‘I found a place’: how Backrooms captures the horror of sinister architecture

A new psychological thriller from A24 turns the mundane into the menacing, plunging audiences into a disorienting world where architecture itself becomes the source of horror. *Backrooms*, directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons—the youngest filmmaker ever to work with the studio—transforms forgotten spaces like empty offices and abandoned malls into a nightmarish labyrinth. The film follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former architect turned furniture store owner, who stumbles upon a hidden portal to this eerie realm in his store’s basement. His attempts to explain the experience to his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), only deepen the mystery, as the film explores the unsettling nature of liminal spaces—those strange, in-between places that exist just beyond the edges of our everyday world.

Liminal spaces, as defined by philosopher Marc Augé, are "non-places"—spaces stripped of identity, history, or relational meaning. Architect Rem Koolhaas famously called them "Junkspace," the hollowed-out remnants of modernist design: fluorescent-lit corridors, endless drop ceilings, and the skeletal remains of retail spaces after the crowds have gone. These are the backrooms of *Backrooms*, spaces that once hummed with life but now linger in a state of uncanny stillness. The film’s visual language, borrowed from Parsons’ earlier YouTube shorts, amplifies this unease, using free 3D software to craft an environment that feels both eerily familiar and profoundly alien. Its aesthetic taps into a growing online fascination with these spaces, a phenomenon that began with an eerie 2003 photo of a half-renovated furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin—an image that sparked decades of internet lore about "dead malls" and forgotten corridors.

Parsons’ fascination with "the laws of the universe that resulted in our consciousness" infuses *Backrooms* with a sense of existential dread. The film’s horror lies not in jump scares but in its slow, creeping revelation: an endless bureaucracy of identical rooms, a void where meaning collapses. As Clark and Dr. Kline delve deeper, they encounter not just emptiness but the absence of answers—no one knows who controls this world or where it came from. It is, in essence, a manifestation of modern alienation, where the spaces we once inhabited have been reduced to neutral, meaningless shells. The flickering lights, the repetitive patterns, the sheer scale of the backrooms evoke a chilling metaphor for how industrialization has stripped away the humanity of our built environment.

In an era where urban decay and digital liminality blur, *Backrooms* resonates as more than just a horror film—it is a meditation on the uncanny spaces that define our era. By turning the overlooked passages of shopping malls and office buildings into a nightmarish void, Parsons crafts a world that feels both intimately familiar and profoundly unsettling. The film’s power lies in its ability to make the viewer question not just the spaces around them, but the very structures of reality itself.