‘Backroom’ Film Review: Ken Parsons’s Postmodern Labyrinth Is a Spellbinding Moodboard for the Horrors of the Internet Age

When I was a kid, the nightmares that terrified me the most rarely involved ghosts, killers, demons, or any other entity that was desperate for screentime during my dreams. It almost always involves only one location.

It was always a familiar place, yet somehow otherworldly. It often felt strangely peaceful, but there was some kind of malevolence that seemed woven into the place itself. There was something about it that created such fear in my mind that I would often wake up in a cold sweat. Sometimes that fear took the shape of some vague, dangerous thing that pursued me with unspoken intent and relentless determination. Most of the time, though, that space was enough. But to know this, first you have to dream about it.

So you can imagine my growing fear when Ken Parsons’s feature-film adaptation of the most infamous frontier of the Internet age captured that feeling with such astonishing fidelity. Even though the idea that an entire generation raised on Internet lore might have somehow excavated the same corner of the collective subconscious is equally provocative to contemplate, this was an archaeological reconstruction of a childhood anxiety so specific that it feels crazy to see it materialize outside my subconscious.

The case of Ken Parsons is a strange one. He belongs to the first generation of filmmakers whose artistic education included an endless well of knowledge of Internet culture, videogame lore, analog horror, and the end of a satisfying YouTube rabbit-hole. Yet his imagination continues to revolve around ideas that have existed on the Internet for decades, pointing to more fundamental concerns with space, memory or dreams that have enthralled and inspired cult genre voices like David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick.

The 20-year-old filmmaker, creator of the viral YouTube series of the same name, built his reputation by creating found-footage horror shorts using Blender and Adobe After Effects while still in high school. Those videos turned a creepypasta inspired by a 2019 4chan image of an empty yellow room into one of the internet’s most defining horror mythologies. His feature adaptation for A24 is based on Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect who now manages Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, a struggling furniture showroom in 1990s California. While investigating strange electrical faults in the store’s basement, he discovers a porous wall that leads into an endless uncanny-valley labyrinth of cavernous rooms.

The following is one of the most inspiring acts of spatial horror that I can remember seeing in years. Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette imagine the notoriously unimaginative backroom as a world made up of half-baked instructions about reality. The ingenious set design finds countless ways to visualize the notion of “noclipping” from the reality of the original mythology, scattering jumbled furniture and half-submerged household debris throughout the maze, while twisting geometry often highlights a Alice in Wonderland-The style descends into deeper layers of endemic absurdity. Despite the urine-yellow lighting set against the dull, lifeless officecore purgatory, Jeremy Cox’s wonderful found-footage cinematography tempers the uneasiness through compositions that consistently deny any semblance of spatial certainty.

Although I have yet to read it house of leavesMark Z. Danielewski’s novel is such a huge influence on the r/LiminalSpace subreddit that its legendary presence here feels like an inevitable comparison to draw. Still, it’s a useful metaphor, considering that both liminal horrors are two of the most distinctly post-modern descendants of Daedalus’s Labyrinth, juxtaposing the ancient terror of being physically lost with the far more contemporary anxiety of being epistemically lost. It feels surprisingly close to the anime concept of isekai, a genre built around ordinary people entering another world governed by unfamiliar laws (the key difference, of course, being that this particular isekai offers no improbably dedicated entourage of anime girls waiting to validate your existence).

Quite the opposite, in fact. Parsons fills the backroom with a deep, almost suffocating loneliness. Clark initially approaches his discovery with the curiosity of an architect stumbling upon the largest structural anomaly in human history, painstakingly drawing maps and excitedly telling his physician, Renate Reinsway’s Dr. Marie Cline, about his findings. Ejiofor plays these early scenes with a manic enthusiasm that slowly turns into obsession as each mission creates new impossibilities. The more time Clark spends understanding the backroom, the less interested he becomes in maintaining a life outside of it.

In the final act, when Mary finally goes into the backroom in search of the missing Clark, Parsons attempts to make some powerful, if slightly snarky, commentary about trauma and the subconscious mind. As Mary’s own reckoning with the maze forces her to confront memories tied to her childhood home and emotionally disturbed mother, one striking sequence – consisting of a steady shot descending through successive layers of the same house, each iteration becoming progressively more abstract and detached from reality – is telling. Here, Parsons emphasizes the idea that backrooms are a giant manifestation of repressed memories and psychic debris.

So is this Parson’s critique of American excess and consumerist accumulation? or a Synecdoche, New York-The genre metaphor for a mind gradually disappearing in itself? Both texts have enough evidence to sustain them, which is why they seem less interesting to me than the experience of being in the movie. There’s a special kind of art that resists intellectual dissection yet communicates with remarkable clarity on an emotional level, and the film loses some of its power whenever screenwriter Will Suddick attempts to turn sensation into explanation.

but what made back room It was so clear to me to register how nostalgic some parts of it were to me. Parsons captures the strange, trippy wavelength of early 2000s dreamcore so intuitively that many of the images give the odd sensation of remembering something you’ve never actually experienced. Many of those scenes are also complemented by a breathtaking, retro-digital synth score, which he composed with Edo Van Breemen, evoking the melancholy minecraft In many ways. And that atmosphere so completely suspended my disbelief and immersed me so completely in Parsons’ supernatural imagination that solving the puzzles of the backroom, existing inside this messy mausoleum of late-capitalist interiors, became secondary.

This may seem like a very dire analysis for a film whose lineage can ultimately be traced to the photograph of an empty room, but it’s an undeniably uniquely compelling detail of the entire film. back room Hopefully the Experience will justify my kindness. Horror reinvents itself from time to time whenever a new generation searches for new visual vocabulary for old concerns, and Parsons has a rare ability to translate the absurd and deeply disturbing mythology of the online world into a cinematic language that feels entirely his own. As it turns out, the Internet is a scary place. Even more so, for unsupervised and unsuspecting teenagers, intoxicated by its endless wonders, who accidentally slip into oblivion.

Backroom will release in Indian theaters this Friday

published – June 11, 2026 06:04 PM IST