A sixteen-year-old pointed a camera at an empty office and frightened the internet. Four years later A24 handed him a fortune and their biggest opening in history. I went in a sceptic. I came out looking over my shoulder.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXVI · 6 minI have spent a long professional life being frightened by expensive things — the towering monster, the orchestral sting, the practical explosion that costs more than a house. So allow me to report, with the weary astonishment of a man who thought he had seen every trick, that the most unnerving film of the year is about a room. An ordinary room. Damp carpet, buzzing lights, wallpaper the colour of an old bruise. No door out. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to ruin your evening in the most satisfying way.
You know the premise even if you have never heard the title, because it did not come from a studio — it came from the internet, where dread is manufactured for free. Four years ago a boy of sixteen named Kane Parsons uploaded nine minutes of footage of an empty yellow space to the great churning nowhere of YouTube. Seventy-seven million views and a web series later, A24 did the only sensible thing a studio can do when a child invents a nightmare: they gave him a chequebook and got out of the way.
He is twenty. He is the youngest director A24 has ever employed and, as of this spring, the youngest filmmaker to sit at number one at the box office. I resent the arithmetic of this so completely that I can only respond to it with respect.
The horror of the almost-familiar
What Parsons understands — and what a great many better-funded, worse-frightened directors do not — is that terror does not live in the monster. It lives in the transition. The corridor you were only ever meant to pass through. The office after everyone has gone home. The hum of a light that has no business still being on. Backrooms takes that specific, modern, ambient unease — the feeling that you have wandered one room too far and the building has quietly stopped being a building — and simply refuses to release you from it.
There is no signal down here, which is the true horror of the film and of the age: a place your phone cannot reach, and therefore a place that, to a certain generation, may as well not exist — except that it does, and it is endless, and it wants you to keep walking. I have never been so unsettled by so little. The budget was spent on restraint, correctly, and restraint is the most expensive thing in Hollywood.
Terror does not live in the monster. It lives in the transition — the corridor you were only ever meant to pass through.
Real actors, lost in a phone-video nightmare
To ground a viral abstraction, Parsons has borrowed gravity from grown-ups: Chiwetel Ejiofor, who can make a man's dread feel like theology; Renate Reinsve, whose face is its own weather system; Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia. It should not work — the register of a real actor inside a creepypasta — and yet the collision is the point. These are recognisable, breathing people, and the room does not care. Neither, in the end, does the film. It is the most disciplined kind of cruelty.
The numbers, which I distrust on principle and cite only because they are absurd, agree: roughly eighty-one million dollars domestic, near a hundred and eighteen worldwide — A24's largest opening ever, mounted by a director who cannot yet legally look bored in most of the bars near the theatre. The mob has spoken, and for once the mob and I are, uncomfortably, in the same empty room.
The scariest thing this year is the least.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. What I can tell you plainly is that the reception is real and the box office is a matter of record: A24's biggest opening ever, and near-universal acclaim for a debut.
What I did not expect was to be moved as well as frightened — that under the dread sits something almost tender, about being young and lost and unable to phone home. Kane Parsons is twenty and has made a room I cannot stop walking through. See it in a full theatre, with strangers, so that when the lights hum you are not alone. That, it turns out, is the only exit.