Christianity and the Backrooms

Psychodrama, Liminality, and the Collapse of Interior Space

Walllpaper.com, The New York Times, Psychology Today — countless outlets reviewing Backrooms reach for the same word: liminal. Everyone calls it a movie about liminal spaces. And of course it's true. But it's an oversimplification. The film's real achievement isn't that it embraces the liminal aesthetic, its inherent anxieties, its reality. Rather, the film subtly relocates liminality. Assuming the phenomenon is real, Backrooms is quietly asking a harder question than the reviews give it credit for: where, exactly, is liminal space? Where does the phenomenon actually occur?

That question matters more than it looks, because this is not a small movie asking it. Backrooms is a polarizing, high-concept horror film that outperforms legacy IPs by leaning into original, internet-born mythology rather than franchise continuity. In its opening weekend it out-drew a $165 million Star Wars spinoff while costing roughly $10 million to make, and went on to become A24's highest-grossing release ever, crossing $330 million worldwide.1 It resonates most strongly with Millennial and Gen Z/Alpha audiences — nearly 85 percent of opening-weekend crowds were under 35 — as a return to form: adventurous, experimental storytelling rooted in a shared cultural sense that originality has been in decline since roughly the early 2010s.2 For others it may register as shallow or overly stylized, contentless aesthetic dressed as meaning — meme logic masquerading as cinema, generational noise to anyone outside the audience that had already spent years building the film's mythology on Reddit and fan wikis before A24 ever got involved.3

That dismissal misses the argument the film is actually making.

Where liminality used to live

For years, internet culture imagined liminality as something external. Empty shopping malls. Endless hotel hallways. Abandoned schools. Office buildings after midnight. Spaces that felt strangely familiar yet completely devoid of purpose — as though reality, like a computer program, had been left running long after everyone moved on, had gone home, logged off for good. The scene exploded via Tumblr around 2010, riding a fascination with late-twentieth-century nostalgia, vaporwave, and VR lobby original-soundtrack aesthetics (today's elevator music), and it eventually curdled into the Backrooms mythos itself — which, notably, began as an anonymous 2019 creepypasta and metastasized across Reddit, fan wikis, and fan-made games for years before any studio touched it. 

A 20-year-old filmmaker inherited that collectively authored folklore; he didn't invent it.4 After years of that organic build-up, Backrooms captured a peculiar feeling that millions of people already recognized and had been trying to describe. There was always something deeper underneath it.

The liminal aesthetic has always reminded me of an almost Newtonian view of reality — in the scientific sense, but philosophically too. Reality feels like a continuous stream only because we're moving through it moment by moment in a way that merely seems seamless. But are moments simply momenting? Imagine time experienced as discrete frames, rendered one after another. What if someone slipped behind those frames? The moments would become places. And places left behind wouldn't necessarily be haunted — they'd be worse than haunted. 

Vacant.

Isolated. Without a spark of connection: airports without travelers, restaurants without customers, beer without effervescence, matches that refuse to ignite. Time moves on and leaves behind a void repulsed by its own uncanny silence.

That's the logic underneath Stephen King's The Langoliers, often considered a proto-liminal masterpiece — which is why the TV movie adaptation still feels remarkably modern. Long before "liminal space" entered internet vocabulary, King imagined yesterday itself as a discarded world, a forgotten moment-place. If The Langoliers imagined the liminality of time, and the internet imagined the liminality of place, then Backrooms does something very different, almost as sleight of hand: it doesn't reject or redefine liminality. Backrooms pinpoints Liminality's origin and reassigns its real location. It gives proper astral coordinates to a moment-place that was supposed to be a myth — and locates liminality, instead, in the mind.

The Catalyst

At its center, Backrooms is built around two figures: Clark, a failed architect turned furniture-store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Mary, his therapist (Renate Reinsve).5 The film is nearly split in half — an A/B test of a theme park, start against end — pivoting on how the handler copes with a world authored by her patient. Psychodrama isn't a passing detail here. It's the engine. It's the catalyst — the scene in Mary's office, roughly twenty minutes in, right where a catalyst belongs structurally, that sets the entire plot in motion. What begins as therapeutic reenactment doesn't stay contained. It becomes generative. Trauma is staged, repeated, re-entered, and in the repetition it starts to mutate. The film asks an unsettling question: what happens when reenactment becomes recursive? What happens when the search for healing generates another layer of the labyrinth — when the process meant to organize suffering starts reproducing it instead?

From there the film's logic changes. The psychodrama stops merely interpreting experience and starts producing environment. The Backrooms emerge as a recursive extension of reenacted trauma — memory rendered spatial, interiority rendered architectural — degrading with each iteration until the mind becomes a maze: an ever-scaling nightmare of identical yellow corridors. Each attempt to understand the past generates another hallway. The reenactment of trauma doesn't merely occur inside the Backrooms — it's the mechanism by which the Backrooms come into being. Therapy isn't a path through the maze. It's the process that generates the maze.

That's the film's most fascinating move: the never-ending hallway isn't a symptom of anything. It isn't a disease. It's a poke at a hornet's nest. The real horror here isn't a spooky building. It's a consciousness that has become unscalable architecture. By constant questioning, relentless recursion, abandoned echoes, the Backrooms stop being simply a place someone wanders into — they become the spatial expression of recursive thought, a mind so consumed with processing itself that it eventually starts constructing the very maze it hopes to escape. That transforms the entire tradition of liminality. And whether Kane Parsons and his team intended this direction or not, the concept-shift raises enormous questions about modern therapeutic culture. One critic put it in psychoanalytic terms — that the unconscious here isn't something we merely have, but something that inhabits us and can ultimately destroy us.6

Putting the Establishment on Trial

Those questions are bigger than horror. They're questions about human nature, and about the institutions built to manage it. The film puts modern psychotherapy — and even the monotony of self-help culture — on trial. Loud and clear, on the big screen: a criticism of medical-establishment deep-capture, the sort of institution-backed do-gooding that unwittingly imposes darkness onto the hurting and the vulnerable.

And I want to push on this rather than just note it: today mental health is treated as an ivory box. Good for you, but don't you dare open it up and look inside — and God forbid you scrutinize the establishment itself. Take the pills. Do the psychodrama, or you get marked "difficult to assist." That posture is a real problem, and Backrooms puts the topic front and center in a way that feels less like accident and more like the one thing the director didn't want the audience to miss. None of this means the whole apparatus is worthless. People have genuinely been helped by all kinds of dangerous things throughout history, and even a broken clock is right twice a day. But right twice a day isn't a foundation.

The Older Truth

From where I stand as a Christian, this is where Backrooms unexpectedly brushes against something much older than internet folklore or modern psychotherapy. Christianity teaches that man cannot, ultimately, redeem himself. Follow that principle to its conclusion and a maze built entirely from recursive self-engagement contains no exit by design. If the self is both the wound and the physician, every answer eventually curves back toward the same center. Things get ugly. The rooms multiply rather than diminish. The architect — his brokenness — isn't trapped so much as encapsulated within a vapor blueprint: never happened, never will, always has.

The question the film keeps circling is whether the self can ultimately rescue the self. Christianity answers that with a decisive no — not because self-examination has no value, but because redemption comes from outside the maze, from a reality the maze cannot generate on its own. This isn't an argument against examining ourselves; scripture repeatedly calls us to do exactly that. Repent every day. But repentance and recursive self-therapy are not the same motion. One looks outward for the thing that can actually redeem. The other just keeps rearranging the furniture around an open wound, on the theory that a better floor plan is the same thing as healing.

That, to me, is what makes Backrooms linger long after the credits roll. It doesn't simply ask whether liminal spaces exist. It asserts where they exist. And its answer is profoundly unsettling: not in abandoned malls, not in forgotten office buildings, not somewhere behind reality — but in the human mind itself. Left to orbit itself long enough, consciousness doesn't just get lost. Encouraged to relive itself endlessly, the mind prefers dementia. It becomes impossible. And its architecture becomes a reflection of reality — the only kind of reflection recursive self-engagement was ever capable of producing.

 

 FOOTNOTES:

1. A24's Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons and produced for about $10 million, had grossed more than $330 million worldwide as of late June 2026, making it the highest-grossing film in the studio's history and beating a $165 million Star Wars spinoff at the box office in its release weekend. Deadline, "How 'Backrooms' Blew Doors Off Box Office With $118M WW Opening," May 2026; Variety, "Box Office: 'Backrooms' Stuns...," May 31, 2026.

2. PostTrak data cited by Variety showed roughly 85 percent of opening-weekend audiences under age 35, with more than half 25 or younger — figures echoed by Deadline's Screen Engine/Rentrak exit data. Variety, "'Backrooms' Box Office: Kane Parsons' Horror Success Explained," June 2, 2026.

3. Deadline reported that A24 built its marketing around communities on YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit who had already spent years developing the Backrooms mythology and lore before the studio got involved. Deadline, May 2026.

4. The Backrooms originated as an anonymous 2019 4chan creepypasta and spread through Reddit, fan wikis, and fan-made games for years before Kane Parsons' web series and the eventual A24 feature. Deadline, May 2026.

5. Character and cast details — Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Mary (Renate Reinsve) — and director/writer credits (Kane Parsons, directing; Will Soodik, screenplay, from an earlier draft by Roberto Patino) per Wikipedia, "Backrooms (film)," and IMDb.

6. Ira Israel, "'Backrooms': Film Review," Psychology Today, June 2026 — reads the film's unconscious as something that inhabits and can destroy the self, rather than something merely possessed.