circuit with the AI theme: VHS, grainy cameras, found footage, degraded images. Everything contributes to the sensation of watching something that shouldn't exist.
And when it comes to building tension, Parsons hits hard.
The problem is that Backrooms carries with it its original nature as a viral short. You can feel that the concept stems from narrative fragments and the accumulation of visual suggestions, and when it needs to sustain feature length, the film tends to scatter. The entire psychological and psychiatric component tied to the characters played by Renate Reinsve and Chiwetel Ejiofor often feels redundant and not truly useful to the narrative development. Mary's traumatic history adds almost nothing to the heart of the story, while Clark's evolution feels too abrupt to be genuinely credible.
Parsons seems to want to give his characters an "adult" and authorial depth, but the true protagonist of the film remains the Backrooms concept itself. It's those infinite corridors, those silent rooms, those geometric voids that truly work. When the film focuses on that, it becomes hypnotic.
Despite some padding and still-developing writing, Backrooms remains an original, unsettling, and surprisingly intelligent work. A horror born from the internet almost as a game, yet perfectly capable of speaking to contemporary fears, transforming digital anguish into cinematic experience.
And perhaps that's the most disturbing thing of all: the idea that the Backrooms already exist. We just call them algorithms now.
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