Backrooms

Backrooms grew out of one of the internet's oddest recent phenomena, the creepypasta and amateur video series created by Kane Parsons around unsettling liminal spaces and endless empty hallways, which became a full-blown online cult starting with a nine-minute video posted on YouTube in 2022, when the director was just sixteen. The film opens as a found-footage document, built from recovered recordings of a hazmat-suited researcher, Naren Warne, who loses all contact with his colleagues during an expedition into the maze of the Backrooms, a space reached through an anomalous section of wall in a store's basement. A team of scientists at the Async Research Institute studies those recordings, gradually piecing together what happened during the expedition.

The adaptation tries to carry over to the big screen that same sense of unease and disorientation that made the original material famous, leaning on stripped-down found footage, with its trademark sickly yellow walls and handheld, VHS-style camerawork, rather than flashy effects. Critics have particularly praised the film's opening stretch, described by multiple outlets as one of the most effectively creepy pieces of old-school found footage of the year, with two or three sequences singled out among the genre's strongest of the decade for making viewers feel fully submerged in its claustrophobic surroundings. Some reservations concern the film's middle section, where the shift toward more conventional narrative risks, according to several reviewers, dissipating some of the tension built up in the opening.

Made on a production budget of around 10 million dollars, the film has recently returned to the spotlight thanks to its commercial performance too, more than 117 million dollars grossed worldwide and A24's biggest opening ever, a milestone that made Kane Parsons the youngest director ever to open at number one at the box office.