The peeling wallpaper of a decaying world

Backrooms, Covid, video games, slop, and the future of film

Jun 15, 2026

Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow...
The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstances of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage...

Listen: walls can speak. The walls of our homes speak to us in voices so familiar don’t hear them anymore. An empty bedroom cries out for a bed and dresser and we dutifully put them there; the kitchen gets messy and we clean it up before the flies come out.

A critic who cannot reawaken their ears to the voice of a space will not understand Backrooms. They will see an interconnected series of ugly, yellow hallways lit with hideous fluorescents and nothing more. But for those with ears to hear, the Backrooms scream out, and have so much to say.

Directed by Kane Parsons from a script by Will Soodik, Backrooms is a fundamentally incoherent film...

This yielded a final film often at odds with itself, in which the script constantly tries to move toward conventional character beats and plot resolutions, while at the same time Parsons attempts to assert a vision very much at odds with previous generations of filmmakers, both in style and substance.

That Parsons succeeds in conveying his vision within the confines of the script he was bound to is a testament to his immense filmmaking skill and clarity of purpose. Backrooms is a fascinating document of an industry undergoing immense stress and change...

No spaces speak as loudly, or at least as overtly, as virtual spaces. It is often neglected just how much video games are an architectural medium. From the dawn of the 3D era with Super Mario 64, game designers have closed players up in little boxes and set them loose to run around. These virtual playgrounds demand things from the player.

I could tell instantly that Parsons is a gamer...

This contradiction between exploring and inhabiting a space is what makes the Backrooms such a compelling and terrifying proposition to me.

The Backrooms are not a place you want to be. But being in a video game is a fraught proposition to begin with.

This is what makes the Backrooms such a compelling space...

The German word Freud uses for “uncanny” is unheimliche, or, quite literally, “unhomelike.” ... The unheimliche is thus something familiar rendered unfamiliar, something thought to be benign shown to hold sinister depths.

In Backrooms, Clark is a divorced, failed architect running a furniture showroom...

Backrooms would not work as a film if the Backrooms were inert...

Clark’s first foray into the Backrooms ends with him rushing back to the exit after he comes into near-contact with something else in there...

This is where Parsons vision of a Backrooms film and Soodik’s script are most at odds with each other...

Their conversation is interrupted by the monster who stalked Clark earlier—it is a gigantic Cap’n Clark...

Clark gains no such insight and finds no such redemption. But how could he? His gaze could never encompass the universe—he’s locked inside.

The timeline of the Backrooms phenomenon cannot be ignored. ... When Mary steps into the Backrooms, she has come home.

Part of what I find so terrifying about the Backrooms is the sense that in this place, the rules do not apply.

The fundamental question that sustains our attention throughout Backrooms is: “What are the Backrooms?” ...

The Backrooms represent the ultimate truth of the cosmos as the maximally banal. ...

The Backrooms are a double to our world. ...

The Backrooms thus function as a criticism of our reality.

There is a sequence in Backrooms. When Mary falls unconscious...

Liz and I were out at dinner the other night...

For a filmmaker Parsons’ age, this is what the world looks like, this is what the future looks like. Emptier and emptier, harsher and harsher, opening onto a great and terrible darkness.