Backrooms (2026) Explained: The Internet Without a Screen

In Kane Parsons’ Backrooms (2026), getting lost and refusing to leave gradually become difficult to distinguish. Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture store owner whose marriage and professional ambitions have collapsed, discovers an apparently endless dimension behind a wall in the basement of his store. Its corridors initially terrify him. Yet the same space eventually offers something he increasingly prefers to ordinary life: somewhere to remain occupied without confronting the consequences of his actions.

The backrooms can be read as a metaphor for the internet in which endless exploration enables digital escapism and sustains behavioral loops. Looking around one more corner resembles following another link or scrolling toward another explanation. Each passage offers apparent novelty, while the habits governing Clark’s engagement stay unchanged. His growing immersion therefore exposes a form of self-deception: the pursuit of answers becomes a means of postponing the responsibility to change.

The film’s analog setting makes this reading especially unsettling. Its story unfolds around 1990, before the contemporary interfaces through which its audience commonly experiences digital life (A24, 2026). Clark enters the alternate world with his body. Walls, carpeting, furniture, and fluorescent lights make his retreat insistently three-dimensional. The film gives the viewer a fear of physical depth while reproducing a familiar pattern of online navigation: movement into another space continually defers the decision to leave.

A straight corridor ordinarily offers a navigable route, while a doorway connects identifiable places. Clark’s passage through the basement wall disrupts these expectations, but the rooms beyond retain enough familiar geometry to invite investigation. The reversed stop sign condenses this contradiction: it looks like a recognizable instruction while functioning as another anomaly to examine. The environment repeatedly offers the appearance of intelligibility, encouraging the belief that further exploration will make its disorder comprehensible.

Fear and curiosity consequently reinforce one another. Clark’s first encounter ends in panic, yet he returns on subsequent nights and attempts to map the space (A24, 2026). The frightening experience has generated a further reason to investigate. Each room raises questions that the next might answer. Rabbit holes move through successive discoveries, much like doomscrolling sustains engagement with distressing material. The backrooms bring these activities together, making apprehension another stimulus to engagement. Looking farther promises relief from the uncertainty that looking has produced.

Clark’s maps show how that engagement can acquire the appearance of purposeful work. Mapping gives him a task, a method, and an identity connected to his frustrated architectural ambitions. When he unfolds a drawing for Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), his therapist, he presents the maze as something he is trying to understand. The investigation can be read as an attempt to substitute an informational problem for an interpersonal one. Accumulating knowledge about the rooms offers visible activity without requiring him to reconsider the conduct that damaged his marriage.

Mary’s response reveals how closely the search is tied to his need for vindication. When she questions his account, Clark promises to return with proof and demands an apology. He subsequently recruits Kat and Bobby to document the discovery. The camera, rope, and taped outline marking the entrance give the expedition the outward form of organized research. But its emotional purpose is already apparent: he wants to establish that another person was wrong about him.

The distinction is crucial because the backrooms really do exist within the film. Clark’s discovery is not simply an error that better evidence could correct. He confuses being right about the space with being vindicated as a person. This resembles a form of online searching in which collecting evidence for a disputed claim gradually replaces examining the grievance motivating the search. More information becomes a defense against self-reflection. His companions’ exposure to danger reveals how an activity presented as research can also serve the desire to avoid accountability.

Mary’s recurring observation, “We all have our loops,” supplies the vocabulary for this pattern. Her warning concerns habits that return people to familiar solutions even when those solutions reproduce their difficulties. The labyrinth turns that recurrence into spatial experience. Clark can enter new rooms, extend his map, and gather additional evidence while remaining caught in the same relationship to himself. The outward expansion of his world disguises the repetition of his behavior.

Freud’s account of repetition compulsion clarifies why fear need not interrupt this engagement. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he examines the recurrence of experiences that produce distress rather than satisfaction (Freud, 1920/1922). Clark’s exploration similarly remains absorbing even when its contents become intolerable. Another immediate problem provides an opportunity to remain occupied. The possibility of an answer sustains the behavior that made escape desirable.

The relationship between repetition and self-deception becomes explicit when Clark takes Mary captive. Their earlier therapeutic role-play revisited the night his marriage broke down. Playing his own part, he transformed questions about his drinking and anger into accusations about his wife’s demands and his unrealized career. Inside the backrooms, he compels Mary to revisit the same grievance and asks her to confirm that he did nothing wrong. An alternate reality has given him another setting in which to preserve his original account.

This scene provides the clearest analogue to an echo chamber. Clark seeks an encounter arranged around the answer he already wants. Mary’s independent judgment becomes an obstacle, so he restrains her and attempts to control the exchange. His apparent interest in understanding has narrowed into a demand for affirmation. The endlessness of the environment conceals this restriction: there may be innumerable rooms, but he keeps returning to the same explanation of himself. New surroundings permit an old story to continue.

His treatment of the human copies extends that logic to the representation of others. Clark praises their apparent absence of thought, pain, and fear. He cuts into one figure and exposes material resembling furniture stuffing, presenting as a desirable condition and even a source of food. These figures can be read as analogues to online images or avatars: a recognizable likeness becomes easier to handle when the person’s capacity to suffer is excluded from consideration. Clark’s bodily contact with the copies is thoroughly physical, yet his justification depends on treating them as abstractions.

John Suler’s account of online disinhibition gives this comparison a more precise basis. He describes dissociative imagination as a way of separating online experience from the responsibilities of ordinary life, allowing conduct within an imagined world to feel exempt from its usual consequences (Suler, 2004). Clark’s retreat can be read through that separation. The labyrinth allows him to imagine an environment in which other people’s demands have been reduced or suspended. Mary’s captivity exposes the consequences of that fantasy. His wish for manageable representations extends to a person who can resist and suffer.

The peace Clark eventually claims is therefore inseparable from the terms of his withdrawal. He admits that he likes being in the backrooms and does not want to change. His relief comes from finding a space in which he can preserve his grievances without continuing the work of confronting them. Endless exploration has gradually become permission to remain as he is. What began as a search for answers now protects him from a question he has little interest in answering: what must he do differently?

In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre argues that appeals to a predetermined nature can conceal responsibility for action (Sartre, 1946). Clark’s appeal to his own wiring similarly turns an explanation of habit into an argument against change. His retreat provides a setting in which this explanation can be rehearsed until familiarity feels like truth.

The encounter with his monstrous pirate double brings that reasoning to its limit. Clark reassures the creature that their conduct follows from the way they are wired, only to be attacked by it. His feeling of belonging has not made the space safe. The scene exposes the gap between an environment that accommodates his self-explanation and one that actually protects him. Immersion can make a destructive pattern feel acceptable without altering its consequences.

Backrooms makes digital escapism visible through analog architecture. Its corridors give physical form to a cycle in which curiosity produces fear, fear encourages further searching, and searching postpones the responsibilities that prompted withdrawal. Clark mistakes the availability of another room for the possibility of another life. The maze offers infinite movement, but he uses it to preserve the same grievances and excuses. The internet without a screen becomes a space where the search for answers can continue indefinitely while protecting the refusal to act.

References

• A24. (2026). Backrooms: Production notes. Praesens-Film.
• Freud, S. (1922). Beyond the pleasure principle (C. J. M. Hubback, Trans.). International Psycho-Analytical Press. (Original work published 1920).
• Sartre, J.-P. (1946). Existentialism is a humanism. Marxists Internet Archive.
• Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326.