‘Backrooms’ Ending Explained: The Complex, Async, And What You Need to Know About the New Horror Film

The following post contains SPOILERS for the movie version of Backrooms. Don’t read on unless you want to know them — otherwise you may get trapped in an endless series of creepy rooms for all eternity.

Backrooms is one of those movies that lives in mystery. It’s built on all sorts of tantalizing what-ifs. A furniture-store owner named Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, finds a portal in his shop’s basement that leads to a mysterious space with no apparent end. It spreads in all directions. It’s filled with abandoned junk and illogical architecture that makes absolutely no sense. While exploring it, Clark discovers evidence that something called “Async” is connected to this place — but who is Async and what are they up to?

Even after you see Backrooms, the mysteries continue. But here, in one place, is what we know — along with some of the earlier Backrooms shorts by director Kane Parsons, who began building out this mythology when he was still a teenager and carried it into the feature-film version.

What Are the Backrooms?

READ MORE: Watch Every Backrooms YouTube Short

In our world, the Backrooms is an internet creepypasta sparked by a single photograph of an empty HobbyTown store filled with yellowed carpeting and sickly wallpaper. Something about that image sparked the internet’s imagination, and message board users began building out their own mythology about liminal spaces like it.

One of those fans was Kane Parsons, who released his first short film called “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” in January 2022. It purports to be recovered footage from a kid who fell into a mysterious dimension filled with endless impossible rooms and hallways. While there, he encountered some sort of monstrous being that chased him; in the ensuing struggle, his camera somehow got transported hundreds of feet into the air before crashing to the ground below.

Parsons built out the world of “The Backrooms” with more than 20 YouTube shorts, then released a feature film based on the same concept in May of 2026.

In the world of Backrooms, the origin and meaning of this area is still largely unknown. It doesn’t have any known boundaries or end points, and can be accessed by invisible portals hidden in many places. One exists in the basement of Clark’s furniture store, but earlier shorts suggest they could be hiding anywhere, including the middle of a busy highway.

What Is Async?

Many Backrooms shorts involve the activities of a mysterious group called the Async Research Institute. They built a door (known as the “Threshold”) into the this place (also known as “The Complex” or “The Backrooms”) then sends researchers in to investigate its various levels. One of Parsons’ shorts, “Presentation,” suggests the company wants to exploit the Complex for profit, possibly by using Thresholds to bridge long shipping distances. (Apparently the monsters roaming the place are not considered a dealbreaker in that regard.)

In the Backrooms movie, a member of Async named Phil (Mark Duplass) appears in several brief scenes interspersed throughout Clark’s story. At the end of the film, he speaks with Clark’s therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) who went into the Backrooms to find Clark. Phil says that Async used to make MRI machines; through events he doesn’t quite explain, they somehow found the Backrooms and began exploring it.

Who Are the Monsters in the Backrooms?

As is common in found footage horror, the Backrooms shorts often contain brief teases of monsters roaming the vast Complex. They are heard in the distance, or glimpsed around corners. Occasionally, they might appear on camera for a split second before whoever happens to be holding the camera runs away as fast as they can.

That’s how these creatures appear in the early scenes of the Backrooms movie as well. But later sequences give us a much better look at these monsters, who often have bizarre distorted faces, and even offers an explanation of their origin. As Clark tells it, the Complex creates copies of whoever enters the Complex. Even after the originals leave, the copies remain inside forever. Mary meets several of these copies, including a towering version of Clark himself dressed in a pirate costume like the one the real Clark wears in his television commercials.

Exactly how these being are created and why is not revealed — and what we do learn comes from Clark, who is not in a proper frame of mind and may not be a trustworthy source of information. But he does claim these copies cannot feel pain (and proves it by cutting one of their scalps while the copy remains utterly indifferent). He also insists they are edible which, y’know, gross.

What Happened to Mary as a Child?

Flashbacks throughout Backrooms gradually reveal Mary’s childhood trauma. In the film’s early scenes, she observes her childhood home’s demolition, and pays close attention to the handprints she and her mother left in the cement outside. She manages to save one of the handprints; in later scenes, she repeatedly glances at it sitting on her desk or nightstand.

But the piece of cement is not just a symbol of lost innocence. Further flashbacks show that Mary’s mother was a shut-in who covered their home’s windows in newspaper and refused to let Mary venture outside. Mary’s early years, then, mirror life inside the claustrophobic, windowless confines of the Backrooms, and her quest to help patients like Clark is partly about dealing with her own past, and the thing she wasn’t able to fix in her own mother.

What Does the End of the Movie Mean?

In Backrooms’ final scenes, Clark — who has been driven insane by the Complex and his own insecurities about his unhappy personal and professional lives — holds Mary hostage and explains he prefers life in the Backrooms to his solitary existence outside. He then decides to free Mary as long as she will allow him to remain in the Complex. As he does, his pirate-cosplaying copy shows up and proves that human beings are just as edible as Backrooms copies. (Again, uh, super gross.)

Clark’s copy pursues Mary through the Backrooms then back out into his store (or at least a part of the Complex that looks like Clark’s store — it seems contain areas that do not make physical sense in our world). Mary manages to stun the copy using the cement handprint (good thing she stuck it in her pocket before uncovering a portal to an alternate dimension!) then stumbles into one of Async’s labs. (Phil, who spotted Clark on one of Async’s security cameras inside the Complex later recognizes him in one of his television commercials and establishes an Async outpost connected to his furniture store.)

Mary repeatedly asks Phil what will happen to her, and if she will be allowed to leave Async; Phil never answers her. Instead, the film’s ambiguous finale shows a series of spaces from the movie that have been transformed into parts of the Complex — including the room inside Async where Phil interrogated Mary. The Complex’s version of this room includes a twisted copy of Mary, sitting silently by herself.

That image is left open to interpretation. I can think of two potential readings of it:

1. Mary did escape and return to the real world, but because she entered the Complex, this copy of her is left inside of it forever, a literal manifestation of the movie’s metaphors about getting trapped inside childhood trauma.
2. The woman we see talking to Phil in the final scene is not the real Mary; it is her Backrooms copy. Their conversation is not real either; it is a figment of the imagination inside this copy’s broken mind, who does not realize she is a copy who’s stuck in the Backrooms.

Those are just two theories. Like the Backrooms themselves, there are sure to be more, hidden just beyond the edges of what we can see with our eyes (or a VHS camcorder).