The Director of This Film Was 16 When He Conceived It.
No Way Out
There are places that exist for people and when the people aren’t there they become something else. A massive furniture store about to close. A shopping mall on a Sunday before the first customers arrive. An office corridor after six in the evening. They’re perfectly lit. They smell like plastic and air conditioning. There’s nothing threatening. And yet something in your body says you shouldn’t be there — that the space was designed to be occupied, and the absence of people doesn’t make it empty, just incomplete. Like a sentence missing its verb. That feeling has had a name since 2019: liminal spaces. And Kane Parsons, who was sixteen when he understood it better than anyone, built an entire film around it.
Backrooms begins with Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who manages a vast, half-empty furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire in the early nineties. He basically lives inside the business. His marriage collapsed. His life collapsed. The store is collapsing too. One day he finds a wall that behaves differently from the others — porous, permeable — and passing through it he ends up in an infinite system of rooms with damp carpet, fluorescent light, and the constant hum of something he can’t identify. His therapist (Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian actress from The Worst Person in the World) ends up going in too. From there the film stops being what it was.
The concept comes from an anonymous creepypasta posted on 4chan in 2019. A single photograph of an empty yellow office, accompanied by a text about “accidentally clipping out of reality” and getting trapped forever in an infinite system of rooms with damp carpet and electrical buzzing. The image went viral because it touched something very specific in contemporary anxiety: the fear of impersonal spaces where the human being seems to have disappeared. From there came the phenomenon of liminal spaces — images of empty schools, abandoned malls, silent corridors that produce nostalgia and uncanniness at once, the feeling of having been there before in a dream. Parsons, at sixteen, turned that idea into a series of VHS-aesthetic shorts that accumulated millions of views. A24 called. Osgood Perkins — director of Longlegs, and son of the actor who played Norman Bates in Psycho — came on as producer. This film is the result.
What Parsons knows how to do is keep the threat from ever fully showing itself. No easy scares. Just corridors. Silence. The permanent feeling that something might appear around any corner without appearing yet. Ejiofor builds a Clark full of contained rage and directionless resentment — the kind of man who doesn’t know who he’s been fighting but knows he’s been losing for years. Reinsve does something harder: a therapist who says the right things in the tone of someone who doesn’t believe them. Together they carry the dramatic weight of a story that prefers discomfort to answers, the hum to the scream.
There’s a moment in the film, around the second act, where Clark sits at a dining table across from Mary in one of those impossible rooms and the scene becomes something you weren’t expecting it to become. Parsons doesn’t explain it. He leaves it there, on the floor, and moves on.
The question Backrooms leaves isn’t whether Clark finds the exit. It’s whether the exit leads anywhere worth going.
