When a furniture store closes for the night, something changes in the rooms on display. By day, no one thinks twice about sofas facing blank television screens or neatly made beds no one has ever slept in. Once the doors are locked, however, what was meant to look like a home begins to resemble something else: a set abandoned before the story ever began, its objects waiting for people who will never move in.
In the basement of just such a store, Clark discovers a doorway that was not there the day before. He is the central character in Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons and released by A24. Reeling from a divorce and struggling to keep his business afloat, Clark steps through and finds himself in an endless maze of rooms, staircases, and corridors. After he disappears, his therapist, Mary, goes in after him.
Beyond the wall, architecture seems to have gone mad without shedding its air of normality. The worn carpet looks as though it has been damp for years. Fluorescent light stains everything yellow, and every passage opens onto a room almost identical to the last. Nothing has fallen into ruin. The place looks ready to be occupied. What unsettles us is that no one ever comes, though every room seems to be waiting.
Long before the film, the Backrooms circulated online as an anonymous legend. Kane Parsons was sixteen when he began recreating those corridors in videos he posted to YouTube. The move to cinema required characters and a more definite story, but the power of the Backrooms still comes from that first image. We look at the room and almost recognize it. It could be a school hallway during summer break, an empty floor in an office building, or a hotel corridor guests pass without noticing. The place seems to belong to our memories, yet no single memory can claim it.
Freud wrote about the unease produced when something familiar turns strange without becoming altogether foreign. He called it das Unheimliche, usually rendered in English as “the uncanny.” The German word points back to the home, to what should offer shelter and intimacy. The uncanny emerges when something we know suddenly turns inhospitable, as if the house were still standing but had forgotten us.
In Backrooms, doors, walls, and corridors retain their familiar shapes. What they have lost is the unspoken agreement that once allowed us to trust them. A door may lead nowhere. Turning a corner does not necessarily mean moving forward, and hours of walking can return us to the room where we began. The architecture still looks like an ordered world after its rules have ceased to work.
After a while, having no way out becomes more than a problem of space. Time itself begins to feel unable to move on. Here the film touches on another Freudian insight: repetition does not always answer to pleasure. Painful experiences return despite the suffering they cause, with an insistence we cannot explain.
In “Remembering, repeating and working-through,” Freud observed that what cannot be remembered may return in the form of action. Instead of recounting our history, we may find ourselves living it again without realizing it. The past rarely returns as a copy we recognize. It is more likely to arrive looking convincingly new. Circumstances change, yet our place within them remains much the same. Only later do we see that what felt like a free choice led us down an old route with different names on the doors.
Clark keeps walking, choosing one passage after another and looking for signs that he is getting somewhere. Still, the space returns him to a kind of continuous present. He really is moving; the mistake is to confuse movement with transformation. One can travel a long way without ever leaving a particular scene.
Mary’s presence brings this image into the therapeutic relationship. In analysis, the past returns not only in what is said, but in the relationship itself, reshaping expectations and feelings. Freud called this transference. A patient may look to the analyst for an answer that belongs to someone else, or anticipate a rejection that has not yet occurred. If the analyst fails to recognize the role being assigned to them, they risk stepping into the scene and helping to repeat it.
Mary crosses that boundary literally. By going after Clark, she moves from listening at the edge of another person’s labyrinth to inhabiting it herself. There is care in the gesture, but also a fantasy: that one might find the exact point where a life went astray and lead it back along the right path. The unconscious, however, has no central room where the truth lies stored. Every attempt to reach the final room opens onto another passage.
The film loses some of its force when it tries to map its spaces onto clearly defined traumas. Explanation offers the reassurance denied by the original image. If every corridor corresponds to a wound and every creature can be deciphered, the unknown begins to acquire the tidy order of a case file. Even so, the architecture exceeds what the screenplay has to say about it. The rooms stay with us because they seem to contain something that was never fully explained.
That impression follows us beyond the film. Look closely, and ordinary life is also made up of routes we hardly notice. The body gets up, crosses the still-dark house, makes coffee, and heads down familiar streets while the mind is already occupied with what comes next. There is nothing pathological about this. Without repetition, we could not keep a routine, learn a trade, or sustain a commitment.
Trouble begins when routine keeps running after it has lost touch with desire. Obligations are met and the days remain full, yet something becomes hard to locate. We blame our exhaustion on the week, look forward to a vacation, change a few habits and, for a while, feel as though life is moving again. Then Sunday evening brings back the anxiety we thought we had left behind.
Some relationships keep returning us to a familiar position. We enter them believing we are starting from scratch, only to take up a role learned long ago. We speak to one person with words that belong to an earlier conversation. When the ending repeats, bad luck is the easiest explanation. Recognizing our own part in staging it requires a less consoling kind of clarity.
The Backrooms are frightening because they give this experience a visible form. No one is in chains there, and no path is blocked. Any door can be chosen. Freedom remains, though every choice seems to prolong our stay.
The next morning, the alarm will ring, and the hallway outside will still be there. The elevator doors will open with their familiar sound. For a moment before stepping inside, it may be hard to tell whether another day is beginning or the previous one has simply started over.
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