Backrooms is the stuff of pure nightmares. It may originate with an internet creepypasta — one that blossomed from a single picture of an empty HobbyTown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin — but the reason this particular legend resonated and spread was its connection to recurring dreams many of us share.

They go like this: You are somewhere familiar (maybe your childhood home, maybe your office) that’s shifted into something strange and uncanny. The layout isn’t right. Doors lead to nowhere, rooms exist where there shouldn’t be any. Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be a way out. No matter which way you turn, you only wind up venturing further into the maze.

Kane Parsons’ impressive debut feature Backrooms, adapted from his popular series of YouTube shorts, deploys that universal fear to heighten a relatable and suitably troubling story about modern loneliness. Its two protagonists are as metaphorically trapped in unsatisfying professional and personal lives as they are physically lost within the endless liminal space they discover beneath a dumpy furniture store.

Its infinite expanse contains room after room filled with junk and odd detritus. Each one is covered in drab carpet and acoustic ceiling tiles, and soaked in the same sickly yellow light and insect-like buzz of fluorescent lights. The connection between the characters’ fragile mental states and their aimless journeys through this unearthly place are not exactly subtle. Nightmares rarely are.

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This one begins, like Parsons’ earlier YouTube shorts, with grainy low-res VHS found footage, apparently recorded by a scientist in 1990 as he ventures through a disturbingly drab and eerily unending space. Then the scene shifts to introduce the two main characters: Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of the aforementioned furniture store, and Mary (Renate Reinsve), his therapist. Clark recently separated from his wife, and he is not handling their new living arrangements well. In role play sessions in Mary’s office, he screams about how he abandoned his own dreams of becoming an architect in order to put her through college, which is how he wound up in retail hell, piloting the sinking ship at Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire in a nondescript suburban strip mall.

Even before Clark finds the backrooms lurking beneath his shabby store, he is clearly not okay. With nowhere else to go, he’s taken to living at Cap’n Clark’s, falling asleep on floor models while watching late-night informercials. He listens to self-help books about how people get trapped in “loops” and “patterns,” then sounds increasingly desperate to escape one in his therapy sessions with Mary. (The “Everything Must Go!” signs hanging throughout Cap’n Clark’s feel like they’re there to torture a man who can never leave a job he hates.) Then, while trying to locate the source of a recurring electrical issue in the store, Clark stumbles across the wall that contains the invisible portal to the backrooms.

Clark recruits a few of his employees to help him explore the space; one brings along a VHS camcorder to document their findings. That leads to another sequence that mimics the found footage aesthetics of Parsons’ earlier shorts, a smart choice that ensures fans of the “Backrooms” viral videos will get more of what they liked out of this glossy A24-backed big-screen production. This scene’s muddy analog 4:3 aesthetic also enhances the pervasive air of dread as Clark and his allies roam through the backrooms, encountering spooky sights we can never quite make out, like stacks of old furniture, piles of discarded clothes, and a twinkling Christmas tree surrounded by mannequins (or are those corpses??) sunken into the floor.

Only 20 years old, Parsons looks like a major director in the making. It’s not just that he’s adept at wringing sustained discomfort out of little more than darkened hallways, flickering overhead lights, distant ominous noises, and half-seen creatures — although, to be clear, he’s very adept at that. Over the course of a brisk 110-minute feature, he keeps finding new unsettling images to perpetually destabilize our sense of reality. Somehow, his movie about this endless series of repeating rooms never feels repetitive.

He also draws very committed and at times surprisingly moving performances from Ejiofor and Reinsve, whose turns as the profoundly broken Clark and Mary turns Backrooms into something far more meaningful than a big-screen blowup of a calling-card horror short. This guy’s not just a special effects traffic cop. He’s got some serious dramatic chops, and an eye for framing an indelible horror image. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

He does end the film on a slightly anticlimactic note, something that might be inevitable when trying to pin down a conclusion to a story built out of a literally infinite place that’s part of an elaborate mythology. Still, Parsons wisely leaves enough ambiguity about the backrooms’ origins and rules to allow viewers to interpret Clark and Mary’s quest for themselves. (Parsons also gives himself plenty of room to make sequels if he so chooses.) He teases just enough answers to hold everything together without over-explaining what the characters find in this subterranean world.

It is fitting that the backrooms concept emerged from the internet, since the backrooms themselves are a perfect metaphor for the internet: A labyrinth filled with bizarre and disturbing imagery and ideas that often make little sense, populated by twisted monsters looking to destroy your body and soul. Once you fall into this labyrinth, it’s very easy to get lost, and to lose touch with your true identity from before you crossed into its limitless spaces. Backrooms may be set in 1990, but it’s about the horror of now.

RATING: 8/10