If you spent enough time online this summer, you probably saw the doors. Outlined in strips of black tape, they appeared against blank walls and in places where doors shouldn’t have been. Then came the fluorescent yellow hallways, grainy footage and that low, droning soundtrack. They all led to the same place: “Backrooms.”
On the contrary, by the time “Obsession” came out, I had already decided I wasn’t going to watch it. From the trailer alone, I thought I knew where “Obsession” was headed. Infatuation would spiral, affection would sour and things would inevitably get ugly. This summer’s horror event, as far as I was concerned, was going to be “Backrooms.”
And really, how could it not be? Its eerie soundtrack crept into my TikTok feed; grainy, sickly yellow hallways flickered across my screen. After years of living online as one of the internet’s strangest collective nightmares, A24 had finally given “Backrooms” a release date. Its marketing never had to tell us to watch the film; it simply left the door open. And, God, did the internet walk through it.
Meanwhile, “Obsession” was looming somewhere in the back of my mind. Then, out of the blue, I decided to watch it one day.
As “Obsession’s” strange, almost hypnotic soundtrack flickers to life, we meet Bear (Michael Johnston), a hopeless romantic quietly in love with his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Desperate to win her heart, Bear breaks an ominous “One Wish Willow” and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world. It works. She becomes completely and relentlessly obsessed with him.
Somewhere between my premature refusal and the ending credits, this dark anti-rom-com I had dismissed became the film I couldn’t stop ruminating over. I find that reversal far more interesting than deciding which horror film was technically better.
There is a peculiar danger in waiting too long for something. Anticipation. It drips like honey, sweetened by everything we imagine is coming. Kane Parsons spent years building “Backrooms” on YouTube, where viewers decoded clues and collectively pieced together its mythology. For longtime followers, the feature was a homecoming; for everyone else, entering those fluorescent hallways could feel like arriving late to a conversation already in progress.
“Obsession” offers no such history. Its premise is almost embarrassingly universal. Bear wishes for Nikki to love him, and she does. Far too much. The supernatural object may appear unfamiliar, but the impulse behind it is only human. Who hasn’t wished for something as badly? A person? A job? A better version of ourselves? No lore is needed to understand “Obsession.” You just need to have wanted something.
Desire has a funny way of making archivists out of us. We collect scraps of evidence and invent possibilities, becoming attached to what could be before anything has actually happened.
Desire has a funny way of making archivists out of us. We collect scraps of evidence and invent possibilities, becoming attached to what could be before anything has actually happened. Then comes the embarrassment: We realize how attached we have become and suddenly want nothing more than to be rid of it.
And then there’s Curry Barker’s take.
I’ve watched enough horror and thrillers to recognize their rhythms: the ominous silence before the jump scare; the slow escalation; the inevitable moment when someone makes the spectacularly stupid decision to investigate the noise downstairs. “Obsession” borrows that rhythm, then interrupts it. The film begins with the grammar of a crush: Michael Johnston nails the all-too-relatable, painful awkwardness of infatuation. The tonal modulation is the trick — Barker lets comedy and horror contaminate each other.
As the audience, we know Nikki’s affection is manipulated, coerced and stripped of free will. Yet the film proceeds to stage it with the velocity and intimacy that romance grants. Bear easily gets what countless rom-com protagonists spend 90 minutes chasing. The difference is that “Obsession” grants the fantasy early enough to ask the question those movies rarely do: What happens when somebody finally loves you as much as you wanted them to?
Really though, this film belongs entirely to Inde Navarrette. She had my blood running cold, every second she was on screen. Not once could I predict her next move because of the range of emotion she elicits in her performance. Some of Navarrette’s best moments come when the old Nikki briefly resurfaces beneath the obsession. Her smile drops into confusion, then fear, before she is pulled under again. The horror then lies in watching two versions of Nikki fight for the same face.
Navarrette’s performance also feeds the film’s tonal whiplash. Tenderness becomes discomfort, discomfort turns comical and, before the laugh has left your throat, the scene turns frightening. “Obsession” repeatedly releases tension only to sneak it back in from another direction, leaving us unsure whether to laugh, recoil or lean closer.
“Backrooms,” by contrast, is deliberately alienating. Its horror depends upon distance: cavernous spaces, anonymous corridors and obtrusively large architecture. That impersonality is part of what made Parsons’ original footage so effective. But stretched across a feature film, the same quality creates an emotional distance. I could admire the scale of the hallways, or dread what might follow around the next corner. What I struggled to do was recognize myself inside them.
On the other hand, “Obsession” gave me the opposite problem; I recognized myself far too easily. We are inexhaustible in the ways we love. We choose our people and crown them kings. We replay conversations, reread messages, build entire futures from a single pinpoint of devotion. We love obsessively, incessantly, sometimes with a maddening hunger. Perhaps most dangerously, we love to love. It is indeed through this self-recognition that “Obsession” finds its horror.
Quincy Qu PO ’29 is hardly a seasoned horror watcher, though curiosity tends to get the better of her. Her new film column “Unboxd” explores what gets under our skin, why we let it linger and the strange psychology behind the films we can’t shake.
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