'Backrooms' - Kane Parsons' icily disturbing horror rewrites the genre rulebook
ll the lonely people … 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, and scripted by Will Soodik.
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’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire.
He does dumb TV ads dressed as a pirate while uneasily aware he should be a sultan to make the “Ottoman empire” 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.
Poor Clark has to actually sleep in his store, in one of the beds in the little “bedroom” tableaux, the strange approximations of people’s 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 – strange installation-style areas showing snapshots of what appear to be different versions of reality. And it goes on for ever.
At: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/may/27/backrooms-review-kane-parsons-icily-disturbing-horror-rewrites-the-genre-rulebook
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