Having written about Backrooms at Little White Lies, I wanted to take some space here to talk about the other big horror sensation this month: Obsession. This movie is having a moment, to say the least, and the specific kind of moment it’s having leads inevitably to two outcomes: Many normal people who see 3-5 movies a year are overrating it like crazy, and many discerning cinephiles who watched it post-breakout are underrating it just as much. A lot of people are talking past each other and it seems like everyone is very angry.
The stakes of the discourse surrounding this movie have become shockingly high. Lots of “media literacy” accusations from all sides. Sort of a classic “is this movie misogynist or is about misogyny” debate, which, I must note, historically have ended in victory for the latter. Much criticism I’ve seen of Obsession has featured a list of all the ways (possessed/possessive) Nikki is shown to be a victim of torture and rape, followed by a complaint that the movie isn’t about that. It’s a little odd to me. We’re all seeing the same thing on screen and arguing about whether or not it’s there.
I disagree as well, strongly, with the notion that Nikki is not shown to have any personality prior to being possessed. We see her only briefly, but you get a clear picture of her. Like the other main characters, she’s an unambitious loser who never left her hometown. She masks this fact with a smug, acidic personality that is endearing to her friends and probably no one else. She goes out of her way to give a homeless guy some money, though she asks her friends for the cash first, and you could write an entire essay on the social implications of that alone. And she clearly really wants Bear to ask her out. Her final pre-wish scene is like a checklist of hetero girl flirting—the only thing she doesn’t do is affectionately touch his hair. This is perhaps not the most complete portrait of a human being in cinema history, to be sure, but you get a distinct enough idea of who Nikki is that you feel her absence when she’s gone. This is as much as the movie needs to move forward.
Anyway, I say all this as preface to the statement that despite liking Obsession, I have to side ultimately with the discerning cinephiles on this one. People have been driven off the deep end, rudely swarming posts both critical of the film and incorrectly appreciative. The former is one thing, we see it all the time, I’ve lived through countless cycles of it. The latter is seen more rarely, and it’s what I mean when I say that the social stakes of the discourse have gotten far too high. The below post by Ariella Lana (worth reading, by the way) was ripped apart by hundreds of people claiming that she had done something wrong by not acknowledging Nikki’s victimhood.
That Nikki is not the “real villain” of the film and is in fact the victim of a kind of magical Rohypnol is obvious to anyone with eyes. That the film does not say this out loud in literal terms has tricked many viewers into thinking they are smart for riddling this out, which I think has led to much of the defensiveness about the film and the narrowing of intellectual territory in which to discuss it. Add on the obvious feminism angle and you get a temptation to approach different viewpoints with a sense of moral righteousness. You’re defending women when you defend Obsession, a victimized woman no less, and never mind that the film was written, directed, shot, and edited by men.
You would not be able to intuit from all this that Obsession is actually quite funny. Your mileage may vary on that, certainly. Few things in life are funnier to me than bad things happening to people for no reason. It’s why I love Jackass and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. A wire in my brain was attached incorrectly at birth. I used to laugh in therapy when I should have been crying. I’m sort of like Joker, I guess. When Nikki is playing Sexy Jenga and she pulls a block, looks at it, smiles, reads some Hansel and Gretel incest porn off her phone, at no point explaining what the prompt on the block said, I was losing it. It’s funny in an unfussy way, leaving out unnecessary commentary on its own gags and keeping Office Jim reaction shots to a potent minimum. Barker’s actual YouTube sketches, by comparison, are really terrible. Good on him for figuring it out.
There are things obviously wrong with Obsession. It looks terrible, for one, and no matter how many screencaps of characters in silhouette I get spammed with I will not change my mind on that. It has the same muddy yellow-brown look that everything has now, still chasing The Social Network 15 years later. It looks nasty. Can we get a damn LIGHT on this set? That being said, I do think Curry Barker uses the dimness effectively at times. One scene sees Nikki hiding from her beau Bear in the shadowy corner of their bedroom, and it’s eerie precisely because you can’t really make out her features. A testament to Barker’s developing skill that he managed to squeeze a few decent images out of this horrible aesthetic. Of course, Kane Parsons just made a movie that looks good in the first place….
Obsession just keeps raking it in. Its VOD release date was supposed to be today, before being wisely pulled indefinitely over the weekend. I’m hearing it might make even more money in its upcoming fourth weekend. It is probably going to stick around in the zeitgeist for quite a while. When it does eventually come to VOD, we’ll get another round of discourse from the clowns who don’t go see things in theaters and still think they get to put two cents in. If you won’t show up on opening weekend to a film you fully plan on giving no more than 2.5 stars then you have no right to call yourself a lover of cinema. I saw Pressure on Sunday, the movie about the guy who figured out the weather forecast for D-Day. That’s the actual premise. Andrew Scott is the guy and he has a boorish American counterpart who does the weather wrong. I will see anything, understand? I would watch the news in a movie theater if I could.
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