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Spoilers for Obsession

I recently rewatched the entirety of Obsession, my favorite horror film of the last few years and possibly my favorite film of 2026. Dune part 3 and Avengers: Doomsday will have a very tough time beating it out for that top spot in my heart.

Obsession and its cast, in particular Inde Navarrette, have been getting a ton of praise for their work and this blog post is yet another one to add to that pile but I think this morning I want to dive deep and dissect an element of Navarrette’s performance that I have a difficult time articulating.

Navarrette is not a novice to acting, having been a recurring cast member on Superman & Loisand appeared in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, but it is unquestionable that her turn as Nikki Freeman, the doomed and tragic object of a young man’s obsession in this year’s breakout and surprising hit, has catapulted her into a very wide and public recognition.

In Obsession, Navarrette performs effectively as two distinct characters: Nikki Freeman, free of the wish’s curse and the ‘Nikki’ that is cursed to love Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey ‘more than anyone in the fucking world.’ I shall refer to these characters as True Nikki and Freaky Nikki to make it clear which is which.

In terms of screen time, the audience has little exposure to True Nikki; she is a voice on a telephone call, a friend chatting happily and teasing Bear at the bar on trivia night, and exposes herself emotionally for a few moments as Bear drives her home, revealing that she is not happy and emotionally keeps her feelings deeply contained saying that when she has a crush on a guy ‘no one knows.’

In contrast, for the majority of the film, Navarrette performs as Freaky Nikki, who is loud, unsubtle, manipulative, and unable to contain her feelings at all, possessing none of the subtlety of the character we were introduced to. So far this might be considered a rather standard Jekyll and Hyde sort of portrayal that has been a fairly standard performance since the 1930s, but there are layers and levels to Navarrette’s approach that I think belie this simplification.

While True Nikki and Freaky Nikki are poles apart in terms of the nature of their characters this is not usually played to exaggeration in the film. Freaky Nikki is a very different character, one the audience is well aware of and possibly would even be aware if there were not instances of True Nikki momentarily and terrifyingly regaining her body. The voices of the two Nikkis are slightly different, using different tonalities in their normal speech. I do not have a particularly well-trained ear, but it sounds to me that True Nikki’s voice is in a very slightly deeper register than Freaky Nikki’s. True Nikki sounds more composed and restrained while Freaky Nikki sounds more ‘girlish,’ perhaps a performance that might be more attractive to a man who lacks the self-confidence to take the emotional risks that courtship and dating require.

Even this, Navarrette’s performance as two different Nikkis, is not the element that astounds me. That moment from the film’s final scene is something I struggle to adequately describe.

Freaky Nikki, certain that Bear doesn’t love her, turns to the same One Wish Willow device that Bear used to enslave, creating a Pseudo-Bear that is obsessed with her as she is with him. This ‘romance’ is short-lived. Bear, seeking an escape from the horrors he birthed into the world, has taken a lethal overdose of pills. (True to Bear’s nature of being unable to commit and face up to unpleasant truths, he had begun to try and make himself vomit up the overdose, but Freaky Nikki’s wish derailed that.)

For a moment the two are ‘happy,’ but then the overdose works its lethal action and Pseudo-Bear dies in Freaky Nikki’s arms. Freaky Nikki wails and cries at the death of her obsession. She nearly ends her own life, but Bear’s death frees her from the wish’s curse suddenly becoming True Nikki again. There is a moment of silence before she throws Bear’s corpse to the floor and sobs.

In a single take, we watch Freaky Nikki transition to True Nikki with both versions warped by the throes of sobbing and wailing, and yet in a manner I cannot quite put my finger on, these are very different wails, very different cries. Freaky Nikki is wailing at the loss of her Bear, and True Nikki is wailing at the horror and torments she has been forced to endure. Both wails are soul-wrenching produced by utter sorrow but are also utterly different, produced by the same actor without a break or a cut to give her time and space to shift emotionally. She wails from two very different reasons, and it is evident in the nature of her cries but in a method so subtle I cannot say precisely why they are different. I can only recognize that they are distinct, that they are two different characters wailing for two different reasons that are easily observed but seemingly impossible to define.

Inde Navarrette has earned every accolade heaped upon her for this performance, and I shall watch her career with great interest.

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Producer Val Lewton working for RKO pictures in the 1940s was tasked to create a number of horror films but without the money to hire established stars or productions of any real scale. His solution, turning to psychological horror, relying on what is left unseen but imagined by the audience yielded some fine examples of horror that has influenced filmmaking and the genre to this day. The Body Snatcher, adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson story gave horror legend Boris Karloff his finest role and performance and launched the directorial career of Robert Wise who directed films in every genre clear into the 1970s. I Walked With a Zombie, blended inspiration from Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Caribbean mysticism, eschewing the cheap laughs or schlocky horror of zombie-centered stories for something with more drama and reigning as the ultimate zombie inspired film until displaced by Romero’s reinvention of the sub-genre in the late 60s. However, it is 1942’s Cat People that is arguably the most influential of these productions responsible for every over-used jump scare and inspiring an R-rated remake in 1982.

Criterion Channel

Helmed by legendary noir director Jacques Tourneur, who also made Night of the Demon, and written by DeWitt Bodeen, Cat People centers on Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) a young artist recently immigrated to the United States from Serbia. Irena labors under the belief that she is descended from wicked, evil witches,  and cursed that when suffering strong passions, such as lust or anger, she will transform into a large and murderous panther. Quite against her plans, Irena falls in love with naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and marries him but refuses the marriage bed due to her terror at transforming. The cast is rounded out by Jane Randolph playing Alice, Oliver’s assistant and the third component to the doomed romantic triangle and Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd, a psychiatrist friend of Oliver who attempts to help Irena past her ‘delusion.’

Lacking the resources for elaborate transformations Tourneur and Lewton relied upon atmosphere and mood to achieve the desired tension in the audience. One of the most influential sequences is when Alice, walking alone at night, becomes terrified that someone or something is stalking her. She is correct. As the audience, we know that Irena, hot with jealousy, is indeed following her along the dark street where only isolated islands of lights from the streetlamps allow any real visibility. When Alice reaches the bus stop, she and the audience are wound quite tight when the sudden and very loud hiss of the bus’s air brakes shatters that tension in what is widely considered to be cinema’s first ‘jump scare.’ A technique now so widely over-used that is often associated with mediocre directors who are unable to build the requisite tension in their films.

I find the character of Louis Judd the most perplexing member of the cast as I can’t determine he is meant to be seen as tragic or as an evil man. While I understand that code of conduct between doctors and their patients, even informal ones such as Irena, have changed greatly from 40s I find it hard to excuse in any manner Judd’s actions towards the young woman. Certainly by today’s standard and what we know of power dynamics between physicians and people under their care and power his disastrous attempt to seduce Irena is not only unjustifiable but also criminal, but this was hardly the case in 1942. When he released the panther within her, it can be seen as tragic for Doctor Judd or as a case of ‘good for her.’ Frankly, I believe that he got pretty much what he deserved.

Being produced in 1942 Cat People needed to stay firmly within the puritanical guidelines of the Production Code, which was rigidly enforced from 1934 through the middle of the 1960s, and as such the exact nature of Irena’s curse could not be fully and plainly spelled out. Sexual intercourse, beyond any depiction of it ever occurring outside of marriage, could not be directly referenced, only implied, making the details somewhat obscure to a modern audience, an obscurity that filmmaker Paul Schrader did not labor under when he remade Cat People in 1982.

Both versions of these films, the original and the remake are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

It is a strange time when one of the, if not the most, popular film series of all time, Star Wars, generates such lackluster interest that a pair of low-budget, non-Intellectual Property driven horror films perform better than the most recent entry in the long-loved franchise.

As with most things in life I believe that there is no simple single answer to as to why Obsessionand Backrooms pulled into such audience number while The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered middling success.

Certainly, the fact that three years passed between the last season of the once hit show, The Mandalorian and the release of the feature film it inspired dulled general interest. It today’s fast moving short attention span driven culture to paraphrase an extra in Jaws, ‘Three years is like three decades!’ It is also not helpful that the third season of that show proved to be the most lackluster one offered, splitting up the dynamic pairing that had driven viewer interest and delving into ‘lore’ of the Star Wars universe that interested the most die-hard fans but for everyone else came off as impenetrable and uninteresting.

When the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu finally appeared, promising the return of that pairing they seemed to rely entirely on the affection people once had for the pairing, offering nothing of the plot or story. The studio’s only pitched seemed to be, here are the characters you loved, come see them, and nothing more. In a time of already declining theater attendance, shortening windows between theatrical release and streaming availability, offering up nothing more than television characters on a theatrical screen is not enough to coax people out of their homes for an expensive trip to the local multiplex. The ones who did go reported that the film had no real story to it, it was a very expensive collection of action scenes and references to other programs that the creators of already shown on television. the script was so flabby and pointless that the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film could be edited out and absolutely nothing would change.

The tired and reheated offering from a franchise nearly 50 years old cannot explain why a pair of horror films exploded with financial and cultural success.

The horror movie genre mirrored the Star Wars franchise in the manner that 2026 with yet another entry in a horror series that had grown quite long in the tooth with the release of Scream 7 the latest addition in that 30-years-old franchise. Now, my opinion on this may be somewhat prejudiced as I have never loved or even enjoyed the original Scream when so many people found the movie so perfectly suited to their tastes. That said I find it hard to imagine how a script can breathe new life into a slasher that has continued for seven feature films without becoming a parody of itself. I will confess that ‘slashers’ are my least favorite sub-genre of horror with very, very few holding my interest. While other people adored Ti West’s X, I could only groan as the characters throughout the movie runtime veered further and further from anything I could believe as genuine human action and reaction.  What Obsession and Backrooms offered were fresh interesting horror stories that were either a series of ‘kills’ displaying technical expertise in the effects nor yet another exploration of grief using horror as a metaphor. Instead, each film spoke to a relevant cultural moment that resonated with people, particularly younger adults, and not the grey-haired fans of quite old franchises.

Obsession speaks to entitlement and consent with Nikki being stripped of agency over her body and her mind being the real horror of the tale. This is a subject that is very real to nearly all, if not all, women today. Between rights being stripped away by their government and the need to exercise vigilance over ever drink in public it is hardly surprising that film like Obsession strikes such a powerful emotional chord. Some have suggested the film would be more powerful if it presented the story from Nikki’s point of view however I think that is a challenge that would be nearly insurmountable in a cinematic form. A character without the ability to influence the events around her or even her own actions is one that would not thrive in a visual medium, that would work in prose, I can see a terrific novel with that approach but not a movie. I found the true horror of Obsession to be NIkki’s enslavement and not her outbursts of violent possessiveness. This movie is very much one of its time as is Backrooms.

Backrooms, inspired and adapted from the directors short projects on YouTube is a movie that, while set in the dreary 1990s, speaks to the young adult suffering the early 21st century. In addition to coming from a medium with which they are very familiar, the internet, its visual presentation, an empty, haunted, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Strip malls were not dead and empty spaces in the 90s but they are today and the vast lonely volumes present in Backrooms is an apt metaphor for the lives of young adults today, a cohort of people who suffered the pandemic for their teenage years, and emerged from college burden with debt and few if any prospect to have even the same lives much less better ones of their parents. A seemingly endless world that lacks maps or any other method of navigating is the world that they are attempting to build lives in. Is it any surprise that this is also a horror that touches their souls?

Star Wars emerged in the late 70s, a time of deep cynicism when heroes were often depicted as doomed their values a futile expression. Lucas painted a simpler time with simpler morality, one where it was easy to know right from wrong, that life had a light side and dark side and that resonated with the next several generations but this generation cannot believe in such a world. They have suffered too much to adopt a pollyannish view of reality; the dark, haunted, and manipulative horrors of Backrooms and Obsession mirrors the world that they know far more than a bounty hunter bound by some honorable code.

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“No Matter Where You Go, there you are”. Dr. B. Banzai PhD, MD, MFA

I had intended to see the new horror film Backrooms on its opening weekend but a cluster of migraines kept me at home and it wasn’t until this past weekend that I managed to get out to the theater to catch this latest horror sensation.

A24

Backrooms, the brainchild of Kane Parsons and born of his internet posted short subjects, centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) a man for whom life has not turned out at all the way he had hoped or wanted. Turned out of his home by divorce and living in his discount furniture store Clark listlessly seeks help from a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) but clearly struggles to make progress. Late one evening Clark discovers a portal in the sub-floor of his store that leads to an uninhabited and seemingly endless series of rooms and corridors laid out by some sort of inaccessible dream logic. Exploring the labyrinth Clark discovers terrors that echo his own distraught mental heath but remain beyond comprehension.

Liminal Horror entered the lexicon quite recently in 2019 with images of abandoned malls and disused spaces appearing on internet chatrooms and message boards. By 2022 Parsons began uploading short subjects of CGI crafted liminal horror to his YouTube account, developing a talent and fandom that eventually led to the feature film Backrooms with its attendant success and recognition. As a subgenre of horror liminal is the most mood defined. Where supernatural horror ranges from ghosts to demons, to witchcraft, and slashers are very specifically about a series of gruesome and on-screen ‘kills’ and zombies, either undead or virally induced, are about the implacable masses, liminal horror has no clearly defined monster at its core but consists almost entirely of atmosphere. In its purest form it would be possible to craft something that is recognizably liminal horror from a single still image. Backrooms, in its expanded feature film form, is more than liminal horror but rests, in my opinion, on a subgenre of horror just over a century old, cosmic horror.

Cosmic horror, perhaps best illustrated by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, is the subgenre that while often reduced to tentacled monstrosities is at its center about the relationship between humanity and reality, but that reality as presented in the piece is far stranger and utterly incomprehensible to the puny human mind rendering it terrifying. It is not that there are simply great areas that lie unknown to humanity, but that reality itself is unknowable and our pitiful understanding of it is utterly in error. The horrific nature of the universe cannot be explained because it cannot be understood at all.

The strange, nightmarish world that Clark discovers in the sub-levels of his furniture store is never explained, with hints at the film’s conclusion that this is not the only occurrence. While the space, its shape, and its nature is twisted by the psyches that invade it, those psyches do not create nor do they dictate it, merely influence the bizarre and unpredictable events and forms it takes.  The Backrooms are not constructed of timber and drywall; their nature is beyond human understanding and realizing just how far beyond our meager intellect it lies is the true nature of its horror.

I both rejoice in the tremendous success Backrooms is finding at the box office and fear it as well. There will be terrible pressure for a sequel, for a continuation of the story and if that comes to pass then each iteration will rob a little more of the mystery, will seek to explain a little more the terror until nothing at all is left to experience.

I opened this review with a quote from a classic cult film of the 80s because the Backrooms are the dark interpretation of that saying, no matter where you go you take yourself with you, and that includes the demons that haunt our every footstep and the loops of destructive behaviors we are unable to unlearn.

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Unless I am again derailed by migraines I have plans to see two films in the theaters this weekend.

Tonight, Friday night, I want to go out and catch Backrooms. It is so nice to see a wider selection of horror than the slashers and murderous home invaders subgenres. I have nothing against those types of movies which are just more often than not dull and tedious to me. The black-gloved killers of giallo are more interesting, but they too can become rather uninspired and repetitive rather quickly. Backrooms looks to be much more a vibe than a plot, which I will wager either works very well or not at all and I am looking forward to finding out.

Tomorrow, June 6th, strikes me as an ironically perfect day to see the D-Day invasion film Pressure, a film that looks to focus on the vital and uncertain weather forecasts that determined the success of the Normandy invasions. I do know as a historical fact that one of the vital elements for that invasion and the Battle for the North Atlantic was the Allied control of Iceland, occupied since its actual controlling government, the Danish Kingdom, was under Axis domination.

Sunday evening, after my sweetie-wife has retired for the night, I plan to watch the next in the Plaid Project, Johnny Eager, a movie I know almost nothing about.

But, like I said much of this turns on if eye strain doesn’t trigger yet another series of migraines.