The Verdict
You took a piece of internet liminal-space folklore that lives in low-res YouTube and dared to give it Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and a real budget. Ambition like that usually faceplants.
Instead you stuck the landing hard enough to make it A24's highest-grossing film to date, north of $270 million worldwide, which is an absurd sentence to type about endless beige hallways.
The trap concept is your whole movie, and you know it, so you build the dread out of repetition and emptiness rather than a creature you can cut to. Brave choice, mostly paid off.
What it nails
- ▲Casting actors of Ejiofor and Reinsve's caliber to anchor a furniture-store-basement nightmare gives the absurd premise gravity it has no right to have.
- ▲It honors the source DNA: the horror of the liminal space itself, the wrongness of infinite empty rooms, not a rubber monster.
- ▲Translating a viral creepypasta into a feature without losing what made it spread online is a genuinely hard adaptation and you pulled it off commercially.
- ▲Parsons clearly understands tension as architecture, the dread comes from geometry and silence, which is a real directorial instinct from a debut filmmaker.
What it botches
- ▼A premise built on endlessness eventually has to answer questions, and 'infinite mysterious dimension' is a setup that punishes you the moment you start explaining it.
- ▼Stretching a short-form internet scare into feature runtime risks stretches where the eeriness flattens into mere wandering.
- ▼Two stranded characters, Clark and Mary, carry enormous narrative weight, and any thin patch in their dynamic leaves the empty rooms feeling like just empty rooms.
- ▼When your scares depend on the unknown, the back half always fights the urge to over-show, and that tightrope is unforgiving.
Who it's for
People who lost hours to the Kane Pixels YouTube series, liminal-space obsessives, and anyone who finds empty offices scarier than any masked killer.
Who should skip
Viewers who need a clear monster, clear rules, and a clean exit. Ambient dread about infinite hallways will read as a screensaver to you.
The whole story lives on the hub