Change or just Distortion?

Backrooms - Kane Parsons (2026)

SPOILERS

What happens to memories over time? Do people, places and events slowly morph until they no longer really resemble the original? The backrooms, where most of this unsettling and disorienting film takes place appear to be never-ending layers of increasingly poor and unnerving imitations of real places and real people, a yellow labyrinth with seemingly no logic behind its design.

Backrooms meanders around these questions without providing any real answers or suggestions, but the feeling is that these rooms are some sort of extension of a collective or personal subconscious, a place where you could get lost, a place that you might not want to come back from, a place where there is terror but also perhaps, for a short time, some comfort.

The two protagonists, a therapist - Mary, and her client, Clark, both spend time in the backrooms. We get the impression that they have learned about as much about this anomalous place as we have about them, that is to say, we have scratched the surface, been shown a small glimpse of who they are.

Parsons dangles things in front of the audience without ever really committing to a coherent idea, but there is a real sense of unease and foreboding throughout. One question does make its way to the surface: Can people change, or are we fated to repeat the same patterns and cycles over and over again? When Clark decides that he doesn't want to leave the backrooms, that he finally feels comfortable, away from his life where he had cast around looking for someone to blame for his unfulfilled dreams and the fact that he is alone. He tells Mary that actually, he doesn't want to change, doesn't want to forge a new path, he is happy to stay inside this distorted underworld, where his anger and insistence on blaming everyone but himself can go unnoticed and consequence-free.

If we are left somewhat unsatisfied by the end, it is because there is no development. Clark does not change, despite Mary's best attempts - she cannot save him from himself. We expect people to grow and to impact each other, but maybe that is all an illusion, and the only thing that changes is our perception of the past, the constantly reconstructed collection that we carry around with us, that we can slip into at any time.