The ‘Backrooms’ discourse is missing the point
A24’s latest release, Backrooms, has only been in cinemas for a few days, but the discourse around it has already lost the plot.
Directed by Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old who built his idea in a series of YouTube videos starting when he was just 16, the film is set in a liminal network of never-ending rooms in which everything is familiar but slightly askew. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as a bitter architect-turned furniture salesman who finds these rooms behind a wall in the basement of his department store. Renate Reinsve plays his therapist who focuses on breaking her clients out of negative patterns but finds herself stuck in one when she follows Ehiofor into the maze.
Even before the release of Backrooms, social media was full of suspicion and accusations over Parsons’ role, with people claiming that it had been “ghost directed” by its illustrious producers, who include directors James Wan, Osgood Perkins, and Shawn Levy. Mark Duplass, who plays a supporting role in the film and has been known to mentor young filmmakers over the years, took to social media to defend Parsons, saying in a video that, although he had shown up to set more than happy to help the young director find his feet, he quickly discovered that the 19-year-old “didn’t need any of us”. He had, after all, spent the past five years creating this intricate world and worked closely with DP Jeremy Cox and the actors to translate that to the big screen.
It’s a disappointingly predictable controversy for 2026. The internet has made it much easier for young artists to create and share their work, but it has also guaranteed that anyone who publicly succeeds will be attacked and vilified. What all these sceptics, whose accusations reek of jealousy, are missing is that Hollywood has always been on the hunt for baby-faced auteurs. The platform for their talents might be new, but young people with an abundance of skill and vision are as old as art itself. Imagine how the internet would have reacted if it had been around when Mozart wrote his first symphony at the age of eight.
In Hollywood, young auteurs have been driving movements for nearly a century. Orson Welles was a painter, actor, and radio trailblazer when he was given free rein to make Citizen Kane at age 24. Roger Corman spent a significant part of his career incubating young directing talent, from a 23-year-old Ron Howard to a 23-year-old Francis Ford Coppola. John Singleton was 22 when he wrote and directed Boyz n the Hood, which made him the youngest nominee for the ‘Best Director’ Oscar.
The best comparison of all is Lena Dunham, who began posting short films on YouTube when she was 19. Two decades and countless accolades later, no one who seriously engages with her work questions whether she was the driving force behind her projects. Girls is unquestionably her vision, and its success belongs to her. No doubt one of the reasons she was ready to embark on such a huge undertaking at the age of 23 was that she had honed her skills with tiny budgets on YouTube first.
Someone who has spent five years honing a single concept on their own and amassing an audience of millions is surely more well-positioned to make a feature film out of it than someone who has just emerged from under the wing of their film school teachers. Anyone can post videos on YouTube, but building a following of millions through world-building and storytelling is rare. It’s no surprise that A-list directors were lining up to finance Backrooms. If anything, their involvement suggests that they wanted to hitch a ride on its coattails, not the other way around.
Similarly, the fact that premium brand actors like Ejiofor and Reinsve agreed to be in the film indicates just how enticing this project must have been on an artistic level. Neither of those actors plays it safe, and both of them are in high demand. They can be picky about the projects they accept. With a small budget of $10million, it wouldn’t have been a paycheque job either.
This brings us to the point that should actually be the focus of the discourse: Backrooms is a startlingly good movie. Based on a script from Will Soodik, who is probably the only person who should be given major credit for the project aside from Parsons, it feels as bright and shiny and new as anything Hollywood has produced in a very long time. You can tell that it was years in the making. It has a lived-in quality and an attention to detail that underpins all great works of cinema.
Most of the sets were built in the real world rather than through computer graphics, which adds to the disorienting juxtaposition between their anomalies and their familiarity. Set in 1990, the film contains scenes that are shot in a found-footage style that is always rooted in the story rather than formal gimmickry.
Many of the effects were done in-camera as well, providing another layer of analogue strangeness. The sustained tension is not created through the usual horror devices of jump-scares and dark corners, but through the increasingly labyrinthine assortment of doorways, clutter, and furniture that isn’t quite right. In the words of Ejiofor’s character, it’s as if you described a dog to someone who had never seen one, and then asked them to draw it. “The devil is in the details,” he says.
It is a cliché to describe a filmmaking style as Lynchian, and it is almost always inaccurate, but Backrooms is one of the first films not directed by David Lynch that justifiably invokes his name. There is one moment in particular, a dinner scene in the Backrooms with Ejiofor and Reinsve, which the Eraserhead visionary could almost have directed himself.
Parsons captures the mundanity and terror of nightmares better than any other horror movie this year (and there have been a lot). Nightmares don’t always feature axe murderers and demonic clowns. They are often much more surreal and uneventful than that, made up of familiar places turned eerie and endless spaces that you can’t seem to escape. From dream interpretation and memory to consciousness, urbanisation, and denial, its themes could spawn a thousand academic articles. On a purely technical level, you could spend weeks studying its use of cinematography, music, and practical effects.
There may be some viewers who feel that its ambiguity is simply obfuscation, but a tidy explanation would be horribly out of place. This is not an M Night Shyamalan movie. If it weren’t so enigmatic, the audience wouldn’t be able to project their own nightmares and phobias onto it. The brilliance of the film is its mounting sense of unease that never quite explains itself. The horror creeps up on you from within, and because of that, it becomes parasitic, unidentifiable, and unexciseable.
It’s a movie that invites argument, speculation, and interpretation, which is infinitely more fulfilling than melting down about the age of the person who created it.
