Backrooms (2026)

Backrooms feels special because it takes a modern, internet-born nightmare and gives it the kind of cinematic hush and scale that makes you lean forward in your seat, listening for the building itself to breathe. Kane Parsons turns a simple hook—a doorway in a furniture showroom basement—into an eerily plausible slip in reality, unfolding into a liminal labyrinth of yellow corridors that looks both mundane and impossibly wrong. With Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve grounding the dread in human curiosity and quiet panic (and Mark Duplass adding an edge of lived-in realism), the film sells its mystery through mood, texture, and creeping unease rather than cheap jolts. If you need tidy explanations or hate slow-burn, atmospheric horror, it may test your patience—but if you like science-fiction dread that seeps into your thoughts after the credits, this is the kind of unsettling you’ll be glad you signed up for.

Backrooms looks like it’s aiming for that pure, unnerving liminal dread: a simple doorway in a mundane place that opens into an endless, shifting maze where your own memories and fears become the trap. The potential problem is that, as a feature, this concept may lean heavily on atmosphere and ambiguity, which can start to feel like vagueness if you’re waiting for clear rules, big reveals, or a tightly plotted mystery. If you’re the kind of viewer who gets impatient with slow-burn pacing or “mood-first” storytelling, this could feel like two hours of gorgeous dread without enough narrative payoff. On the upside, if you want a sensory horror experience—creeping tension, unsettling imagery, and that A24-style commitment to tone—this has the ingredients to deliver exactly that.