Sunday Scaries: Defending ‘Obsession’

I had originally planned to publish this opinion piece earlier, but when your film becomes an unexpected cultural phenomenon that rakes in literally over one hundred times its budget at the box office, home media rollouts get pushed back a bit to ride that theatrical gravy train for as long as possible. Now that we’re finally getting a streaming release for one of the two most shockingly successful horror outings of the year (the 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray releases are coming next month), I figured now’s as good a time as any to publish my alternate opinion on it.

But before I do, let’s just take a brief moment to consider the runaway success of both Obsession and Backrooms being as close to a semi-indie horror Barbenheimer as we can possibly imagine in the 2020s. However, instead of the mass collective capital-e Event being derived from the contrast between two films of seemingly opposite tones, ambitions, and target audiences, Backrooms and Obsession are remarkably similar — both films fall in the same genre and have generally appealed primarily to the same generation of moviegoers, both are directed by young upstart filmmakers who cut their teeth producing online content before making the leap to feature filmmaking, both have set box office records for their respective studios… and our Editor just wasn’t really all that hot on either of them. I empathize! I know from personal experience what a bummer it is to not share the same enthusiasm for a horror hit that everyone else feels. 

However, it’s a little harder for me to identify with Joey’s assessment of Obsession specifically and, to a lesser extent, Backrooms. I agree that the latter film has not-insignificant flaws, though I lay the blame for nearly all of them at the feet of Will Soodik’s script, not Kane Parsons’ direction, and I still enjoyed the movie overall (side note: A24 needs to commit to an aggressive For Your Consideration campaign for that movie in Best Production Design)… but Obsession is a different beast. It’s not that I think Joey’s “wrong” in how he describes the things he disliked about it, but I would argue those aspects of the movie he found repulsive are, from another perspective, precisely what make it so striking and bold.

So when he says he “actually found it rather cruel, as opposed to fun,” I can’t push back too hard on that complaint! Obsession is, above all, a mean movie, twisting its knife into you up until literally the very last shot before the credits roll. But I would argue that there’s “good mean” and “bad mean.” I’ve mentioned this before in a past review of an indie horror effort that did not work on literally any level, but Rob Zombie’s first two feature films provide ideal compare-and-contrast examples of what I’m getting at. House of 1000 Corpses is “bad mean;” empty, prurient, tediously over-the-top, completely uninterested in making you actually feel anything during its most revolting scenes other than a detached amusement at all the myriad callbacks to older, better grindhouse B-movies and slashers Zombie grew up with. The Devil’s Rejects is “good mean;” every scene of brutality filmed with intent, all of its most harrowing scenes making you viscerally feel every wound inflicted by and on the fugitive Firefly clan, derived not from “Hey, remember this reference to this obscure horror movie?!?!” but a far more emotionally compelling “I deeply resent how much the 1970s have shaped my personality and cultural frames of reference.”

There should be a method to the meanness, in other words. It should come from a place of genuine emotion and moral clarity. Joey is 100% on the money when he observed “a cruelty towards the female characters,” but unlike, say, the opening scene of Saw 3D, where you are clearly meant to cheer on the two totally chill dudes as they both agree to literally bisect their shared paramour slowly and painfully as punishment for being such a cheating whore amirite bruh, Curry Barker never once suggests we should derive any kind of enjoyment from Nikki’s suffering. She is positioned as the Scary Threat™ character, but the audience is reminded frequently (maybe a little too frequently?) that none of what she’s doing is of her own volition. And while the movie situates us within Bear’s point-of-view, the movie very overtly (maybe a little too overtly?) develops him as a risible main character.

Much like the eponymous protagonist of Frankenstein, the sinister force possessing Nikki is what scares us externally, but Bear is The Real Monster™ with an internal (anti-)arc we’re locked into, resulting in a discombobulated subversion of how audiences typically empathize with a story’s main characters. For a film to break so defiantly from Hollywood’s addiction to Save the Cat mandates for all main characters to be presented good and heroic and *gag* “likeable” in every story, and become a runaway hit in its defiance, hopefully sends a very strong message to studio executives who arrogantly insist on an imagined myopia of the very audiences they purport to appeal to. This gambit is aided considerably by the actors having to personify these against-the-grain characterizations. Inde Navarrette has, not at all undeservedly, been receiving the lion’s share of the critical acclaim and awards buzz for her fearsome commitment to a challenging dual role, but Michael Johnston is just as praiseworthy for his uninhibited embodiment of a cowardly Nice Guy.

That is very much uncomfortable for audiences, not at all what I would describe as an attempt to be a “crowd-pleaser.” It’s not a dreary slog, necessarily – there are many scenes that are darkly funny in the same way that there are situations in our deeply unpleasant reality that you just can’t help but bitterly laugh at – but the overall effect leaves you shaken and disturbed. And it’s scary! In creative and surprising ways! After years and years of late-stage “elevated horror” settling for just evoking vague feelings of “creepiness,” Obsession genuinely rattled my nerves in a way I haven’t experienced since Smile. I’m reminded of a particular scene when a running shower is suddenly shut off that provoked audible yelps from audiences in both of the screenings I attended. Can anyone say the same for Bring Her Back or Keeper?

I do not want to imply that I have no qualms with the movie at all. I’ve already hinted at how much I felt it belabored its moral judgments of Nikki and Bear a little too much, but I also concede that I may just be an old man who cannot accept that this is just The World We Live In Now. I could accuse Barker of being graceless in his approach to articulating themes as a writer… but maybe I’m wrong and he just understands modern audiences better than I do?

Also, and this might be a more contentious observation, I think the movie should have looked better. This could be chalked up to budgetary limitations, but it’s so frustrating to me how many filmmakers believe using “darkness” as a visual expression of their movie means frequently making your scenes underlit. This leads to occasional instances of images that could have felt oppressive and intimidating just come off as… murky to look at, instead. The only time I ever felt d.p. Taylor Clemons was proactively and successfully sculpting the visual darkness of a scene was when Nikki was hitting on Bear outside his doorway after their first awkward night and the only detail of her face you could clearly see was the flickering light of her eyes. It also suffers from the Sinners problem of being presented via an unconventional aspect ratio without ever justifying… why, exactly, we’re watching this particular film on this specific aspect ratio.

There are things about Obsession that could be better. More visually striking. More narratively sophisticated. But the movie we have is still pretty damned good, and I, for one, cheer for its success and the future of its director and two stars. I just really really really hope Barker finds a way to back out of that misbegotten Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.