luca

What a great movie. Well edited, amazing performance by Inde Navarrette, very original and intriguing premise. Genuinely terrifying to watch in the cinema, with several scenes I won’t forget for a long time. The film has its jump scares and „easy tricks“ here and there, but it never gets cheap. The psychological thriller remains at the heart of the film. The commentary on consent in relationships starts out rather subtle and becomes very obvious towards the end. This commentary is really meaningful and is what makes this film so much more than just a scary movie. I only wish the male protagonist had been a bit more grounded or nuanced, and that he had maybe gradually slipped into the situation instead. To me, it never really felt like a psychological struggle for him, he was pretty much an asshole from the start, aside maybe from a handful of scenes at the very beginning. But then again, that’s probably realistic.  While „The Backrooms“ still struggled to cement a meaningful background to its story, Obsession shows us how its done. Amazing debut by Curry Barker, I hope he gets more opportunities in the coming years and doesn’t burn out too fast.

I’m really not sure what to think about this movie. On the one hand, I love this kind of film: lots of dialogue, great acting, and really good, fast editing. I also think the movie generally has an interesting way of approaching its main topic. There is a really interesting discussion hidden in this movie about our dark secrets and where we should draw the line. But at the same time, I felt uncomfortable the whole time: (Spoiler warning!) Isn’t a school shooting just too extreme for this kind of discussion? I think my non-American brain just can’t accept that this is something people even could talk about as if it’s almost normal. Then again, in the US it sadly is a „normal” thing. And, like the movie suggests, maybe many otherwise „normal people“ have had thoughts like this at some point. Still, I’m just not sure if this example is the right one to make the discussion work. Right now, I can’t rate the movie badly. It’s too well made for that and I had a good time watching it. But I think I need some time to think about it. Maybe I’ll only know how I really feel after watching it a second time.

tbh I don’t quite understand the hype around this film.  The idea of the Backrooms started with 4chan images and later evolved into a YouTube short film series, but the transition to a feature-length film just didn’t work for me. The film had two possible directions it could have taken: either stay abstract and ambiguous, or develop a convincing backstory for the Backrooms. Instead, it takes a middle road, throwing multiple possible explanations at the audience without ever fully committing to any of them. A lot of people seem to interpret that as “artsy” or intellectually ambiguous, but to me it just feels lazy.  If they had, for example, fully committed to the psychoanalytic angle, and treated the Backrooms as a reflection of the human mind that becomes increasingly fragmented and distorted through (traumatic) memories, with the strange pirate at the end representing Clarke’s Über-Ich, they could have explored a genuinely interesting idea. Instead, those themes are only hinted at before actually being undermined by the film’s other developments.  There was a really strong idea at the core of this project, and they did a great job bringing it to life visually. However, the writing and story development feel underwhelming. It‘s cool that A24 had the confidence to hire a 20-year-old director and let him do his own thing, but the final result still feels „unfinished“.