Backrooms Review: Kane Parsons Delivers A24’s Riskiest Horror Bet Yet

At 20, Kane Parsons just became the youngest feature director in A24’s history. Backrooms, his sub-ten-million-dollar adaptation of the YouTube series he started filming in his bedroom at 16, opens wide in U.S. theaters on May 29 carrying an 88 percent Rotten Tomatoes score across 82 critic reviews and a Metacritic average of 76. Industry trackers are penciling in a $20 million-plus opening weekend, which would put it well clear of its production cost before the first international print clears customs.

That’s the headline. The quieter question, and the one A24 is paying for, is whether a viral-native filmmaker can convert a YouTube audience into a theatrical one without sanding off what made him interesting in the first place. The film answers it sideways: with striking craft, two committed lead performances, an uneven found-footage shell, and just enough loose narrative thread to suggest Parsons is already aiming past opening weekend.

The Furniture Store With a Door That Should Not Be There

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a furniture warehouse owner with a slow-burn temper and a marriage that has failed loudly enough to put him in therapy. Renate Reinsve, the Norwegian lead of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, plays Dr. Mary Kline, his therapist, and the film’s first act keeps the two of them in tight, almost domestic frames before anything supernatural arrives. Will Soodik’s screenplay treats Clark’s rage as the real engine; the door in the warehouse wall is just what happens once the engine overheats.

When Clark slips through that door, the film changes textures. Parsons co-composed the score and the soundscape carries the load when the visuals go quiet. Wide-angle lenses, mostly 12mm and 15mm, give the empty corridors the warped depth that the original web series turned into a meme. The cinematography is patient. Shots hold three or four seconds longer than a modern horror cut wants them to, and the discomfort that builds in those held seconds is the movie’s strongest single tool.

Production wrapped in Vancouver last summer on a budget A24 has not officially disclosed but which Deadline and trade analysts place under ten million dollars. The 110-minute runtime feels deliberate; the film is not in a hurry to explain itself, and the longer it withholds, the more the warehouse begins to feel like the only honest space in Clark’s life.

From a Bedroom in Northern California to A24

Parsons, who posts as Kane Pixels, started uploading The Backrooms: Found Footage to YouTube in January 2022. He was 16, working in Blender on what he has called a fairly crummy laptop, and the first video crossed forty million views inside a month. By February 2023 Deadline had confirmed A24 was developing a feature with Parsons attached to direct.

YouTube, really more than just being a cultural reference for me, has been how I know how to do any of the stuff I do. Even on a pretty shitty machine, you can still get the ball rolling.

That’s Parsons in a Deadline interview earlier this month, in a piece that listed him among the industry’s emerging disruptors. The line lands because the film bears it out. The visual grammar of the warehouse sequences carries the same self-taught logic as the YouTube shorts: long lens distortion, sourceless light, a refusal to cut to a reaction shot when holding on the room is more frightening.

Producers James Wan, Shawn Levy and Osgood Perkins backed the film. The producing team matters here because each of them runs a separate horror playbook (Wan on franchise architecture, Levy on streaming-to-theatrical scale, Perkins on auteurist atmosphere), and Parsons has spoken in interviews about choosing to absorb notes rather than guard the work. The result is a debut that looks like a 20-year-old’s instincts edited by people who have shipped horror at every budget tier.

Ejiofor’s Slow Burn and the Therapist’s Pivot

Ejiofor is doing the heaviest dramatic work the film has. His Clark is a study in low-grade dread held just under the skin, the kind of performance that pays off twice: once when the supernatural starts and once when it doesn’t. A goofy pirate-themed television commercial for the furniture store, written and placed early, reads as a throwaway laugh on first watch and as a tell on second. Parsons and Soodik plant that kind of detail repeatedly. The film rewards the audience that pays attention to what people choose to be when no one is watching.

Reinsve’s Dr. Kline begins as the rational frame the story needs and then quietly takes over as its protagonist. The plot’s official synopsis, as A24 has been promoting it, describes a therapist who enters another dimension to find her missing patient. That sentence does most of the structural work but undersells how much weight Reinsve carries once Clark goes missing. Her role-playing exercise with him in the second scene, which feels at first like a clinical tic, comes back as the film’s most disturbing single beat.

Mark Duplass appears in what reads as a single extended sequence and exits without the film bothering to explain him. Whether that’s a structural problem or a deliberate one is the kind of argument Backrooms seems built to provoke.

Where the Found-Footage Frame Drags

The film’s weakest stretch is the prelude. Parsons and Soodik open with a found-footage sequence that announces the film’s lineage with the YouTube series and then never fully recovers from the announcement. Found footage as a horror grammar peaked in the early 2010s and has, with a handful of exceptions, calcified since.

The choice is defensible on franchise grounds: the YouTube series is found footage, and A24 wants the bridge to be visible. The cost is that the most static and dated minutes of the film are also its first, which is a structural risk in a release window where the average ticket buyer’s attention is decided by trailer pre-rolls.

Three things the film does not solve:

• A subplot involving the warehouse’s electrical system that promises a rational explanation and then walks away from one.
• The Duplass thread, which lands as a tonal grenade rather than a payoff.
• The found-footage cutaways in the second hour, which jolt the audience out of the cinematic register the rest of the film has earned.

None of these are fatal. All of them are visible. A more cautious debut would have ironed them out; a more cynical one would never have included them. Parsons does neither, and the film’s roughness is part of what marks it as recognizable work rather than committee output.

A24’s Bet on Viral-Native Directors

The pipeline question is the one that matters past the second weekend. A24 has built a model that runs on micro-budget horror debuts converted into franchises and, downstream, into prestige theatrical and TV slots for the directors. Hereditary made Ari Aster. Talk to Me made the Philippou brothers. The studio has not previously tried to do it with a director recruited from a YouTube channel.

The math is friendlier than the precedent suggests. Set against recent A24 horror debuts, Backrooms enters the market with a built-in audience the others did not have.

The studio is paying for the IP, the director, and the audience all in one transaction. Parsons’ YouTube channel has crossed 4 million subscribers and the original Backrooms short still sits above sixty million views. The opening weekend functions as a conversion test: how many of those YouTube viewers buy a movie ticket, and at what discount to the channel’s view count?

The broader context for that test is the indie horror surge that has carried the post-pandemic theatrical recovery. Studios that have leaned on existing intellectual property are watching small, original horror clean up their weekends, a pattern that has begun to expose the limits of the IP-first release strategy. Backrooms sits at an unusual point on that map. The film is original to the studio system but already-IP on the platform that grew its director.

The Box Office Read for Memorial Day Weekend

Backrooms opens against a softer Memorial Day frame than the slot usually carries. The world premiere ran on May 7 at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles, the South Korean release landed two days ago, and U.S. previews started Wednesday night. A24 has booked the film into roughly 3,000 screens, modest by tentpole standards but aggressive for a horror debut.

Two things will tell quickly. The first is the under-25 share of the opening-night audience, which is the bet on the YouTube-to-theatrical conversion. The second is the second-weekend hold, which is the bet on whether the film’s strangeness travels by word of mouth past its core fan base.

If both numbers land, A24’s next viral-native director gets greenlit on a shorter runway than Parsons did. If only the first number lands and the film falls hard in week two, the model is still viable but the studio will pick its next platform graduate more carefully. If neither lands, the experiment ends and the pipeline reverts to film school and shorts programs.

By Tuesday morning the answer will be on a tracking sheet. Until then, the only thing certain about Parsons’ first feature is that it does not look like anyone else’s.