Backrooms

Drawing on the deep dread of so-called “liminal” spaces—the non-places of depopulated office buildings and parking lots of late capitalist America—this feature debut from 20-year-old Kane Parsons was inspired by a sprawling fictional location first chronicled in a 2019 4chan thread. A simple premise straight out of the internet age snowballs into psychological terror as store-owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist (Renate Reinsve) venture into an unknown dimension through a strange doorway that has appeared in the basement of a furniture showroom.