Backrooms

From no-budget YouTube shorts to the big screen, Kane Parsons turns his viral online series into a full-length liminal-space nightmare.

It’s 1990. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) works at a struggling furniture showroom, where he stumbles on a mysterious portal in the store’s basement. Stepping through it, he finds a seemingly endless labyrinth of mostly empty rooms that often lead nowhere. But behind the walls and blank spaces, something sinister lurks.

When Clark goes missing and leaves a cryptic answering-machine message, his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), sets out to find him. Soon Mary is lost in the uncanny spaces of the backrooms herself, and she slowly begins to understand what Clark found inside.

Curator’s Note
The biggest story in cinema this year isn’t the record-breaking success of blockbusters like Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. It’s the emergence of a new breed of filmmakers who cut their teeth on no-budget YouTube shorts and viral internet skits.

Kane Parsons started his filmmaking career as a teenager, uploading short videos to his hugely popular YouTube channel. His recurring series about the backrooms, a maze of eerie liminal spaces, grew from a simple monster lurking in empty rooms into complex science fiction conspiracy lore, full of sinister corporations and vast cover-ups.

Out of this evolved Backrooms, a refreshing, original horror film that heralds both a major talent and an upending of the traditional pathways to filmmaking success.