{"id":606599,"date":"2026-05-27T12:52:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:52:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606599\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:52:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:52:08","slug":"backrooms-review-kane-parsons-icily-disturbing-horror-rewrites-the-genre-rulebook-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/606599\/","title":{"rendered":"Backrooms review \u2013 Kane Parsons\u2019 icily disturbing horror rewrites the genre rulebook | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

All the lonely people \u2026 where do they all belong? YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut with this icily brilliant and genuinely disturbing conceptual horror film based on his web series<\/a>, and scripted by Will Soodik. There is something here of J-horror, the V\/H\/S found footage franchise, Dan Erickson\u2019s Severance and Nathan Fielder\u2019s The Rehearsal. It\u2019s about people walled up in their own memories, imprisoned in endlessly remembered scenes from their past, or miserably perceived versions of their present existences in which they have become caricatures of themselves, gargoyle stars of their paralysed inner world of failure. Or perhaps the action of the film is not metaphorical in this or any other sense, and the \u201cbackrooms\u201d of the title simply exist.<\/p>\n

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary; it is the early 90s and Clark is a failed architect, separated from his wife, and an alcoholic who to make ends meet self-hatingly manages a drearily and eerily vast discount furniture store, called Cap\u2019n Clark\u2019s Ottoman Empire. He does dumb TV ads dressed as a pirate while uneasily aware he should be a sultan to make the \u201cOttoman empire\u201d pun work. He goes to see a therapist, Mary, a sad, gentle person who markets her own self-help audio tapes and is haunted by childhood memories of her abusive mother.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Poor Clark has to actually sleep in his store, in one of the beds in the little \u201cbedroom\u201d tableaux, the strange approximations of people\u2019s actual living spaces. But one day in the huge basement section, he discovers a supernaturally porous section of wall, through which he can walk to discover an infinitely vast secret network of backrooms \u2013 strange installation-style areas showing snapshots of what appear to be different versions of reality. And it goes on for ever. Clark finds that getting out of this non-Narnia of non-places isn\u2019t easy, and neither does Mary when she goes in to look for him.<\/p>\n

The production design by Danny Vermette is amazing, combining genuine constructions and digital fabrication. With cinematographer Jeremy Cox, they create an ineffably oppressive, crepuscular kind of dead yellowish light, a light that leaks like radon gas from the strip lighting of a million malls, stores and office buildings. Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares. There is real fascination in exploring this vast, invisible city state of fear.<\/p>\n

Backrooms is out on 28 May in Australia and on 29 May in the UK and US<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All the lonely people \u2026 where do they all belong? YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":606600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-606599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/606600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}