The Backrooms ending broke my brain, but Kane Parsons insists it has a ‘solid meaning’

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for Backrooms*

There’s been much speculation about the surreal ending of Backrooms, but Film Shrine spoke with Kane Parsons about the final act, and the filmmaker said it isn’t “weird for weird’s sake” – there is a real meaning behind it. 

The Backrooms hype is real. Following the A24 movie’s premiere, the 20-year-old has become the youngest ever filmmaker to open at number one at the North American box office, beating previous record holder Josh Trank by a whopping seven years. 

Even more impressive is the fact that he was just 16 when he first started posting his Backrooms shorts under the YouTube mantle Kane Pixels. 

Using Blender and other software, he single-handedly transformed a simple internet creepypasta about endless yellow corridors into an ambitious sci-fi horror saga centred around the mysterious research company Async.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to come knocking, and now we have his feature-length debut. The movie itself is a direct adaptation of his viral webseries, with Async’s experimentation running alongside the story of main character Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Clark is an isolated, unhappy man who struggles to deal with the divorce from his wife and his failure as an architect. Now, he spends his days running a failing furniture store called Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire, and his nights drinking inside said store. 

He is trying to overcome his issues, however, through his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who herself is internally dealing with her own trauma related to her mother. 

Clark’s life takes a strange turn when a series of unexplained electrical problems begin occurring inside the furniture store, leading him to discover a hidden doorway to another world. 

Like Kane’s shorts, what he finds on the other side is an endless maze of empty yellow corridors and distorted spaces that feel like imperfect copies of the real world, and his experience leaves him obsessed.

When Mary dismisses his story, Clark decides to gather proof. He returns to the Backrooms with his assistant manager Kat and her boyfriend Bobby, documenting their expedition on camera. But the trip quickly descends into chaos as the group becomes separated and hunted by entities inhabiting the maze.

After the disastrous expedition, Mary listens to a voice message from Clark that he won’t be returning, and so she visits the store, at which point she discovers the doorway to the Backrooms. 

She heads in, and, well, this is when things get really weird. 

Backrooms ending explained

Clark ends up knocking Mary out cold, and she wakes up tied to a chair at a dinner table, surrounded by the Backrooms’ eerie human-like copies (it’s reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre dinner scene in terms of how messed up it is).

As for Clark, he’s not the man she knew in the real world – he’s been completely consumed by this new reality. He tries to force Mary into a mock therapy session, but she refuses, saying his inability to take responsibility for his failures is the real reason his wife left him. 

During this encounter, Clark offers up his own explanation of the Backrooms. According to him, everything down there is a copy of memories from the outside world, explaining why they’re surreal and distorted. 

It’s why the human-like lifeforms don’t feel pain (and why you can literally eat them, as he demonstrates in truly grotesque fashion). 

They’re then interrupted by a gigantic, messed-up version of Clark dressed as the pirate mascot from his furniture store, who kills Clark out of nowhere before turning its attention to Mary. 

After being cornered, Mary uses a chunk of concrete bearing her childhood handprint to fight back against the creature.

Eventually, Async researchers intervene and rescue her from the maze. Mary is taken to an interrogation room where researcher Phil (Mark Duplass) reveals the company – formerly an MRI manufacturer – has been observing the Backrooms after discovering it.

According to Async, the Backrooms seem to reconstruct fragments of reality from memory. That’s why everything feels familiar but slightly wrong. Mary asks to be let go, but Phil says it’s not up to him.

The final scene cuts to a montage of the Backrooms spaces that appear to have replicated memories of Mary’s life, ending with its own distorted version of her sitting in the Async chair. 

The final shot has sparked the most debate, with one popular fan theory being that the Backrooms attaches itself to people at their lowest point, creating distorted copies of them once they lose hope. 

Likewise, the monstrous pirate version of Clark appears to embody everything he hates about himself – a failed architect reduced to performing as the mascot of a struggling furniture store.

Others interpret the story as a more metaphorical one about people becoming trapped by their own emotional baggage. However, Kane Parsons said that while he won’t shut down anyone’s interpretations, there is a more literal meaning to the ending. 

Kane Parsons says the Backrooms ending has a ‘solid meaning’

Speaking to Film Shrine, Kane stressed that the ending wasn’t designed to be confusing for confusion’s sake. “Yes, it has a solid meaning,” he said. 

Kane did point out that he thinks “everything’s open to interpretation,” and that he usually makes a deliberate effort not to talk about his work in definitive terms, preferring to discuss the ideas behind it rather than tell audiences exactly what they should think.

“But I also want to make it clear that… it’s there for a reason, and I do think it holds up under scrutiny,” he added. “I don’t think it’s weird for the sake of weird.”

While the filmmaker chose to not comment any further, he generously clarified, “I would never go with the ‘it’s all the dream’ ending, and it’s not even a version of that. I just need to kill that version.

“I would very much say that we get to a place where Async, this research lab, is playing more of an archetypal role… in this expression of the trait that has been driving a lot of the characters in this film.

“It’s sort of like that cranked up to 100, and it’s going back to a small place where the literal plot components maybe matter a little bit less than the simple reasoning and association with one’s own sense of self and place in the world. It focuses back to a very inward place.”

Parsons appears to suggest that the ending is less about solving the mystery of the Backrooms and more about what the existence of those copies says about the characters themselves. 

Thankfully, Deadline has confirmed that a Backrooms sequel is in the works, meaning we’ll get to learn more about Kane’s world – and Async’s research – in the future. 

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Featured images credit: A24