Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Backrooms
2026 · Kane Parsons · Backrooms on Sightlines
Start with the doorway. It is in the basement of a furniture showroom, under its staged fake rooms, furnished for nobody. Clark, who owns the store, and his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, go through it. On the other side there are more rooms. Beige walls, drop ceilings, fluorescent tubes buzzing at full strength. Then another doorway, and another room behind it.
Kane Parsons has been building these rooms since January 2022. First they were a YouTube short presented as recovered 1990s camcorder footage. Then they were a model he kept refining in Blender for years. For A24 they became more than 30,000 square feet of physical sets in Vancouver. Parsons has said that walking onto the finished set felt deeply strange: he knew a place that did not exist, and then it did. That sentence is the best key to the film.
Gilles Deleuze has a name for the place on the other side of the doorway. He calls it an any-space-whatever. A normal movie setting tells you what it is for. An office is for work, a street leads somewhere, a door is a way out. An any-space-whatever has come loose from all of that. You can't tell what it's for, how it connects to anything else, or how you would leave. Deleuze found these spaces in postwar cinema, in bombed-out cities, vacant lots and the emptied margins of Antonioni's frames. He cared about them because they broke an old bargain in movies, the one where a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it. A corridor that repeats forever doesn't ask you to do anything. It just goes on.
This is where Parsons is cleverest. The original 2019 4chan caption said that if you "noclip" out of reality in the wrong place, you end up in rooms that go on forever. Parsons's film makes the fall begin in a furniture store, which is already a maze of rooms cut off from any life. The showroom is an any-space-whatever disguised as retail. Going down into the basement doesn't take you to a new kind of place. It takes you to the pure form of the place you were already standing in.
The film's version of this space has a specific flavor, which Deleuze would call emptiness: pale, uniform fields where nothing stands out. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox has said that once you put contrast back into the image it quickly gets dense, so the grade stays washed-out and flat. The fluorescents remove every shadow. Horror usually lives in the dark. Here everything is lit, and that is the problem. You can see it all, and none of it is an edge, an exit or a horizon.
The lenses do some of the theory work too. André Bazin, the great critic of cinematic realism, loved deep focus because it let the viewer's eye wander through a shot and decide for itself what mattered. Inside the Backrooms, Cox shoots at 18mm or wider, so deep-focus corridors stretch toward their vanishing points. Your eye is free to wander, and it finds only repetition. Bazin's freedom becomes the trap. Back in the everyday world the lenses go to 25–28mm and longer, so the optics themselves tell you which world you're in.
When action stops working, Deleuze says, the character turns into a seer, someone who can only look and listen. He calls what they take in pure optical and sound situations. You hear the film before you understand it: the fluorescent drone, the room tone, distant noises that come from nothing on screen. You can't fight a sound like that. You can only keep listening to it. The slow pans in the conventionally shot scenes work the same way. One reviewer noticed that they pull your attention toward threats just past the edge of the frame. That is the relative out-of-field: the space next door, implied and unseen. You end up scanning the margins the way the characters do.
The found-footage sequences, which reviewers called the scariest part of the film, add another layer. The camera is handheld and searching, and you hear heavy breathing behind it. Deleuze's term for this is the dicisign: we watch someone who is watching, and we feel the camera's presence while we do. Here the camera is a frightened body filming its own disorientation.
These techniques have a history. Cannibal Holocaust invented the frame of recovered footage, horror presented as a document. The Blair Witch Project made the handheld camera the only witness and turned a maze you can't navigate into the terror itself. Paranormal Activity held on empty rooms until the waiting became the threat. Marble Hornets and Local 58 turned static, signal decay and VHS smear into evidence that something unseen was there. Parsons's 2022 short pulled all of this into one grammar, and the feature adapts it wholesale. It's too early to say which films Backrooms will seed. It made about $402.5 million on a reported $10 million budget and was reported as A24's biggest opening, so it showed that a horror mythology with no single author, born on message boards and YouTube, can fill theaters. What comes from that remains an open question.
The critics' main complaint is worth taking seriously. Many found the first half stronger and felt the film loses force as it moves from suggestion to explanation. Film Stories said it was really a short stretched to feature length. Deleuze offers a way to see this. Explanation is the old action-movie machinery trying to start up again: find the cause, take action, get out. The any-space-whatever resists that. This is what Deleuze calls the crisis of the action-image, characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see, and Backrooms stages that crisis inside its own structure. Whether a feature-length story can live in a space built to defeat stories is the film's real gamble. One reviewer said the sets hold the film up when the plot falters, which suggests the space wins.
That brings us back to Parsons's sentence. Most film sets imitate places. This one materializes a place that existed first as an image: a grainy photo, then a meme, then a Blender file Parsons taught his cinematographer to use so they could plan shots before anything was built. This any-space-whatever didn't come from a ruined world. It came from screens, and Backrooms gives it floors and walls.
So when you watch it, stop hunting for the monster. Look at the edges of the frame. Listen to the hum. Notice the lens change when the story crosses back into the everyday world. And the next time you walk through a furniture showroom, notice how quiet it is.
Concepts in play
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The endless beige, fluorescent-lit rooms beyond the basement doorway, which serve no use and have no locatable exit; the furniture showroom's staged fake rooms as its everyday precursor
- any-space-whatever: emptiness — Cox's pale, washed-out grade (restoring contrast 'quickly makes it dense'), drop-ceiling fluorescents that flatten every shadow, and a horror of legibility with no edge or horizon
- pure optical and sound situations — The fluorescent drone layered with room tone and distant noises from no visible source; 18mm-or-wider deep-focus corridors that offer only repetition to look at
- the seer (voyant) — Found-footage sequences governed by a person filming their own disorientation, who can search and look but finds no action that would get them out
- relative out-of-field — Slow pans through empty corridors that, per one reviewer, pull attention to threats outside the frame and keep the viewer scanning the margins
- dicisign — Handheld, searching camcorder footage with heavy breathing on the soundtrack, so we feel the camera as a perceiving body
- crisis of the action-image — Critics' judgment that the film weakens as it moves from suggestion to explanation, as the cause-and-escape logic tries to reassert itself inside a space that resists action