When Architecture Watches You Back: What 'Backrooms' Says About Surveillance, Control and Memory
Contemporary cinema increasingly moves beyond established generic categories such as horror, psychological thriller and fantasy. In films like Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, narrative often yields to the power of image, craft, atmosphere and conceptual depth – elements that transcend surface classification. Parsons takes this approach even further than many of his contemporaries, transforming the film’s disorienting, labyrinthine space from a mere setting into its most compelling character.
Parsons was 20 when A24 released Backrooms in May 2026 and he arrived at that premiere carrying an unusual production history. He began posting short films on YouTube around the age of nine or 10, and in January 2022, while still a teenager, he uploaded the first entry in an 'analog-horror’ web series built around a piece of internet folklore – an infinite, fluorescent-lit office labyrinth known as “The Backrooms.”
That series, shot largely alone and edited in Blender, became a minor phenomenon and eventually put Parsons in a strange position for a studio: a self-taught teenage filmmaker with no formal training or crew experience, whose devoted online following was large enough to justify a ten-million-dollar theatrical adaptation.
Will Soodik wrote the screenplay and James Wan, Shawn Levy, and Osgood Perkins produced the film alongside a roster of genre veterans, with Parsons directing his own mythology on a 30,000-square-foot practical set and becoming A24’s youngest feature director in the process.
The finished film follows Mary, a therapist played by Renate Reinsve, who searches for a missing patient named Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, after he disappears into an alternative dimension. Set up as found footage and shot through with tracking lines, magnetic distortion and the hum of dying fluorescents, the film trades jump-scare mechanics for something closer to architectural dread. It is this substitution of atmosphere for incident that opens the film to a different experience, since what Parsons has built is, at bottom, a study of space that has come unmoored from function.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Backrooms.
The any-space-whatever
Deleuze’s book Cinema 1: The Movement-Image names a category of setting he calls the any-space-whatever, a location stripped of the coordinates that usually orient a viewer, which appears in postwar cinema as bombed lots, transit terminals and other zones where characters drift rather than travel toward anything in particular. Parsons pushes this idea to a limit Deleuze may never have anticipated.
The beige wallpaper, the identical door handles, the ramps that terminate against blank ceiling, none of it obeys the logic of a building meant for human use. The Backrooms is architecture with the function scraped out of it, leaving only pattern behind and the film treats that pattern as something closer to a malfunctioning generative process, a system attempting to reproduce a hallway or a break room from data it has already corrupted. Walking through it feels like watching an algorithm hallucinate a memory of one.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Backrooms.
That distinction signifies, because the ‘horror’ the film produces has little to do with monsters cornering their prey. It comes from the sense that the environment is composing itself in real time, guessing at what a room should be and getting the guess slightly, yet unbearably, wrong.
Parsons has described this instinct directly in interviews, tracing it to the specific unease of dreaming about a childhood home and waking to realise the geometry never matched the real place, and that mismatch, translated into a feature-length structure, is what gives the Backrooms its particular texture of wrongness.
The fold between body and data
Where the film hones its argument is in what happens to the two leads once the space starts reading them. The Async Research Institute – the corporate entity that first pierced the dimension while chasing a fix for storage and real-estate shortages – discovers instead an environment that responds directly to trauma, memory and psychological history.
Clark’s arc is built around this discovery. Recovering from addiction and carrying the shame of a failed business, he finds his inner history externalised and weaponised, his own discarded furniture-store mascot returned to him as a stalking, mutated figure built from his own guilt.
This is where Deleuze’s 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” becomes relevant. Deleuze argued that the disciplinary institutions Michel Foucault had mapped – the school, the factory, the prison – were giving way to a different arrangement of power, one that governs through continuous modulation rather than confinement, tracking a subject across open, ostensibly free space rather than locking them behind a wall.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Backrooms.
Mary’s fate at the end of the film illustrates the idea with unusual precision. Her body is recovered and debriefed by Async’s handlers, seemingly restored to the ordinary world, while a duplicated version of her consciousness remains behind, folded into a degraded replica of her own childhood and left to loop indefinitely. Control, in this reading, does not need to hold anyone captive in the conventional sense. It only needs a copy.
Async’s origin as a medical-imaging company sharpens the metaphor further. MRI technology scans the interior of a body and projects it onto a screen for a clinician to study from outside. The film’s fictional device inverts that process entirely, tearing open a threshold and pushing the human interior outward into physical space for the corporation to walk through and harvest. The found-footage aesthetic stops functioning just as a stylistic flourish once this logic is in place. It reads instead as evidence of a system straining to compress a human interior into a format it was never built to hold.
What the film withholds
Backrooms refuses any resolution and that refusal is itself part of the argument. Nothing in the film explains precisely how the space senses trauma or why some rooms manifest monsters while others manifest only silence. Deleuze’s rhizome offers a valuable shorthand for this structure: a network with no central trunk, no single explanatory root, spreading instead through lateral, unpredictable connections.
The corridors of the Backrooms behave the same way, branching without hierarchy, denying the viewer a map that would make the space legible or survivable. Critics who received the film warmly on its release tended to describe it in similar terms, as a mood assembled from architecture and sound rather than a plotted descent, and that assessment sits comfortably alongside the philosophical reading rather than against it.
What the film, in the end, proposes is a warning dressed as a haunted-office story: an institution capable of reading interior life as raw material will eventually stop asking permission to do so and the self that gets returned to you afterward may not be the only copy still circulating. The metaphor lands because it barely needs translating. Recommendation engines already infer mood from a scroll pattern, wearables already convert sleep and heart rate into a score sold back to insurers and generative systems are trained on the accumulated writing, speech and images of people who never agreed to have their interior lives treated as raw material.
Screengrab from the official trailer of Backrooms.
None of this requires a torn threshold in a wall. It requires only a terms-of-service agreement nobody reads and a business model that profits from knowing a person’s fears before the person has finished naming them. Async’s crime in the film is not the surveillance itself but the completeness of it, the refusal to leave any part of a person unmapped and that completeness is precisely the horizon towards which the current AI systems are moving, one convenience at a time.
Parsons, still in his early 20s, has built a debut feature that treats that proposition as seriously as any work of theory does, using yellow hallways and a dying hum of fluorescent light to make an argument about surveillance that a lecture hall would need far longer to reach.
K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.
This article went live on August twentieth, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-eight minutes past one in the afternoon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
