Backrooms

"Backrooms" is A24's adaptation of Kane Parsons' viral YouTube liminal-horror series, directed by Parsons himself at twenty and written by Will Soodik. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a failed architect running a dying furniture store whose life has shrunk to a small, humiliating loop. Renate Reinsve is Dr. Mary Kline, his therapist, coaching other people through their private traps while sitting inside one of her own. Mark Duplass, Lukita Maxwell, and Finn Bennett fill out the ensemble. The setup: an electrical problem sends Clark into the store's lower level, he pushes through a wall that shouldn't be there, and he's somewhere else. Yellow walls. Fluorescent hum. The floor doesn't end.

Parsons made the original YouTube shorts terrifying with almost no money, and the film keeps what worked: patient camera moves, dead air, rooms that go on too long. The producing bench is stacked for a reason (James Wan, Shawn Levy, Osgood Perkins) and you can feel the discipline they brought. Ejiofor is the reason the first hour lands. He plays Clark as a man already half-defeated before anything supernatural shows up, so the horror sits on top of a real character instead of a scream machine. Reinsve, straight off "The Worst Person in the World," gives the therapist scenes a weight they didn't need to have. And the sound design is genuinely oppressive. Buzz, footfall, the wrong kind of silence.

The back half is where the maze starts to feel like a maze the writers are also lost in. The oddities pile up and start canceling each other out; by the time you've seen the tenth impossible corridor, the eleventh is just a corridor. Character backstories get sketched in and then abandoned when the movie remembers it owes you another set piece. A 20-year-old debut director with three A-list producers standing behind him produces exactly the movie you'd expect: visually assured, dramatically thin in spots, occasionally showing off when it should be tightening. If you need your horror to resolve into meaning, this one will annoy you.

Sicko for "Skinamarink," the quiet stretches of "Hereditary," early Ari Aster, or the found-footage lineage of "Lake Mungo"? You're in. Anyone who liked the YouTube shorts should just buy the ticket. Bounce risk: viewers who want a clean explanation, a monster with a name, or a third act that pays the setup back with interest. If "It Follows" felt too slow, this will feel glacial.

WORTH IT, not GREAT, and the gap is honest. The craft is the story here. Parsons knows exactly how to hold a shot until your stomach turns, and Ejiofor gives him a lead performance the concept doesn't strictly require but absolutely benefits from. The first act is as good as studio horror gets this decade. The second half loses its grip on the humans and starts trusting the vibe to do work the vibe can't quite do alone. There's no sermon problem here. No themes getting shouted, no characters pausing to explain the movie to you. It's a filmmaker with real chops swinging bigger than his experience, landing most of it, missing some. That's a WORTH IT all day. Just don't walk in expecting the ending to tie the room off.