‘Backrooms’ Review: Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve Get Lost in A24’s Creepy but Underbaked Liminal Horror
The film 'Backrooms' explores a surreal and unsettling alternate reality, drawing from internet lore. Directed by Kane Parsons and featuring stars like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, it presents a mix of intriguing concepts and underdeveloped storytelling. While it captures a sense of unease, the film ultimately leaves viewers questioning the effectiveness of its narrative.
- ▪The film is produced by A24 and features a cast that includes Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.
- ▪It follows a failed architect named Clark who discovers a bizarre, endless realm after slipping through a wall.
- ▪The movie is directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who previously created short films based on the Backrooms concept.
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| Original publisher | The Hollywood Reporter |
| Canonical URL | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/backrooms-review-chiwetel-ejiofor-renate-reinsve-1236605400/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T10:07:58.288Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T10:07:58.288Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | O_3zSCEkOUN8 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Chiwetel Ejiofor in 'Backrooms.' A24 Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Appropriately for a surreal realm comprised of inexplicable angles that stretch across impossible dimensions and seem, as one explorer puts it, cobbled together by “construction workers on acid,” the Backrooms, as a premise, have no precise parameters. You might think of it less as a story than a shared alternate reality, originating as a creepypasta (internet-based urban legend) and then taking on a life of its own as fans added bits of lore and started to spin it into works of their own.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Hollywood Reporter.