Kane Parsons' (aka Kane Pixels) science fiction horror film, Backrooms (2026),  is his adaptation of his YouTube short into a feature length work that unnerves and captivates audiences. But as Lucy Veitch discovered, the film also says so much more about the perils and bizarre fascination of difficult memories that distort but remain over time. 

LUCY VEITCH, Mon 22 June 2026

I went into Backrooms expecting horror. Endless yellow hallways, uncanny monsters, internet folklore brought to life. What I didn't expect was to spend the drive home thinking about memory.


The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a frustrated furniture store owner who stumbles into the mysterious Backrooms, and Mary (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, whose own childhood trauma slowly emerges throughout the story.


On paper, it sounds like a familiar psychological horror setup. Watching it, however, I found myself far less interested in the monster than in what the liminal spaces themselves seemed to be saying.


The moment that shifted the film for me came through Mary's memories of her childhood. There is a scene where we see her childhood home recreated again and again, each version slightly different from the last in her memories. The camera moves downward through floor after floor of repeating rooms, each one resembling the original a little less.


Sitting there, I was thinking about how my own memory works. When I look back on difficult moments from my own life, I don't remember them perfectly. Details disappear. Conversations blur and distort. Some objects become strangely important while others vanish entirely. Yet the core emotion remains intact.


Watching Mary move through those increasingly distorted copies of her home felt like watching trauma itself. Time doesn't always soften painful memories, sometimes it reshapes them into something stranger. Something both familiar and alien.


That idea followed me throughout the rest of the film. The Backrooms aren't just a maze of never ending, ever expanding yellow office spaces. To me, they felt like a physical manifestation of getting stuck inside your own mind. Every corridor loops back on itself. Every attempt to escape seems to leads somewhere new but still familiar.


The longer Clark remains in the Backrooms, the less interested he becomes in leaving. I found that particularly unsettling because it reminded me of how easy it can be to fall into familiar patterns of thinking. The more often we revisit a thought, a regret, or a hurt, the deeper and more warped the pathway becomes.


Even some of the film's creatures, the 'Still Lifes', felt like memories more than monsters. They are copies of people that become increasingly distorted each time they are recreated and remembered. Every time we revisit a memory, we aren't pulling out the original version. We're remembering the last version we remembered.


By the end, I wasn't frightened by the Backrooms themselves. I was frightened by the possibility that we all carry our own versions of them. Places built from memories we can't quite let go of, endlessly reconstructed inside our heads. For me, Backrooms succeeds because it transforms a viral horror concept into something far more human. Beneath the liminal hallways and unsettling imagery is a story about memory, trauma, and the difficult work of finding a way forward when part of you really wants to stay lost.

A Strange Re-shaping of Painful Memories in Backrooms

REVIEW

Ali Alizadeh

January 2025


Pascal Plantea's film Les Chambres Rogues (Red Rooms) takes viewers on a terrifying journey into mental spaces as dark as the horrors of the dark web.

REVIEW

Phoebe Lupton

December 2024


Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World draws on memoir-cultural criticism to reveal a disturbing lack of kindness in the era of misinformation.

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