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.

Now that concept seems poised to break containment into the mainstream with Backrooms, a slickly produced feature boasting a buzzy studio (A24), bona fide arthouse stars (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve) and established genre leaders (James Wan, Osgood Perkins) among the producers.

But if the film captures something of the concept’s intriguing unease — with 20-year-old director Kane Parsons drawing from his own Backrooms-set short films, created when he was just a teenager — its underbaked storytelling made me wonder if some spooky ideas might be better left as whispers in the dark.

Though the Backrooms are ineffably strange (“Imagine describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then asking them to draw it,” characters reply when asked to explain them), the world we cut through to get there is almost suspiciously normal. In a quiet California suburb circa 1990, Clark (Ejiofor) is a failed architect who makes his living as the proprietor of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — or rather tries to, since the discount furniture store’s total lack of customers suggests a business on the verge of collapse. His life has gotten miserable enough that he’s seeing a therapist, Mary (Reinsve), to deal with the implosion of his marriage.

Up late watching TV at the store one night (because he’s been sleeping there ever since his wife kicked him out after a bitter, booze-fueled fight), he ventures downstairs to fiddle with the breaker, whereupon he discovers he can just kind of slip through one of the walls, as easily as stepping into a beam of light. On the other side lies a room not unlike the windowless carpeted basement he’s emerged from. But this one is lit in a sickly institutional yellow, with all its furniture haphazardly piled in the middle. Also, it seems to go on forever. No matter how deep Clark wanders into it, all he finds are more rooms, corridors, staircases, doorways, crawlspaces.

It’s a deliciously creepy concept, tickling the same elemental unease provoked by other liminal horror stories like 2022’s unsettling Skinamarink or Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves: If structures like homes and offices and stores are meant to contain and protect, there’s something disturbing about one that refuses to conform to those boundaries — that shifts beyond the known laws of the universe so that what should have been a safe space becomes a trap.

The horrors that lie within this particular trap take some time to reveal themselves. At first, our disquiet and Clark’s mostly stem from sights that, while not overtly threatening, simply feel wrong: a stop sign printed backwards and erected in a dark room, a cardboard cutout fitted with a tape recording of messages in foreign languages, shoes embedded in the floor at an angle that suggests said floor materialized suddenly out of nowhere to slice right through them.

But eeriness for its own sake has its limits. The longer we spend exploring the Backrooms, the less frightening and more random these oddities start to feel. They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing; it works only until it becomes apparent that there are no meaningful answers forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Clark and Mary (to say nothing of other minor characters played by Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) are painted in extremely broad strokes. Even allowing that one of the movie’s central concerns is the way we create mental loops that keep us fixed in our miseries, the choice to define each of them through a single formative trauma and nothing else renders them too flat to care about.

I suppose the advantage of Clark’s lack of any other traits, including a self-preservation instinct, is that it makes him an ideal conduit for us into this universe: Since he never stops to consider whether wandering freely around what amounts to a haunted maze might be a bad idea, we never have to stop poking around it either. The further he goes, the more harrowing things get. The roar of a monster that had seemed distant at first seems to grow louder and more frequent, evidence of its violence clearer and harder to ignore (though never very graphic; Backrooms traffics more in dread than gore).

In its best moments, Backrooms brushes up against something bittersweet about the way our memories warp a little every time we access them, until they’ve been stripped of real details and we’re left only with the emotional imprint they’ve left behind. In one striking sequence, the camera glides down a succession of living room floors, each one growing more abstracted until all that remains is a pitch-black hole radiating menace from a corner. In another, grotesque humanoid figures are frozen in a dinner table scene, so lacking in feeling or agency that they do not protest even when they’re stabbed.

At its worst, Backrooms tries to raise the stakes by trading subliminal chills for more explicit but also more generic thrills, culminating in an action-y climax that seems to exist solely to fulfill audience expectations of how a mainstream horror movie is supposed to end. The film wants to invite you in, but the more the Backrooms try to explain themselves, the more quotidian they feel. This is a realm better left to the shadows, where unsuspecting souls can fall down its rabbit holes before they even know what’s hit them.

Laura (Malou Khebiz), a young French woman, takes a job as a personal assistant/cleaner/chef for Souria (Soundos Mosbah), the effectively incarcerated mistress of a Saudi prince (Kassem Al Khoja), in the smart, psychologically nuanced French drama Madame (Le Triangle d’Or).

A debut feature for director Hélène Rosselet-Ruiz, written in collaboration between Rosselet-Ruiz and Pauline Guéna, this was reportedly inspired by a very similar experience the director herself had working for a wealthy Gulf state family, although tweaks have been made to facilitate the drama. The often imperious behavior of the titular Souria, who is not allowed to leave her gilded cage of a mansion, and the conspicuous consumption she and her lover enjoy may seem outrageous, but the milieu is largely convincingly depicted — right down to the keeping of a miserable black panther in a closet enclosure, whom the prince’s factotum Emre (Ziad Bakri) has to drug daily lest it cry all day and night out of despair. All in all, the film offers a well-considered analysis of the class, gender and cultural dynamics inherent in the core situation that doesn’t preach or polemicize.  

The opening sequence shows a variety of women, including Laura, being interviewed for the assistant position by a recruiter, all of it filmed by low-resolution security cameras, a device deployed throughout, although thankfully not for the entire film. The security footage, with its date and time stamps and weird angles, acts as a reminder of the vigilance of the Saudi family who eventually hire Laura, shadowy figures who are mostly behind the cameras watching to ensure their employees and subjects like Souria are doing what they’re supposed to do.

In fact, there is a kind of fuzziness around whom Laura is meant to report to. She’s paid to be at Souria’s beck and call every moment of the day and often gets awakened at strange times in the night for errands, like going out to buy every item on a fast-food restaurant’s menu and bring it back for a midnight feast. At the same time, Palestinian employee Emre reminds Laura that its actually the sheikh who is paying her wages, and when Emre and the boss are off on trips (usually to visit the sheikh’s legal wife, whom we never meet), Laura’s job is to spy on Souria, making sure she never leaves, and to report on everything she does.  

Even so, Souria likes to pretend, if only to herself, that she’s in charge and she will often say abusive things to Laura, ridiculing her dress sense, embarrassingly scrutinizing her body, and reminding her in every way that she is a servant. Laura is not supposed to ever look the prince in the eyes when he’s there, and at one point early on she’s advised to never look more attractive than Souria, who has a very jealous streak, which is mostly directed at the prince’s legitimate wife. A little deluded and possibly driven a little crazy by the constant isolation of living in a harem of one, Souria is convinced that someday he will leave his wife and marry her and then everything will be coming up roses. Indeed, he sends a truckful of red roses one day to the house after a fight, but all they do is get in the way and slowly wilt.  

After Laura snaps one day and threatens to quit after Souria goes too far with her insults, the power shifts abruptly. Laura decides to stay when she sees Souria’s desperate reaction, literally beating herself up like a contrite child. Similarly, she grows closer to Emre, who has a heart underneath his veneer of cold professionalism and worries profoundly about his family back in Palestine, whom the sheikh has promised to help emigrate.

In a way, Laura has the least investment in the situation as she can walk away any time she wants and pursue her ambition to join the army, a goal she’s working toward by doing push-ups and pull-ups everyday in her tiny maid’s bedroom. She’s only there for the money, which is needed to help out her sister, who has a young daughter — although the longer Laura spends with these ultra-wealthy foreigners in their tower of gold, the less she can relate to her sister’s working-class Parisian friends, met on a rare night out to celebrate a birthday.

Guena and Rosselet-Ruiz’s deft script tracks the power shifts and realignments of sympathy in this claustrophobic environment with persuasive subtlety, although a near final scene where Laura, Souria and Emre all finally drop their rigid roles and get drunk together may seem a little abrupt to some. The homestretch of the drama, however, takes the story in a chilling direction, packing an aching quantity of feeling into a single glance at a security camera as someone climbs into a car and leaves the compound, never to be heard from again. For all the high tech and haute couture on display throughout, this feels much like a modern fairy tale, one warning young women against seeking love and riches that have hidden costs to the soul, deadly as a depressed panther in a cage.

Watch Obsession in theaters now (and rewatch on digital later)

Curry Barker is the writer and director of Obsession, which he also edited himself. On board as associate producer is Cooper Tomlinson with Jason Blum as executive producer. Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson also have the YouTube channel “That’s a Bad Idea”, which is full of amazing shorts.

Also, they made the amazing horror-comedy movie Milk & Serial, which I highly recommend checking out. You can watch it for free on their YouTube channel.

Admittedly, I cannot even read the title of Obsession without hearing the Army of Lovers song with the same title in my mind. In fact, I am writing this review with that song on repeat (anything else would be madness to me). Oh yeah, one might even say that I am obsessed.

And yes, this movie has already had a similar impact on me, so I cannot wait to watch it again.

In any case, I would highly recommend watching it in the theater as well. The impact of a dark theater with gorgeous sound delivers a solid impact with Obsession. And then, of course, you’ll want to rewatch it when the unrated version comes out on VOD.

Oh yes, “unrated”… a terrifying thought. I can’t wait!

OBSESSION is out only in theaters where it premiered on May 15, 2026. Rumor has it that it will be out on VOD in early June 2026.