{"id":337112,"date":"2026-05-29T06:33:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T06:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/337112\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T06:33:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T06:33:17","slug":"backrooms-review-get-lost-in-a-20-year-old-directors-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/337112\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Backrooms’ review: Get lost in a 20-year-old director’s vision"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hollywood has been waiting for Kane Parsons<\/a> since the year he was born. The 20-year-old director is the same age as YouTube\u2019s first videos<\/a> and grew up with no barriers between his creativity and an audience. \u201cBackrooms,\u201d his debut feature, marks the start of a new new wave of filmmakers raised by internet feedback who are ready to reinvigorate the industry.<\/p>\n

Young Steven Spielberg<\/a> screened his 8mm reels for his neighborhood. Parsons uploaded his early shorts online where he could analyze the mass response. When one, an unsettling nine-minute experiment<\/a> about a warren of dingy carpets, taffy-yellow walls and gridded drop ceilings clicked with 78 million viewers, he made sequels. A24 offered Parsons a deal before he finished high school. He\u2019s graduating into multiplexes having spent his adolescence writing, directing, editing, composing and market-testing what people want to watch. I\u2019d toast to that, but Parsons isn\u2019t old enough for Champagne.<\/p>\n

Given that backdrop, \u201cBackrooms\u201d would be one of the year\u2019s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine. But it\u2019s better than fine \u2014 it\u2019s a work of honest-to-goodness art. Working with screenwriter Will Soodik, Parsons has gone back into that banal maze to find an uncannily mature story about loss and stagnation, about how our self-serving narratives barricade us from emotional growth.<\/p>\n

Set in 1990, \u201cBackrooms\u201d has the fritz of an old VHS tape. (Like so many other Gen Z kids, Parsons is nostalgic for a pre-smartphone era he never knew.) A failed architect-turned-furniture salesman named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor,<\/a> superbly expressive) tumbles through a portal in his store\u2019s basement to the backrooms of the title \u2014 less Alice in Wonderland, more Alice in Wonderbland.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like it was made by a bunch of construction workers on acid,\u201d he muses. The hallways lead to more hallways, the overhead fluorescents whine like hornets. Someone \u2014 or something \u2014 has piled lamps and stools into the center of one room, scattered chairs in another and embedded shoes into the floor as though the ground were made of sand. The disorder looks like the wreckage of an unknown chaos. Aboveground, Clark is trapped in his own resentments, throwing temper tantrums like a toddler. Down here, frustration feels natural.<\/p>\n

Should he be afraid? And if so, then what of?<\/p>\n

Distant thuds warn that Clark isn\u2019t alone. Soon after, three other characters follow Clark into this liminal space: his loud employees Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett<\/a> and Lukita Maxwell<\/a>) and his exasperated therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve<\/a>), who is haunted by flashbacks of her agoraphobic mother. There\u2019s also a mysterious man in a lab coat (Mark Duplass<\/a>) who works for a company that factors into the backrooms\u2019 preexisting internet lore, but doesn\u2019t have much purpose in this script. It\u2019s fine just to see Duplass as a gesture toward corporate apathy. More beings will appear too and cinematographer Jeremy Cox\u2019s<\/a> deliberately low-fi look forces you to do triple and quadruple takes to comprehend what you\u2019re even seeing.<\/p>\n

How does a 20-year-old fathom adult-sized discontent? Lord knows, but Parsons does. One theory is that today\u2019s 20-year-olds were just launching into teenhood when the pandemic teleported them from their classrooms to isolated computer screens. Meanwhile, they overheard their parents fret that society might be forever hollowed out. When a young person looks toward the future, what do they see? Probably not an office building bustling with entry-level jobs. <\/p>\n

Think about how the act of buying a couch no longer involves interacting with a salesman like Clark, but peering at a pixelated living room that doesn\u2019t actually exist with a couch that changes colors at a tap. Think about how lately the internet at large feels human-less. Then layer that emptiness over the images here.<\/p>\n

Sparse yet gripping, \u201cBackrooms\u201d and its minimalist story accommodate the audience\u2019s own free-ranging imagination. The infinite size of these drab catacombs triggers sense-memories of feeling small and confused in an ordinary place that feels all wrong. It\u2019s a time travel trip back to childhood \u2014 mass entertainment made intimate \u2014 with Parsons tossing us scraps of Clark and Mary\u2019s personal histories like a breadcrumb trail. I remembered what it felt like to get lost in a motel on a road trip with my grandparents. More recently, I tidied the home of a friend who was in the hospital, the pill bottles and crumpled blankets left in situ as evidence of someone else\u2019s pain. \u201cBackrooms\u201d felt like that, too.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an incredible special effects shot where the camera sinks through the floor of Mary\u2019s living room to find a mutation of the same room \u2014 and then another and another \u2014 each replica deteriorating further from reality until it becomes a new room altogether that would fit right into the backrooms. This, we wordlessly understand, represents how memories of the past can be at once factually inaccurate and emotionally true. We\u2019ve all been bewildered kids, Parsons more recently than most. Some of the most powerful people on Earth still behave like they\u2019re stuck in that headspace.<\/p>\n

Describing \u201cBackrooms\u201d as a horror film doesn\u2019t feel exactly right. It\u2019s a surrealist painting in motion, the equivalent of staring at Salvador Dali\u2019s<\/a> wasteland of melting clocks until it makes gut-sense. Dali made that famous masterpiece, \u201cThe Persistence of Memory,\u201d in 1931, a breath-holding moment between wars when daily life looked normal enough but vibrated with the dread that no, things were definitely not OK. Kids don\u2019t know that, but they vibe with Dali anyway because he keys into their suspicion that the world doesn\u2019t really obey the rules.<\/p>\n

That anxiety hums through \u201cBackrooms.\u201d It\u2019s why millions of people watched and shared the original short. Yet as fraught as it sounds \u2014 and as abruptly as it ends \u2014 I left elated. A major new moviemaking talent has arrived and he\u2019s the beginning of a movement. Other internet-honed young filmmakers will follow with their own fresh insights into genres like action, comedy and romance. Kane Parsons is just the first one through Hollywood\u2019s labyrinth.<\/p>\n

‘Backrooms’<\/p>\n

Rated: R, for language and some violent content\/bloody images<\/p>\n

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: Opening Friday, May 29 in wide release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hollywood has been waiting for Kane Parsons since the year he was born. The 20-year-old director is the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[139109,139113,1864,123262,135796,11150,4464,139111,139114,139108,48,52,51,47,50,49,139112,41646,592,6201,139110],"class_list":["post-337112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-20-year-old-director","tag-architect-turned-furniture-salesman","tag-audience","tag-backroom","tag-backrooms","tag-clark","tag-floor","tag-hollywood-spellbinder","tag-internet-feedback","tag-kane-parsons","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mark-duplass","tag-mary","tag-people","tag-room","tag-salvador-dali"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/337113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}