Hear Me Out: ‘Obsession’ Is Kind of a Drag [Devil’s Advocate]

Welcome to Devil’s Advocate, a space where we go against the grain. Each piece here spotlights a horror movie, good or bad, that we felt differently about than most people. See why, and please – don’t condemn us.

I thought Obsession was kind of a drag. Now, I’m still excited to see what Curry Barker manages with a property as storied as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and there’s no denying the chronically online (kindly) Gen-Z filmmaking acolyte has some serious sauce – Obsession is leagues ahead of most debuts, and despite my own tepid feelings, I both understand and welcome the way he’s been embraced unabashedly by genre fans. Yet, echoing the shallow friendships at Obsession’s core, Obsession wants to be about character but lacks any meaningful interest in exploring who they are beyond archetypal, bold-typeface names.

Consider, for instance, the ongoing (and misguided, Christ) debate about whether Bear is really a villain. It’s not subtext, not fertile ground for polysemic reading—the text, quite explicitly, portrays him as such. Amy Dunne of Gone Girl fame (to use an example) endures as an exemplar of literary characters because she’s so measured, textured, and dynamic, it’s fascinating to explore her distinctly feminine evil alongside our collective cultural desire to cut her slack because she’s a woman. There’s text and subtext, and Gone Girl as art allows for disparate, yet no less convincing, readings of what it endeavors to say. See also: Bong Joon Ho’s Mother, Ari Aster’s Hereditary (to which Obsession is regularly compared), everything about The Substance, and infinitely more.

Those are some personal favorites, though this century’s genre cinema is abounding with complicated characterizations we love to talk about. Debate their ethos and motives, unpack their rights and wrongs, onward and onward. It’s what makes art, well… art. Obsession, despite its acclaim, doesn’t really invite that depth, even if it’s confoundingly happening anyway (I think it’s simply misogyny, but what do I know).

Obsession, shot for less than a million dollars, is a baby movie. Yes, that’s still a profound amount of resources most filmmakers would eat a cat for, but it’s comparatively small considering, say, budget of nearly $100 million. As a result, it lives or dies on its characters. When the scale is small, the personalities need to be big. Barker, who also wrote the script, imbued Nikki’s transformation and titular obsession with enough genre ick to give the impression of something, but it’s all surface-level, High School antics glossed up as something it’s not.