Backrooms

The animation is bright, colorful, and visually inviting. The jungle setting is filled with lively characters and appealing imagery that keep young viewers invested throughout the film.

Kane Parsons' feature debut delivers exactly what you would hope for - a deeply unsettling trip into liminal horror. For newcomers, however, the experience may feel like wandering through an endless maze without a map.

What follows is one of the most persuasive acts of spatial horror I can remember seeing in years. Parsons and production designer Danny Vermette conceive the notoriously inconceivable Backrooms as a world assembled from half-remembered instructions about reality.

But if the film captures something of the concept's intriguing unease, its underbaked storytelling made me wonder if some spooky ideas might be better left as whispers in the dark. The film wants to invite you in, but the more the Backrooms try to explain themselves, the more quotidian they feel.

Kane Parsons builds the year's most convincing horror maze. The 20-year-old behind the viral YouTube series turns his liminal-space nightmare into a feature that is cannier and lonelier than its origins.

YouTuber Kane Parsons makes his feature directing debut with this icily brilliant and genuinely disturbing conceptual horror film based on his web series... Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve give barnstormingly good performances as Clark and Mary... Backrooms progressively raises its game towards the big finish with jump scares, squirm scares and tiny shiver scares.