Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve star in Kane Parsons’ liminal horror film Backrooms

Turning an internet creepypasta into a full-length feature film sounds like an ambitious move, but director Kane Parsons takes on the challenge of bringing that vision to the big screen in “Backrooms.” While the result is far from perfect, the attempt is enough to afford someone an effective horror experience.  “Backrooms” follows Mary (Renate Reinsve), a therapist whose patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor) disappears into a dimension beyond reality. Given the emotional connection they built as doctor and patient, Mary finds herself venturing into the unknown to save him.  The film’s first 20 minutes require a lot of patience, as the story […]...Keep on reading: ‘Backrooms’: A horror-maze experience worth getting lost in

Debut from 20-year-old director examines memory, reality and fear after Chiwetel Ejiofor accesses an infinite series of hidden rooms that all feel creepily askewAll 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. There is something here of J-horror, the V/H/S found footage franchise, Dan Erickson’s Severance and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. It’s about people walled up in their own memories, imprisoned in endlessly remembered scenes from their past, or miserably perceived versions of their present existences in which they have become caricatures of themselves, gargoyle stars of their paralysed inner world of failure. Or perhaps the action of the film is not metaphorical in this or any other sense, and the “backrooms” of the title simply exist.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. Continue reading...

With echoes of "The Blair Witch Project," "Annihilation," and the novel "House of Leaves," Parsons adapts his own YouTube series into a feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve as broken people who enter an acid-yellow maze of multiplying horrors.

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve star in 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons’ eerie, fascinating exploration of liminal spaces

Produced by James Wan and Osgood Perkins, the film adapts director Kane Parsons' own series of shorts set in an extra-dimensional maze of office-like rooms and hallways.