Inde Navarrette as Nikki and William Johnston as Bear in a scene from "Obsession." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
This summer season has taken a wild and unexpected detour. It may or may not bring about seismic long-term effects to the movie industry, but what is clear is that this trend has taken over the landscape and seized the conversation. This cinema revolution, young and frugal, was birthed in the short attention span realm of content intended to be viewed on your cellphone or tablet. Oh, and it lets horror lead the way.
So, if you've noticed the genre fiends and gorehounds in your life are feasting, it's largely due to two filmmakers, one in his mid-20s and the other barely out of his teens, who have leveled up from their YouTube content and made quite a splash with their theatrical debut features. They may be newcomers to many of you, but not to their core demographic: young males who grew up consuming most of their entertainment on tiny screens, their desktop monitors or even through their game consoles. They're already familiar with who these directors are and what they bring to the table.
But the runaway box office success of both big-screen efforts means that audience has now ballooned and diversified. The buzz is deafening, and the spin cycle is working overtime to portray these young creators as knights in shining armor, the grasp of their craft helping to ensure the survival of the film medium following a long and difficult period that elicited talk of its impending demise. But do these conversation starters, which dominated the box office last weekend, actually live up to the hype? One of them does. Read on, if you dare.
"Obsession": Earnest feelings have no place in the hermetic confines of this repellent, ghoulishly vacuous hybrid of dark comedy and supernatural horror. The tale of a music store employee, and the grisly consequences that come when his romantic wish is granted via a novelty shop trinket, had the makings of a wicked “Tales from the Crypt” episode expanded to feature length. But Curry Barker, who wrote and directed this modestly budgeted enterprise, nudges viewers to point and laugh at his neurotic, frequently passive aggressive protagonist, as his predicament snowballs into full-on mayhem with a sadistic streak and a body count.
But I wasn't frightened, and I wasn't laughing.
Inde Navarrette as Nikki and William Johnston as Bear in a scene from "Obsession." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
Our leading man, Bear (Michael Johnston), pines away for Nikki (Inde Navarrette), his beautiful co-worker. Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), his fellow workmate and longtime confidant, is getting tired of the whining (and frankly, so was I within less than 10 minutes), so he encourages Bear to finally let the object of his attention know how he feels. Bear might be sullen and socially awkward, though not at all bad looking, but he intuits Nikki had friend-zoned him, and he fears there's no coming back from that. He's too thick-headed to realize he's doing the same thing to Sarah (Megan Lawless), a fourth, comparatively better adjusted employee at this Los Angeles-area store. (It's improbable this small business would be able to afford having this many people on its payroll, but this is an acceptable, budget-driven suspension of disbelief.)
The film's early scenes suggest the more mumblecore-driven route Barker could have taken, but he's really not that interested in these four characters as people. Rather, the 26-year-old director is glad to flatten them into receptacles of misery that's occasionally self-inflicted but is more often imposed upon by Barker, not unlike that boorish jerk you meet at a friend's weekend getaway who proceeds to make your vacation a living hell. Then he hands you a popcorn bucket and eggs you on to ridicule. All while he keeps a watchful eye on you, keen on gauging your reaction.
Inde Navarrette as Nikki in a scene from "Obsession." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
Sure enough, Bear picks up a “One Wish Willow” during a visit to an occult shop, ostensibly as a gift for Nikki. The retro doohickey claims to grant one wish per user when snapped in two. After things go south for him on the night he planned to shoot his shot with Nikki, it is he who cracks the toy, unwittingly opening Pandora's box.
The rest of “Obsession” chronicles the downward spiral spurred by this decision, as it's Nikki who suddenly finds herself besotted with Bear. The magnitude of this feral infatuation keeps escalating and escalating, and this deterioration ought to be nasty fun. But Barker, who works overtime to fuse gallows humor with gross-out havoc, lets the bile get in the way of the laughs, sound designing his film within an inch of its life in the process. Moreover, he views his characters from a judgmental distance, as if he were keeping an ant farm. He doles out small moments of respite for his hapless couple before snuffing them out with surgical precision. Rinse, repeat. You can almost hear the director's cackle from behind the camera, but the disconnectedness he engenders has a counterproductive effect.
To Barker's credit, he makes it clear Bear is not the victim here, but by narrowing the film's focus to his main character's vantage point, the better to inflict chaos for his impressionable viewers' consumption, Nikki's plight never feels real, so her arc rings hollow. It's as if Sam Raimi had filmed “Drag Me to Hell,” a film most definitely in “Obsession's” DNA, from the Justin Long character's perspective. It is rather limiting, and a waste of Navarrette's committed, go-for-broke performance.
Even more dire, if you look underneath its grimy color palette and dank interiors, “Obsession” harbors toxic sexual politics, despite how merciless it is on Bear. (Johnston, who looks like a cross between Billy Crudup and “The Sopranos'” Robert Iler, is fine here, but he's saddled with a lousy script that does him no favors.) Barker's depiction of Bear and Ian as crybabies crippled by their hangups, and Nikki as a menace to be feared and resented, prevents viewers from seeing the unfurling terror from the point of view of the very character who could have balanced the scales. Compare this reductive portrayal to “It Follows,” a horror film that also centers on fraught relationships but benefits from a more egalitarian view of gender dynamics.
William Johnston as Bear, Megan Lawless as Sarah and Cooper Tomlinson as Ian in a scene from "Obsession." (Photo courtesy of Focus Features)
Barker, who hails from Alabama, became an internet sensation after he and Tomlinson formed the comedy skit duo That's a Bad Idea and began posting clips online. Their material is quite funny and very well acted, but some of those skits' undercurrent of malice wraps its tendrils around “Obsession” and devours it, taking a good cast down with it. Barker has churned out a putrid calling card film, a rotting carcass that's icky for all the wrong reasons. It reduces what could have been a potent deconstruction of codependency to a twisted punch line, and shows us who this rising star is on the inside. It's not a pretty picture.
"Backrooms": Whereas “Obsession” is internal and claustrophobic, this justly acclaimed debut feature from 20-year-old Kane Parsons is expansive and labyrinthine, inviting viewers to get lost in its vast nightmarish spaces. Reader, to say I was skeptical before taking the plunge would be putting it mildly, but this atmospheric sci-fi riff on Lewis Carroll's “Through the Looking-Glass,” adapted from Parsons' web series, won over this grumpy skeptic.
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark in a scene from "Backrooms." (Photo courtesy of A24)
This A24 release's curious and depressed Alice is Clark (a marvelous Chiwetel Ejiofor), the sour owner of Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire. The year is 1990, and Clark's discount furniture store is floundering, prompting the recently divorced, not-so-quietly desperate owner to vent his frustrations on his therapist. If Dr. Mary Kline (the luminous Renate Reinsve) looks disinterested in her patient's troubled psyche, it's partly because she's bored with him, but also because she's dealing with her own baggage, depicted in brief childhood flashbacks. The therapy session scenes, well-observed by screenwriter Will Soodik, underscore Parsons' investment in his main characters, and it isn't just fodder for the perils in store. This is a dark tale whipped up by a storyteller who's a good listener, and someone who clearly thinks it's cool to let Reinsve keep her Norwegian accent.
A confounded electrician Clark has hired to figure out why his electric bill is so damn high, and why the store lights occasionally flicker for no apparent reason, finds strangely installed breaker switches that shouldn't be there at all. It doesn't take long for Clark to discover there's a space on the wall in the basement of the store that's a portal to, well, another place. Sprawling rooms, empty save for some debris and discarded furniture, their canary yellow walls a mundane counterpoint to their eerie silence, disrupted by the noises in the film's creepy sound mix. The rooms give way to darkly lit hallways and other spaces, not all of them yellow, that become increasingly spookier. And Clark soon discovers he's not alone down there.
Renate Reinsve as Mary Kline in a scene from "Backrooms." (Photo courtesy of A24)
The narrative that follows isn't quite the game changer some would have you believe, nor is “Backrooms” quite as scary as Parsons likely intends it to be, but the young helmer's mise en scene, punctuated by moments of found-footage frenzy and showing off his fetish for 1990s artifacts, sucks you right in. Immersive in the most pervasive way, this is a slow burn that pays off. Despite the familiar nature of some of its imagery, there is zero doubt that Parsons has the formal chops to bring his unsettling vision to fruition.
Lukita Maxwell, left, and Finn Bennett in a scene from “Backrooms.” (Photo courtesy of A24)
Do these liminal spaces belong to another dimension? Does time work differently here, as the film occasionally hints? The answers may lie with the shadowy Async Research Institute and Phil (Mark Duplass), the scientist who has apparently been tasked with monitoring these endless spaces. But Parsons is shrewd enough to know that “Backrooms” would lose its power the second he starts spilling the beans about his universe's secrets. Thus, concrete answers remain tantalizingly out of reach.
The result is a feature-length tease, a psychologically inclined odyssey into those cavernous spaces inside Clark and Mary's minds, mirrored by its expertly crafted tableaux of despair and existential dread. It does stumble a bit in the last 10 minutes, with a resolution that's unable to match the magnetic pull of what has preceded it. But “Backrooms” is the real deal, a calling card film so accomplished that it makes you forget you are watching a calling card film. It heralds the arrival of a fresh new voice in horror, with the potential to go beyond genre exercises, much like David Cronenberg, David Lynch and John Carpenter did later in their careers. It's a very good film that whets your appetite for the even better films Parsons has percolating in his brain. I can't wait to see the tactile, evocative landscapes he conjures up next.
Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark in a scene from "Backrooms." (Photo courtesy of A24)
“Obsession” continues its reign of terror across South Florida screens, including at AMC Aventura 24, Silverspot Metsquare Cinema in downtown Miami, CMX Brickell City Centre, Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas Coconut Grove and Regal Dania Pointe.
“Backrooms” invites you to cross over, also in wide release, including at the Nite Owl Drive-in + Tropical Market and Dolby Cinema engagements at AMC Aventura, AMC Sunset Place 24 and AMC Pembroke Lakes 9.
