Raise your hand if you just got out of Backrooms and simultaneously want to go down an internet rabbit hole about Kane Parsons’ horrific world based on an internet creepypasta and go outside to touch grass! I’m here and ready to break down what just happened during the ending of one of the most critically-acclaimed movies on the 2026 release schedule. Feel free to walk outside and read this… if you can find the door, that is. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Poor Mary! Renate Reinsve’s character goes after her patient Clark (Chiwetel Ejifor) to the backrooms and tries to help him out. What she finds when she goes through the invisible door he rambled about is a crazed man who would rather live in an unsettling place full of endless rooms than live among society.
She does manage to escape him after learning something really scary about the backrooms: it seems to create copies of whoever enters its space, except they are abnormal versions of humans that don’t seem to feel pain. It’s also unclear if they have minds of their own or not. The end of Mary’s journey that we see is when she meets a man named Phil (Mark Duplass).
Who Is Phil In Backrooms?
Phil is an employee of the fictional Async Research Institute, which is a prominent element of director Kane Parsons’ YouTube series this whole movie is based on. You definitely don’t have to have watched the series to enjoy or understand the movie itself, but it does help, perhaps, explain the movie’s ending. In the YouTube series, the backrooms were actually created or discovered by Async in an effort to solve global storage and residential problems on Earth. This episode from the series is a good place to start:
The YouTube series often follows Async as they explore the backrooms and attempt to explore its vastness, but several strange anomalies begin to be made known – including openings popping up in unexpected places, from a freeway to people’s homes. While Phil’s exact position isn’t clarified in Backrooms, he’s part of the company that is trying to contain the problems that the backrooms have started to create. We can definitely assume Mary is not safe now that she’s seen it extensively.
Does Backrooms Set Up A Franchise?
While the YouTube series kind of starts where the movie ends, it's a very smart way to introduce the masses to Kane Parsons’ backrooms lore without stepping on the toes of the web series. In the web series, it’s concluded that there’s an uptick in missing persons after the backrooms were opened because so many have found them through multiple portals. Clark is one of the latest casualties who will never be found, but Mary’s fate is more complex. Will they try to recruit her or do away with her?
Since the nature of Backrooms is infinite rooms based on places on Earth, I think this movie is absolutely setting up a franchise. Introducing Async gives Parsons the option to tell the story next from the institute’s perspective or involve them more in a potential sequel. I definitely see a second movie acting as an anthology of sorts rather than continuing where the end leaves off, but either option (or both) is definitely on the table.
All that being said, I absolutely love how Backrooms can work as a standalone movie, too. If it doesn’t inspire any upcoming horror movies, it gets its terrifying message across and could be one of the best scary movies of the year.
