Backrooms

A 2026 psychological horror with an adventure streak, directed by Kane Parsons from a screenplay he wrote with Roberto Patino. Clark, who owns a furniture shop, finds a door in it that opens onto an endless run of identical uninhabited rooms, and he goes missing inside them. His therapist Mary Kline goes in after him, and the deeper she walks the more her own reality gives way. The place itself is the leading character: identical corridors with yellow wallpaper, worn carpet and humming fluorescent lights, even light, and a silence in which a person loses count of the distance covered. Distance, time and exits stop working as they should. It grows out of the Backrooms, an internet legend that began with a caption to a photograph of an empty office: hundreds of anonymous authors kept adding to it, giving the maze its levels, its inhabitants and its rules that must not be broken. The action is set in the Santa Clara Valley, a lived-in and altogether unremarkable stretch of country. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve take the leading parts, with Mark Duplass, Lukita Maxwell, Finn Bennett, Avan Jogia and Krista Kosonen alongside them. The feature grew out of a run of shorts Parsons made as a teenager and posted online: they became the best-known screen version of the legend and gathered an audience long before the big picture existed. The film opened in cinemas on 7 May 2026 and went out wide in the United States on 29 May. By the middle of June its worldwide takings had reached 390 million dollars.