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The Backrooms arrived in theaters worldwide on May 29, turning a viral vision of eerie isolation and endless yellow hallways into a psychological horror film. Yet while its unsettling universe remains intact, its scattered story struggles to give audiences much to follow.

The film still delivered a massive opening. It earned more than $118 million globally, tripling the sales behind A24’s previous debut record, held by Civil War. The performance made 20-year-old Kane Parsons the youngest director to top the box-office charts.

Parsons first expanded the Backrooms urban legend through found-footage-style YouTube shorts that reached 78 million viewers. A24 later placed the $10 million adaptation in his hands.

The movie follows Clark, a grieving furniture-store manager, and therapist Dr. Mary Kline as they become caught in an apparently endless maze inhabited by surreal entities. Rather than building a conventional narrative, the film emphasizes exploration, misplaced objects and the unnerving familiarity of spaces that feel both recognizable and wrong.

An intense opening chase establishes that atmosphere before Clark begins uncovering traces of the hidden world behind his furniture store. Still mourning his wife, he gradually accepts the Backrooms and eventually seems to prefer them to his troubled life outside.

That shift could have given the story emotional weight, but the film never fully explores the psychological or physical effects of the maze on its victims. Clark’s changing relationship with the Backrooms therefore feels underdeveloped.

As new rooms appear, Clark explains that the maze is a replica of “every place that ever was.” The idea offers a tantalizing glimpse into how the alternate realm operates, while increasingly disturbing encounters deepen the sense of unease.

Kline’s story is similarly fragmented. The therapist carries trauma from an isolated childhood, but her experiences inside and outside the Backrooms are used more to expand the mystery than to develop her character.

Clark is eventually killed by an entity that duplicates him. Kline escapes and is found by Ansync, the company responsible for creating the Backrooms universe.

In under two hours, the film raises far more questions than it answers. Its narrative never fully comes together, but it preserves the quality that attracted fans in the first place: the feeling of being trapped somewhere vast, familiar and impossible to understand.

Nothing in the Backrooms is supposed to make sense, and the movie embraces that principle almost too completely. By the end, the characters, the audience and the plot have all become lost beneath the fluorescent lights.