Liminal spaces in abandoned, closed-off areas are slowly becoming a subgenre of horror. Early in 2026, I saw the unsettling "Exit 8" which has liminal spaces in the form of endless subway corridors. "Backrooms" might become the quintessential liminal space horror movie, a most unsettling and unnerving movie experience. It is nightmarish, subversive and elliptical particularly as a surrealistic experience that may drive you up the wall. It has driven me up the wall and beyond.
There's a dank-looking furniture store, Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, that is reducing prices though it makes little difference. The parking lot is expansive with this store existing in the middle of it, and no customers ever come by. Chiwetel Ejiofor is the store owner, Clark, and you would think that dressing up as a pirate in commercial promos would help build sales but it doesn't (the store's name could use some revision). Clark is an alcoholic, a failed architect, and he has been forced out of his home by his unseen wife - he now lives in the spacious store. Problems circulate like wildfire with Clark not being able to pay the electrical bills, barely pay his two employees, and he sees an attentive therapist, Mary Klein (Renate Reinsve), who can aid Clark though she may not admit what his real problems are. Electricity malfunctions with lights going on and off at odd times in the store. Eventually, Clark notices something odd in the basement wall and finds he can walk through it to endless backrooms. One has furniture and a TV set in the middle of one room, leading to a dead bird, and more backrooms where chairs are embedded on ceilings and floors. There is also a surveillance camera and a couple of cardboard cutouts of people. What in creation is going on here? Is this another world created by aliens? (Perish that thought). Are these rooms part of other unfinished stores? (Perish that thought as well). Or is this all in Clark's mind, a gradual symptom of his alcoholism? (You can strike and perish that from the record as well).
"Backrooms" is not just content with Clark's vivid perceptions but also with Mary's perceptions as well. She came from an unhappy childhood home where her agoraphobic mother sealed the windows with newspaper clippings and blocked their entrance door with furniture, afraid they will come for them if they are seen. The home is eventually demolished and, in a metaphorical sense, so is Clark's. These two eventually find themselves in these infinitely creepy backrooms because memories linger, for better or worse, and they become visual representations embedded in their own past. Not to mention that the destruction of a home or even other places long remembered by some also become represented in these backrooms. Maybe, maybe not.
20-year-old Kane Parsons has astonishingly directed "Backrooms," his first feature based on a Youtube web series which I must check out. There are no easy answers in what is the film equivalent of Salvador Dali surrealism crossed with Picasso's Cubist ideas poured in rather thickly. It is a mesh of visions that can startle, fascinate and deliberately question what you see on screen. A staircase leading to a door on a ceiling in the middle of dozens of rooms without partitions is one of the more notable examples of a Daliesque moment. Three characters existing in this vacuum with deformed, fragmented faces (they are Still Lifes that definitely echo Picasso) stand by idly. Silence pervades with echoes of music heard somewhere in the distance while everything is lit with fluorescent bulbs. All this would be striking in its own way yet the inclusion of Ejiofor's anxious Clark and Reinsve's subdued Mary is the icing on the creepypasta cake. Forewarning: if you suffer from anxiety, do not watch this movie.
