Backrooms (2026)
What happens when urban alienation, the existential void of the digital age, and humanity’s collective unconscious condense into a concrete nightmare? Kane Parsons’ feature debut strips the viewer of the comforting fiction of an explicable world and casts us into an architectural purgatory. Tuonen Portti examines the film’s psychological depths and esoteric warnings: if you step behind the veil already broken, the beyond will tear you to pieces.
The Backrooms draws the viewer in through a tear in reality, directly into a hell of yellow wallpaper and fluorescent tubes.
The film is a modern, distorted iteration of a Lewis Carroll classic. Falling through reality is the digital age’s rabbit hole. In Alice’s world, the rules were mad — but they existed. In the Backrooms, there are no rules at all. There are no tea parties to be found here, only an endless descent into a nameless abyss.
The film strikes at the heart of modern existentialism. No one lives in a waiting room. Liminal space is nobody’s destination — yet these characters cannot pass through it.
What are the yellow corridors made of? The film suggests something more frightening than a mere physical trap: the Backrooms is a dumping ground for the collective unconscious, a place where society’s existential dread, urban alienation, and suppressed madness pool and drain. The yellow office walls and fluorescent tubes are of their own making — they are the psychic slag of an industrialised and bureaucratised world. When a person ends up there, they do not step into an external dimension but into the species’ shared insanity made concrete.
As the characters wander this collective nightmare together, the film reveals its most chilling psychological register: shared madness. Isolation from the outside world tears the psyche open, and within the shared space, delusions begin to feed one another: the flicker of a fluorescent tube heard by one becomes the footstep of a monster for another. Despair compounds within an enclosed space. The worst threat ignites in the paranoia kindling behind a companion’s eyes. At this point the film becomes a serious warning that resonates with occultist tradition. Those who approach unknown spaces had better be psychologically grounded. A strong psyche anchors one to reality. If you stare into the abyss of collective madness long enough, it remakes you in its own image. The film’s Minotaur strikes when the victim’s psychological backbone snaps at the labyrinth’s dead end.
When the theatre lights come up, you find yourself scanning the room differently. Empty corridors and shopping centres begin to look like gateways to the other side of the threshold. The film renders our everyday environment unsafe — because it reminds us of what waits beneath the surface.
