Kane Parsons has built Backrooms around a wonderfully simple cinematic proposition: what if you could walk through the wrong wall and discover that the world behind it was infinitely larger than the world you thought you knew? It is the kind of premise that sounds almost childish when reduced to a sentence yet becomes profoundly unsettling once given physical space. A doorway appears where no doorway should exist. A basement gives way to an impossible architecture. Rooms lead to rooms, corridors fold into corridors and the familiar becomes subtly, irrevocably wrong.

For a filmmaker barely out of his teens, Parsons demonstrates an extraordinary understanding of why such spaces disturb us. His feature debut, adapted from the online phenomenon he helped develop through his Kane Pixels YouTube series, does not treat the Backrooms simply as a monster’s playground. Instead, it approaches them as a psychological landscape, a physical manifestation of memory, regret, failure and the human need to impose meaning upon spaces that refuse to provide it. The result is an ambitious piece of conceptual horror that absolutely lived up to the enormous expectations surrounding its transition from internet phenomenon to feature film — and yet, somewhat paradoxically, not always in the ways one might expect.

The mythology of the Backrooms began with an image rather than a narrative: an apparently empty, yellow-walled interior illuminated by fluorescent lighting, a space that seemed both completely mundane and profoundly unnatural. Parsons understood the potential of that image early, transforming it into a series of increasingly elaborate short films before expanding the concept into this feature. The achievement of Backrooms is that it retains the essential strangeness of the original idea while giving it human beings to inhabit.

That distinction is crucial.

Because an empty room can be unsettling, but an empty room inhabited by someone carrying the weight of a broken life becomes something else entirely.

At the centre of the film is Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a failed architect whose professional and personal lives have both collapsed into a kind of stagnant middle age. Separated from his wife, drinking heavily and working in a furniture showroom that feels almost comically disconnected from the life he once imagined for himself, Clark is already living in a psychological backroom before he ever discovers the literal one.

That is one of Parsons’ smartest ideas.

Clark is an architect who has failed to construct the life he wanted, and he subsequently finds himself trapped inside an impossible architecture. The metaphor could easily have been unbearably obvious, but Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik understand that the Backrooms do not need to function as a simple allegory. Their power comes from existing simultaneously as a physical impossibility and a psychological possibility.

Clark’s first encounter with the Backrooms therefore carries an unusual mixture of fear and fascination. The space is terrifying, but it is also liberating. Its infinite corridors offer something that the world above cannot: possibility. Here is a place without conventional boundaries, a space where the rules of reality have become negotiable. For a man whose existence has narrowed into disappointment, the infinite can initially look like freedom.

That makes Chiwetel Ejiofor such an inspired choice.

Ejiofor has always possessed an ability to communicate enormous amounts of emotional information without appearing to perform it. Here, that quality becomes essential. Clark is not simply frightened by the Backrooms. He is fascinated by them, frustrated by them, angry with them and, at times, almost seduced by them. Ejiofor allows those contradictory responses to coexist.

There is a weariness to his performance that makes Clark’s predicament feel much larger than the mechanics of the horror story. He is a man who has already become trapped before the film begins. The Backrooms merely give that condition architectural form.

It is one of the film’s most impressive pieces of psychological construction.

Renate Reinsve is equally effective as Dr Mary Kline, Clark’s therapist, and her presence gives the film another layer of psychological inquiry. If Clark represents someone trapped inside his own resentments, Mary represents someone who has built a professional life around helping other people navigate theirs. Her decision to enter the Backrooms after Clark therefore becomes more than a conventional rescue mission.

The therapist enters the patient’s nightmare.

And once she does, the distinction between observer and participant begins to collapse.

This is where Backrooms becomes particularly inventive. The film repeatedly toys with the idea that the environment may not simply be an external supernatural space but something connected to the characters’ memories and emotional histories. The rooms appear to contain fragments of lived experience, distorted approximations of reality that resemble memories reconstructed by someone who cannot quite remember them correctly.

The result is architecture behaving like trauma.

A corridor does not necessarily lead somewhere.

A room does not necessarily contain anything.

A familiar object may have no explanation.

And the deeper the characters travel, the less useful conventional geography becomes.

Parsons is exceptionally good at this kind of spatial uncertainty. He understands that horror does not always require darkness. In fact, Backrooms demonstrates how effectively a filmmaker can make fluorescent lighting frightening. The sickly yellow interiors and endless artificial illumination create a world that is permanently exposed and yet somehow impossible to see clearly.

There is nowhere to hide because there is nowhere that feels safe.

The cinematography and production design deserve enormous credit for creating this sensation. Parsons and cinematographer Jeremy Cox transform the supposedly mundane language of commercial interiors into something oppressive and almost cosmic. Walls, carpets, ceiling panels and furniture become components of an endlessly repeating visual vocabulary. The repetition is essential because it gradually erodes the audience’s confidence in their own spatial memory.

We have seen this room before.

Haven’t we?

That corridor looks familiar.

Or perhaps it doesn’t.

The film understands that the human brain is constantly trying to map its surroundings, and Backrooms weaponises that instinct against us.

This is where the film’s connection to liminal-space horror becomes more than a fashionable aesthetic. The liminal space is frightening because it is a location without a clear purpose. It is the hotel corridor after everyone has gone home. The office after the workers have disappeared. The shopping centre before opening. The school after the final bell.

These spaces are recognisable but stripped of their social function.

Backrooms takes that idea and removes the endpoint entirely.

There is no closing time.

There is no final corridor.

There is no obvious outside.

There is simply more.

And more.

And more.

That is conceptually brilliant.

It is also where the film begins to reveal its greatest weakness.

Because once the audience understands the central conceit, the question becomes what Parsons can actually do with it for almost two hours.

The answer is frequently impressive.

But not always frightening.

Backrooms is an exceptionally inventive film, yet its inventiveness does not consistently translate into shock appeal. Parsons is more interested in unease than conventional scares, and that decision is understandable given the material. The original Backrooms concept was never particularly dependent upon jump scares. Its power came from suggestion, emptiness and the sense that something might be waiting just outside the limits of the frame.

The problem is that a feature-length film eventually has to provide some escalation.

And the middle section occasionally feels as though it is wandering through the very architecture it has created.

The endless rooms are fascinating to explore, but fascination and fear are not identical emotions. The film’s central conceit is sufficiently compelling that simply moving through the Backrooms can remain interesting for quite some time. Yet there comes a point where the viewer begins to anticipate the rhythm: another corridor, another room, another strange object, another distant sound.

The film starts to experience its own version of spatial fatigue.

This is not a failure of imagination. Quite the opposite.

There is almost too much imagination and not quite enough dramatic propulsion.

The film’s psychological ideas are considerably more successful. The Backrooms become a kind of externalised interiority, a landscape in which characters confront versions of themselves that have been distorted by memory and regret. Parsons is interested in the way people become trapped inside narratives about their own lives, particularly the stories they tell themselves about why they failed.

Clark is an especially compelling example because his professional identity has collapsed alongside his personal one. He was supposed to design spaces. Instead, he finds himself working in a furniture showroom, surrounded by representations of homes that he no longer possesses.

The irony is beautifully constructed.

He sells people the fantasy of domestic stability while sleeping in the store himself.

Then he discovers an infinite series of spaces that seem to exist behind reality.

The Backrooms therefore become both escape and punishment.

That duality gives the film its emotional weight.

And it is why Ejiofor’s performance matters so much. Without him, Backrooms could easily become an elaborate exercise in production design. With him, the corridors acquire emotional significance.

He makes the film human.

There is something particularly impressive about watching an actor of Ejiofor’s calibre respond to a premise that could so easily have remained trapped within internet horror. He doesn’t treat the Backrooms as an excuse to perform fear. He treats them as a psychological event.

That difference elevates the material.

The supporting performances contribute to the same effect, particularly as the film moves away from Clark’s solitary exploration and begins introducing other characters into the labyrinth. The Backrooms become more threatening when they are shared because their presence introduces conflicting interpretations of what the space actually represents.

Is it a supernatural dimension?

A psychological projection?

A manifestation of memory?

A place that exists outside conventional reality?

Parsons wisely refuses to provide a completely comfortable answer.

That ambiguity is one of the film’s strengths.

Yet it also contributes to the sense that the horror never quite lands with the force it could.

There are certainly disturbing images. Parsons has an excellent eye for grotesque shapes and unnatural movement, and when the film finally reveals some of the entities inhabiting the Backrooms, they are strikingly designed. But there is something almost academic about the horror. We observe it. We analyse it. We wonder what it means.

We don’t necessarily recoil from it.

And that distinction is perhaps the key to my response to the film.

Did Backrooms live up to expectations?

Yes and no.

It absolutely lives up to the expectation that Kane Parsons would bring something inventive and visually distinctive to the big screen. It demonstrates a remarkable understanding of atmosphere, spatial design and psychological horror. The performances are considerably stronger than one might expect from a film originating in internet creepypasta culture, with Ejiofor providing the emotional centre and Reinsve offering an equally compelling counterpoint.

But it does not always live up to the expectation of being genuinely frightening.

There are moments of terror, but the film is ultimately more interested in the uncanny than the shocking.

That is not necessarily a criticism.

In fact, some audiences will consider it the film’s greatest virtue.

But for a horror film built around such an inherently disturbing concept, there is a nagging feeling that Parsons could have pushed the material further into genuine nightmare territory.

The middle section in particular could have benefited from greater narrative urgency. The Backrooms are fascinating, but the film occasionally mistakes movement through an interesting environment for dramatic progression. The characters continue exploring, the mythology expands and the psychological dimensions deepen, but the narrative momentum periodically stalls.

When the film finally accelerates towards its conclusion, it becomes considerably more effective. The space suddenly feels smaller, despite remaining physically enormous. The threat becomes more immediate. The characters’ movement through the environment gains urgency.

And for a brief period, the film achieves the perfect marriage between its conceptual and visceral qualities.

This is what makes Backrooms so frustratingly close to greatness.

You can see what Parsons is capable of.

There are sequences where the film stops feeling like an adaptation of an internet horror phenomenon and starts feeling like the emergence of a genuinely distinctive cinematic voice. The imagery, sound, performances and psychological ideas converge into something that feels strange and original.

Kane Parsons has clearly spent years thinking about how spaces can frighten us.

Now he has to learn how to make stories frighten us just as effectively.

That is an exciting prospect.

Because Backrooms may ultimately be less significant as a fully realised horror movie than as a statement of intent from an extraordinarily promising filmmaker. At just twenty, Parsons has taken an idea born from internet folklore and translated it into a feature that possesses a visual and conceptual identity of its own. That achievement alone is considerable.

The film’s greatest success is perhaps that it makes the Backrooms feel cinematic rather than merely viral.

The internet created the mythology.

Parsons has created a world.

And it is a world worth getting lost in.

Even if, occasionally, the journey takes a little too long.

The Prognosis:

Backrooms is an inventive, psychologically rich and beautifully performed piece of liminal horror that proves Kane Parsons has far more to offer than an expansion of his viral YouTube phenomenon. Its middle section occasionally loses momentum, and its strange, unsettling imagery rarely delivers the visceral shock one might expect from its premise. But the intelligence of its ideas, the extraordinary production design and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s superb central performance make it an intriguing and often hypnotic debut. It may not always frighten as much as it fascinates, but there is no question that Kane Parsons is a filmmaker worth watching.

• Saul Muerte