Get Lost
Directed by Kane Parsons
Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
Released May 29th, 2026
Rated R
Kane Parsons was a teenager when he started uploading videos to YouTube about a never ending labyrinth known as Backrooms. The videos were based on a single image of an empty office space that was uploaded anonymously to an internet message board, and then turned into user-generated horror fiction, or “creepy pasta,” as people added disturbing captions to the photograph. Many creepy pastas have been adapted into other media, notably in the series Channel Zero and the movie Slender Man, and now Parsons at just twenty years old brings Backrooms to the big screen in his directorial debut.
Written by Will Soodik, the film follows Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist who harbors concern for the safety of one of her clients who may be in danger of breaking with reality. The client in question is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a frustrated architect who is currently running a furniture store. Dr. Kline listens attentively while Clark details how his wife kicked him out of their house due to his anger and alcohol issues. She begins to worry for his well-being after he shows her a drawing he made of a series of interconnected rooms he says he found by stepping into a portal in the back of his furniture store.
Eventually, Dr. Kline may find herself venturing into this odd area, but before we get there, Clark has two of his employees, Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell), bring a video camera to document his discovery. The characters walk around the empty yellow office rooms, marvelling at how strange it is to see a chair sticking out of the wall, or a single stop sign standing in the middle of a hallway. They see a room with five couches melted into one another. They see a room with a small lamp and a large Christmas tree. I wish I could tell you that this is where the film gets scary, but nothing happens. I mean, sure, there’s disembodied footsteps in the distance and someone is taken by something. There is some blood splatter and screaming, but it’s mostly all off screen.
I do not mind ambiguity, but when you set up so many dots and do not attempt to connect any of them, that’s lazy storytelling. Ejiofor and Reinsve do their level best to elevate a go-nowhere screenplay, but they are unable to prevent Backrooms from being a colossal waste of time. Are the backrooms at least interesting places to look around? Not really. They’re a collection of mundane items in yellow office rooms. Nothing that’s crazier than anything Alice encountered in Wonderland. Am I too old for this movie? Possibly. I was not raised on the internet, so it could very well be that I am not wired the same way as the target audience for this film. I do not find so-called liminal horror to be frightening. I do not understand what is scary about an abandoned building or an empty hallway.
We’ve seen many low-fi movies recently that share a similar liminal vibe, from Skinamarink to Good Boy to Undertone. It seems like Hollywood has finally figured out that there are a lot of young creators on YouTube making content that’s proven popular with tons of viewers, and they’d like to turn those YouTubers into filmmakers. But not everything that works on the internet is going to work as a movie. It’s also unfair to lump all of these YouTubers together as one voice. It’s like when all of the Seattle bands got popular in the 1990s, they were all lumped together as grunge bands, but they were actually all pretty different. Some of them were good, some of them were not. The same thing will prove to be true about this new generation of creatives coming out of YouTube. Some are going to make good films, like Obsession. Some of them are going to make bad films, like Backrooms.