“Backrooms”: Film Review
What happens when someone experiences their own unconscious?
Posted June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
The definition of hell is: On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become. – Anonymous
Forty years ago, I entered (yes, entered—it’s a room) Marcel Duchamp’s masterpiece Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Professor Philip Rieff had explained that the work was a temptation to glimpse into the horror of one’s own unconscious . Peepholes drilled into an old barn door lure visitors across a mysterious antechamber to peer through... on the other side lies a dead, mangled nude woman, sprawled in a stream and clutching a lighted gas lamp in broad daylight. The horror is not what we see but what we experience—the repulsion, the curiosity, the allure, the horror, the questioning, the grief …
Exploration of the Unconscious
“Backrooms” operates similarly: like the cabinet portal in “Being John Malkovich,” a wall in the basement of a furniture store is a portal, a descent into the unconscious where we are confronted with that which our minds have hitherto forbidden us to see. Our minds have good reason for hiding certain traumas from our conscious daily lives—the images are too disturbing—if the repression is undone, so are we. And trust me, you do not wish to become psychologically undone. We can usually only get hints of what is repressed through parapraxes, dreams , and repetitions that require interpretation by a skilled analyst.
Directed by the youngest director in A24 history—someone who has been on the planet 1/3 of the time that I have—“Backrooms” follows Clark, a failed architect and now a furniture store owner struggling with alcoholism , played with soulful conviction by Chiwetel Ejiofor. When the portal in the basement of his showroom entices him in, Clark is swallowed into a labyrinth of jaundiced corridors, stairwells that lead nowhere, and rooms that replicate themselves infinitely. His therapist, Dr. Mary Kline—played by Renate Reinsve with hauntingly contrived intelligence —follows him into this netherworld.
The Architecture of the Unconscious: Lacan's Influence
What director Kane Parsons has built with writer Will Soodik, set designer Danny Vermette, and cinematographer Jeremy Cox is nothing less than a spatial rendering of Jacques Lacan’s concept of “subjective destitution.” Lacan famously proposed that “the unconscious is structured like a language”— like being the operative word. Parsons has the ingenuity to translate that structure into the language of architecture: into a place you enter and can even check out, but you can never leave. The endless repetition of jaundiced corridors, stairways to nowhere, rooms of jumbled furniture—it is a mise-en-scène of self-loathing , the floor plan of a life half-lived.
Clark is not simply lost in a building; he is attacked by his own unrealized potential, ambushed by his moribund dreams. And his therapist refuses to absolve him. She informs him that the dismal state of his life is the product of his own poor choices and blunt instruments. This honesty, in the economy of Clark’s unconscious, is punishable by a fate worse than death. Mary escapes the monster only to discover that she too is now imprisoned, awaiting judgment like the characters in Sartre’s No Exit —condemned not by fire and brimstone but by the collapse of fantasy and the intolerable confrontation of who one has failed to become.
Escaping the Hell of Unrealized Potential
Thus, the definition of hell holds: The person you became meets the person you could have become. “Backrooms” makes this encounter visceral. The film presents the unconscious not as something we have but as something that inhabits us and can ultimately destroy us. I was entranced by Parsons' comprehensive vision and the psychological portrait offered by these genius young filmmakers. I daresay that the film posits that nobody can help you but yourself, that the monster appears when/if subjective destitution resolves to nihilism. “Backrooms” provokes audiences to break out of victimhood and escape from the hell of unrealized potential. And in that sense, like Duchamp’s “ Étant Donnés, ” it is a masterpiece.
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Ira Israel, LMFT, is a therapist and author.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.