One of arthouse cinema’s most compelling stars has a confession: even she isn’t immune to the dread of the Backrooms.
Renate Reinsve, who plays therapist Dr. Mary Kline in A24’s breakout horror film, has been doing the press rounds since the film opened on May 29. Known for carrying emotionally complex, grounded roles with ease, Reinsve is the last person you’d expect to admit vulnerability on set. But the Backrooms, it turns out, got to her too.
The film is based on a creepypasta that first appeared on 4chan in 2019, describing an eerie, impossible maze of empty, yellow-tinged rooms accessible only by “no-clipping out of reality.” From there, 20-year-old director Kane Parsons built a cult YouTube franchise around the concept before A24 signed him on to make the feature. The result is one of the most talked-about horror films of the year, with sets that physically recreate the disorienting, endless hallways of the original internet myth.
Renate Reinsve on Navigating the Backrooms Set
In a recent interview, Reinsve admitted the physical reality of those sets had a real effect on her.
“I would avoid going on the ‘Backrooms’ movie set alone,” she said. “I have a very bad sense of direction. When I got there the first time I was a bit scared of just losing it a bit but I kept sane.”
It’s the kind of candid admission that feels very on-brand for Reinsve. The Norwegian actress broke through internationally with Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World in 2021, winning Best Actress at Cannes and earning a BAFTA nomination, and has since built a reputation for being refreshingly unguarded in how she talks about her work.
In Backrooms, she plays Dr. Mary Kline, the therapist of Clark, a struggling furniture store owner played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who together become entangled in a terrifying extradimensional horror. The film is set in the 1990s, and the production team physically constructed the Backrooms across sprawling sets, which clearly made quite the impression on its lead actress.
The film holds a 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is on track to gross $90 million at the box office against a production budget of under $10 million, a strong opening weekend that cements Parsons as one of the most exciting young directors working in horror right now. For Reinsve, it marks another sharp left turn in a career defined by unpredictable, fearless choices.
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