“Backrooms” filmmaker Kane Parsons may have just made the jump from YouTube sensation to box-office-record-breaking A24 feature director, but he already has another dream project in mind: “Portal.”
In a recent New York Times profile, the 20-year-old wunderkind discussed his unusual path from teenage creator to studio filmmaker, his anxieties around being taken seriously, and the digital-first influences that shaped his sensibility. The profile notes that Parsons’ artistic approach has been shaped less by traditional Hollywood moviemaking than by web series and video games like “Portal” and “Half-Life.” Parsons even admitted, “I don’t watch a lot of films,” though he has apparently watched “Mr. Robot” at least eight times.
That gaming influence is clearly still on his mind. According to the Times, Parsons said a feature-film adaptation of “Portal” would be his dream project, and he’s apparently looking into whether it’s possible with “a lot of caution and a lot of curiosity.” Given how many video game adaptations have either stalled, collapsed, or landed with mixed results over the years, caution is probably the right posture. But the fit is also obvious: “Portal,” with its sterile test chambers, spatial puzzles, black-comic corporate menace, and eerie artificial intelligence, sits comfortably in the same liminal, systems-obsessed zone Parsons has been exploring with “Backrooms.”
It’s not the first time Hollywood-adjacent filmmakers have circled the possibilities of “Portal,” either. Dan Trachtenberg famously made the live-action fan short “Portal: No Escape” before directing “10 Cloverfield Lane” and “Prey,” and the short remains one of the cleaner examples of how the game’s puzzle-box mechanics and containment-horror atmosphere could translate visually (watch it below if you’ve never seen it before). Parsons, however, would seem to bring a very different sensibility to the material: less action-forward, more ambient, anxious, and existential.
For now, though, Parsons does not seem ready to leave “Backrooms” behind. The film stars Renate Reinsve as a therapist whose client, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, claims to have discovered a portal to a strange realm inside his furniture store. When he disappears, she enters the labyrinth herself. Parsons told the Times that, beneath the genre framework, the movie is about the human need to map and explain impossible systems in order to feel some sense of control.
Parsons is also open to more “Backrooms” movies if this one connects, but his larger ambition has long been television. He said he has carried several seasons’ worth of story in his head for years and feels he needs to get it out before fully moving on.
“I feel like I’m going to go insane if I don’t get this out of my system,” he said. “The reason I do ‘Backrooms’ at all is for stuff that hasn’t quite happened yet. It’s been a few years since I first started the YouTube series, and it’s like, ‘Come on, just finish the thing already, guy,’” he continued. “But I counter that by saying I deeply enjoy working on it.”
So, “Portal” may be the dream, but “Backrooms” still appears to be the obsession. And for Parsons, that may not be a bad thing. As he put it, “I don’t plan on dying in the next five years, so I don’t see a problem with taking a bit of time on it.”
