{"id":506478,"date":"2026-05-28T06:41:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T06:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/506478\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T06:41:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T06:41:13","slug":"backrooms-review-kane-parsonss-exquisite-direction-brings-webs-scariest-creepypasta-to-the-big-screen-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/506478\/","title":{"rendered":"Backrooms review: Kane Parsons\u2019s exquisite direction brings web\u2019s scariest creepypasta to the big screen \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Backrooms<\/strong> <\/p>\n

\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d8<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Director:<\/strong> Kane Parsons <\/p>\n

Cert:<\/strong> 15A<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Horror<\/p>\n

Starring:<\/strong> Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell, Avan Jogia <\/p>\n

Running Time:<\/strong> 1 hr 51 mins<\/p>\n

There is so much elaborate lore around the Backrooms that it can be a daunting concept for newcomers. In 2019 a single uncanny photograph posted to a forgotten corner of the internet, featuring jaundiced drywall under fluorescent lights in a never-ending office space, emerged from 4chan threads, where anonymous users traded eerie tales as \u201ccreepypasta\u201d: horror stories that spread virally online, mutating with each retelling.<\/p>\n

The Backrooms quickly became one of the internet\u2019s scariest nightmares, a liminal purgatory of empty corporate spaces wherein reality itself glitches and you \u201cnoclip\u201d out of the world.<\/p>\n

This collective hallucination has dropped the definite article to become Backrooms, the hottest A24-produced horror of the year. It succeeds where other creepypasta adaptations (take a bow, Slender Man) have dismally failed and requires no prior knowledge of its storied history.<\/p>\n

Wisely, A24 has tasked Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old film-maker who since 2022 has garnered hundreds of millions of views for his short-film series The Backrooms (Found Footage), with bringing the web\u2019s scariest concept to the big screen.<\/p>\n

Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor<\/a> and Renate Reinsve<\/a>, Backrooms follows damaged souls as they noclip into an infinite expanse of jumbled furniture. These corridors only lead to more corridors and degraded copies of copies. It\u2019s Alice\u2019s alienated Wonderland, unsettling from the opening gambit, but sit tight: like the space it depicts, there\u2019s infinitely more to come.<\/p>\n

Ejiofor plays Clark, a failed architect and the proprietor of Cap\u2019n Clark\u2019s Ottoman Empire furniture emporium. Drinking heavily and wounded by marital failure, he has tense therapy sessions with Dr Mary Clark (Reinsve), whose cassette-tape self-help programme encouraging listeners to \u201copen a window\u201d has done little to quell her own inner demons. Note the tech: the film partly, and evocatively, masquerades as 1990s found footage.<\/p>\n

When a manic Clark arrives in her office with a map of the strange otherworldly space he has found through a portal in his shop, she seems unconvinced. But the audience has already journeyed through this dimension and knows that something awful lurks around its improbable corners. We can\u2019t say too much.<\/p>\n

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve\u2019s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass<\/a> deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette\u2019s production design and Parsons\u2019s exquisite direction. <\/p>\n

In cinemas from Friday, May 29th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Backrooms \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d8 Director: Kane Parsons Cert: 15A Genre: Horror Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[121982,18,117,19,17,200047,34622],"class_list":["post-506478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-chiwetel-ejiofor","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mark-duplass","tag-renate-reinsve"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116650841806593395","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}