Backrooms (2026)

Well, in the immortal words of Al Pacino, I have seen.

Well, I have seen A24's runaway box office hit.

I guess it's considered a psychological horror film.

I don't know that I would necessarily describe it that way.

But I have seen Back Rooms on HBO Max.

I guess it landed on Max.

I don't know, a week or so ago.

And I have a lot of thoughts about it.

I understand why certain critics found the film to be underwhelming.

It somehow doesn't feel like a completed movie.

And I don't remember too many films where I finished it and I said, this was a pretty good idea for a movie, but they only got, I don't know, 30 or 40 percent of the way there.

So the filmmaker, Kane Parsons, who was presumably a genius and a kid who, unlike the aspiring young filmmakers from, let's just say, Steven Spielberg's generation, where they would have a movie camera and they would shoot student films.

Things have advanced to the point where Caine Parsons as a 10-year-old would have had access to, let's say, an iPhone 7 and could have made a reasonable student film way more advanced than anything that Spielberg could have come up with in the 1950s and into the very early 60s.

So Caine Parsons created a web series.

And the web series was then turned into, like the ideas were broadened, and it was turned into the movie Backrooms.

But Backrooms does not feel like a film with a beginning, middle, and end.