HORROR-THON 2026 • NO EXIT
10/10
DIRECTOR: Kane Parsons
STARRING: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass
RELEASED: 2026
RUNTIME: 2 hr 6 min
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: Medium to high
EXPLORING THE BREAKER BOX AT NIGHT: Let it stay broken.
Damp yellow carpet. The yellow wallpaper has a pattern that almost repeats. Fluorescent lights buzzing over rooms that go on forever. If you’ve ever been in an empty office after hours and felt like you shouldn’t be there, this movie is that feeling for two hours.
Clark is a failed architect running a struggling furniture store in San Jose. His marriage is falling apart, he’s drinking, and he’s started sleeping at the store. He’s also roped his assistant manager and her boyfriend into filming a store commercial, with Clark in the pirate mascot costume.
Then the lights start flickering at night. The TV acts up. At the breaker box, Clark finds a glowing slit in the wall, and he falls through into the Backrooms. Meanwhile, his therapist, Mary, starts trying to figure out where he went.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
Kane Parsons started this as a found-footage YouTube series when he was a teenager, and now he’s the youngest director ever to have the No. 1 movie in America. It’s A24’s biggest movie ever, by a lot.
Honestly, I love liminal spaces, and I also think one of the scariest things in horror can be interior or set design. Here, it isn’t gross or dark. It’s just bland, beige-yellow, and endless. It’s like a dentist’s waiting room that never ends. The emptiness is the true monster.
The first half is incredible. Every hallway feels wrong, and the tension comes from what you can’t see. Then it starts going in circles, which it’s meant to. If you’re going to be annoyed by that and heading for the exit, this just isn’t for you.
The story isn’t really there. The movie explains almost nothing, and the ending just stops, like someone pulled the plug right before the third act. If you loved the YouTube videos, you’ll either be thrilled that it stays mysterious or annoyed at things that were added. It seems like there’s no middle ground with this one.
I, for one, quite enjoyed it despite the ending. And the pirate mascot costume is the most unsettling outfit of the year…by far.
A FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY:
The production built around 30,000 sq feet of Backrooms which eventually led to crew members occasionally getting lost and becoming disoriented on set.