May has been a major month for horror fans. Following the breakout success of Focus Features and Blumhouse’s Obsession, A24’s Backrooms is set to hit theaters Friday — and the reviews are now in.
The films also share a common thread: both are directed by rising young voices in the genre, with 26-year-old Curry Barker helming Obsession and 20-year-old Kane Parsons directing Backrooms. After online rumors questioned Parsons’ involvement in the film, star Mark Duplass quickly defended the filmmaker. “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control,” Duplass wrote on X Tuesday. “More so than many directors 3x his age.”
The film also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, with a script penned by Will Soodik. Horror leaders James Wan and Osgood Perkins are among the producers.
Backrooms follows therapist Dr. Mary Kline (Reinsve), who enters an alternate dimension after her patient disappears inside it. The film adapts Parsons’ viral YouTube series, which he launched as a teenager.
As of Wednesday, Backrooms holds an 87 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and is tracking for a $45 million to $50 million opening weekend, which would mark A24’s biggest debut yet. Below, see what critics are saying about the film.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han wrote, “Eeriness for its own sake has its limits. The longer we spend exploring the Backrooms, the less frightening and more random these oddities start to feel. They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing; it works only until it becomes apparent that there are no meaningful answers forthcoming.”
The Daily Beast’s Nick Schager wrote in his review, “Backrooms is unquestionably a horror film, but at its core, it has less in common with slashers, torture porn, and haunted house chillers than with the likes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. A descent into an uncanny-valley netherworld that’s both a warped reflection and deconstruction of the modern world, 21-year-old Kane Parsons’ debut feature (May 29) is a waking nightmare that prioritizes atmosphere over jump scares, suggestion over explication. While it occasionally weighs itself down with excessive psychologizing, it casts a surrealistic spell that’s unlike anything else in contemporary cinema.”
YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns praised the movie’s found footage elements and balance of comedy, saying, “This movie is actually shockingly funny” at times, “There were moments he was clearly going for a laugh, and it hit. The audience was laughing.” Though he added that the movie felt too long. “The last act of this movie is kind of tacked on as an afterthought … It has its flaws, and I can see the Backrooms working better as a series of online shorts, but by and large, I had myself a nice claustrophobic time.”
The Associated Press’ Jake Coyle wrote that the “backstory is more intriguing” than the film in his review: “As a horror, fluorescent-lit riff on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Backrooms doesn’t quite work. While the movie finds a potentially insightful pathway to a story, it can’t bridge its very physical, wall-to-wall-carpeted labyrinth with Clark’s mental state. A movie with so many doors ultimately can’t find the right one.”
Empire’s Jamie Graham wrote, “Backrooms is one of the most out there, surreal, art-horror features since David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The web series might boast 200 million views since debuting in 2022, but this movie is most certainly not for everyone. It favours opacity, half-glimpsed creatures and a steady sense of unease over crowd-pleasing jumps, and is sure to spark endless debate and interpretations among those who aren’t bored silly by it.”