Thoughts on Obsession

   At the Village East Cinema in Manhattan, I saw Obsession, a 2025 supernatural psychological horror film written and directed by Curry Barker. The film stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a young man in his early twenties who works at a music store with his friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Sarah (Megan Lawless), and Nikki (Inde Navarette). Bear has a crush on Nikki, but is too nervous to confess his feelings to her, and Ian wants him to just get it over with and ask her, but not during their weekly bar trivia night, as to not spoil the fun. Bear comes home to find that his cat Sandy has died after accidentally consuming Bear's oxycodone pills. The next day, he shops for a gift for Nikki because she lost her crystal necklace, and he goes to a crystal shop, but instead of getting a crystal, he finds a novelty toy called "One Wish Willow," where the user can make one wish and break a plastic log in half. 

    Later that night, after bar trivia, Bear drives Nikki home, who is asking him if he likes Sarah, hinting that Sarah likes him. Bear completely whiffs the chance to confess his feelings, denying it when Nikki directly asks if he likes her, and as she is at the front door of his house, Bear in his car goes, "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the world," and snaps the willow log. Suddenly, Nikki stops before going into the house, then runs back to Bear in his car, and her behavior is erratic, switching between wanting him to come inside and then screaming, and then brushing off her own behavior as "weird." Bear is confused by Nikki's behavior, but comes in, and she keeps switching between trying to seduce him and having screaming fits. Bear doesn't understand any of this, and despite his own hesitations, he is flattered when Nikki is attracted to him, and against his better judgment, takes advantage of the situation, and they become a couple, with Nikki being overly possessive and jealous, manipulating him with her mood swings.

    This movie could be taken in different ways, how it is about an unhealthy, codependent relationship, where the monster that has taken over Nikki (it is implied that the real Nikki's consciousness is trapped in some kind of hell while the "loving girlfriend" persona takes over, with large, forced smiles that she holds for an uncomfortable amount of time) is the abuser, taking advantage of Bear's attraction to her by keeping him close to her and acting out in random violence of hurting herself or others. But that it can be seen as Bear having unwittingly taken away Nikki's free will, and rather than finding a way earlier to undo the spell or fix things, he lets it go on because he is happy that his crush is so into him and his fantasy has become a reality. Nikki may be the violent one causing mayhem, but Bear is the one who started this by being unable to face rejection or get out of his arrested development of acting like a teenager when he is past 21 years old.

    The movie is very effective with silhouettes and shadows, often hiding Nikki's face, or the brief times when the real Nikki will get control of her body to speak her own words or ask for help before the monster shuts her down again. 

    The two leads are fantastic in the film. Michael Johnston takes a character that can be sympathetic at first as a lovelorn loser who is pining after his crush, unaware that his other female friend is into him, and seems emotionally stunted and needs to grow up more. But then he becomes more selfish in taking advantage of the situation, and though his idle wish doesn't deserve such punishment, when the real Nikki reaches out to him for help, he still can only think of his own desires and not her feelings.

    Inde Navarette is in a star-making turn with this performance. Director Curry Barker had her study performances from Betty Gabriel in Get Out, Toni Collette in Hereditary, and Mia Goth in Pearl to develop the character of Nikki, and there are elements from those roles, like Betty Gabriel's performance as a woman whose body is possessed and whose soul is in the Sunken Place, only able to briefly reach out with her real life briefly, and Mia Goth's performance as a manic woman who tries to act "normal" but, in the finale, greets her horrified husband with an unsettling wide smile throughout the ending credits. Navarette switches between voices and personas quickly; saying "no" several times in one scene with different rising intonations; and her physical performance is raw and emotionally taxing. The film helps with showing Nikki before the transformation, as a regular person, making it more tragic when her body and mind is stolen by this demon because of Bear's unrequited crush.

    The movie is also darkly funny. It's meant to be grim, but there are several moments that are funny, like Nikki's intense frowny face; the reaction from a crystal shop employee saying that people come back to complain about the wishes they got and Bear not understanding the risk he's taking; the response from the One Wish Willow customer service representative that Bear calls to try to cancel the wish; and another attempt to fix the wish that goes horribly wrong. 

    I really liked this movie. I kept forgetting the characters were young adults because they acted like teenagers, and it did speak a lot to their own immaturity and limited life experiences when trying to handle adult situations. I'm glad this movie ended up becoming a sleeper hit, it's well-deserved.

Thoughts on Modern Girls

     On Tubi, I watched Modern Girls, a 1986 comedy film directed by Jerry Kramer, and co-written by Laurie Craig and Anita Rosenberg. The film stars Daphne Zuniga, Cynthia Gibb, and Virginia Madsen as three young women in their early twenties, living together as roommates in L.A. and working menial jobs. Margo (Zuniga) works in telemarketing, a boring job where the manager repeats "keep dialing"; Cece (Gibb) gets fired from her makeup job in a department store, and Kelly (Madsen) does very well working in a pet store and selling pets and pet supplies, mainly due to her looks. 

    They all work crappy jobs, but the highlight of their life is going out to clubs at night, where, due to their "pretty privilege," they can work connections to skip lines and get into clubs for free, and never have to pay for their own drinks, always flirting with guys to get drinks out of them.

    When Kelly takes Margo's car to see a DJ ex she's re-connected with, Margo and Cece are left stuck at home, until Kelly's blind date Clifford (Clayton Rohner) shows up. The girls are hesitant to tell him that Kelly went out with another guy, but take advantage of him to get him to drive them out to the club to "find Kelly," seeing him more as a dork and not their usual type. 

    At the club, Clifford quickly finds out that Kelly ditched him for the DJ, and only sticks around in the club because he's the other girls' ride home. Margo and Cece do their act to get free drinks, and dance around, while feeling bad about how they treated Clifford and including him more as part of their group, getting him a free drink too.

    The story goes into a "one crazy night" plot, as the girls and Clifford chase Kelly around various clubs/bars in L.A. as she deals with rejection by the DJ by getting intoxicated, taking drugs, rolling around on a billiard table (in a fun display of physical comedic acting by Madsen), and twice having to be rescued from near-rape by her friends due to her carelessness and using her looks to charm random men.

    Cece is enamored with a rock star, Bruno X (also played by Rohner), who she meets in a club and instantly falls for her, but says he's leaving for Rio in the morning, then they get separated and Cece is searching for him all over. In one scene that makes sense with the same actor in both roles, the group show up at an outdoor video shoot to look for Bruno, only for the director to see that Clifford resembles him and uses him as a body double in a scene with four women dressed in black leather dancing around him, and Clifford has to improvise and just go with it.

    I really enjoyed this movie. It's very much set in a 1980s club culture with outlandish outfits, a killer pop/dance soundtrack, very bright with neon colors in nighttime scenes, and an apartment with a fantastic pop art look (including the movie poster with a comic, Roy Lichtenstein look to it).

    I really liked how this film largely centered around the women, and even if they start out taking advantage of men to get free things and coast on their looks, they're not dumb bimbo stereotypes. They all work crappy day jobs, and this is their release to party at night and have fun. And even if they are chasing men through various clubs, they still value their friendships above any dates or boyfriends, and are always looking out for each other. 

    I liked that Clifford starts out being rightfully annoyed at being taken advantage of, but he's not a jerk. He never leaves the women to be stranded anywhere, he helps rescue Kelly from sexual assault, and he has fun being mistaken for Bruno X and being in the video for a second, switching from his more conservative appearance to having his hair mussed up and wearing a long black duster coat that looks great on him.

    Virginia Madsen had this Marilyn Monroe-like pink dress on with a silk scarf around her neck that looked really pretty, and did make her stand out as the most "classically" pretty of the women, though Cynthia Gibb was really cute and Daphne Zuniga had a rugged sexiness to her. They're all a lot of fun to watch in this movie, especially early on in their careers.

Thoughts on The Final Girls

    On Tubi, I watched The Final Girls, a 2015 horror comedy directed by Thomas Strauss-Schulson and co-written by M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. The movie stars Taissa Farmiga as Max, a teen girl whose mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) is an actress that is best known for her "scream queen" role in a 1986 slasher film called Camp Bloodbath. In the present day of the 2010s, she only has a handful of screen credits, is broke, and is still typecast from her horror role and unable to be cast in other projects. On the way home from a film audition, the two get into a car accident and Amanda is killed.

    Three years later, Max, an orphan living with her aunt, is hanging out with her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat) and Chris (Alexander Ludwig), when Gertie's stepbrother Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), a horror film nerd, shows up and tells them that Camp Bloodbath 1 and 2 are showing at the local theater, and wants Max to make an appearance there to talk about her mother at a Q&A afterwards. Max is hesitant, not wanting to watch her mother die on screen or talk about a movie that her mother was sick of being associated with. But they go to the theater, where Chris' ex-girlfriend and Max' former best friend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) shows up, trying to woo Chris back. During the movie, the theater is accidentally set ablaze by a stray cigarette and a rolling bottle of liquor on the floor, and the group of friends can only escape through cutting a hole in the movie screen, trying to find an exit, but end up in the movie itself.

    The group are in the woods, and a van comes by with two of the Camp Bloodbath characters, Tina (Angela Timbur), a ditzy "slut" archetype, and Kurt (Adam Devine), a jockbro stereotype frequently making sexual comments about women. The group initially turn down the ride to the summer camp, but a title card reads "92 minutes later" (the runtime of both the fictional movie and this real movie), the van comes back again with Tina and Kurt, saying their same lines, NPC-style, and again 92 minutes later. The group realizes they will be in a time loop if they don't get in the van and continue the plot, so they pretend to be new camp counselors and go to the camp, where Max meets Nancy (Akerman), and while she knows it's not really her mother, she wants to save Nancy from dying in the movie, transferring her feelings about wanting to save her real mother from death. 

    The group initially lets two murders happen without interference, but when their interference causes characters to die out of order, or realizing that not being movie characters doesn't make them immune, more calamity happens, as the group realizes they are not going to survive just following the original movie's plot, and have to be more creative, as well as interacting with the movie characters who don't know that they aren't real people.

    I really enjoyed this movie a lot. I liked the gags like when Nancy is telling the origin story of the slasher killer, and gray matter starts dripping from the roof and wraps up the group and transports them to the black-and-white 1950s flashback of the killer's story as Nancy is narrating, having to step over large subtitles reading "Summer 1957" in block letters. Or when Kurt gets called out by Chris for his homophobia, hearing Chris has two gay dads, and mockingly goes, "Oh, do they go to discos and have sex with each other?" before dropping the derisive tone and adding, "Actually, that does sound kind of cool." Devine is really good in this movie, in playing the 80s horny guy stereotype who constantly objectifies women with crass language and obviously mocking him.

    The heart of the film is with Max and Nancy/Amanda, and Taissa Farmiga and Malin Akerman are excellent in this film. Max is still just a kid, and even if Farmiga was about 20 when she was in the film, she brings a lot of young vulnerability to this role, as a girl who lost her mother too soon, and is trying to save a version of her to bring her back. And Akerman is so warm and kind as Nancy, who initially starts in the fictional film as "I'm just a shy girl who's a virgin and wants to have sex with this cool guy" before getting killed, and as Nancy is further developed as a person, she talks about wanting to go to college and do more with her life and not be so shy. Even if Max can't let on to Nancy that she sees her as her mother, Nancy does take more of a big sister/mothering role to Max, caring about her, and the finale with them and the use of "Bette Davis Eyes," the song playing in the car before the accident, is incredibly moving and stunning, with a synth score and gorgeous colors.

    The film was co-written by Joshua John Miller, a former child actor who was in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Near Dark, River's Edge, and Teen Witch. His father, Jason Miller, played the priest in The Exorcist, and Miller said the film was partially inspired by that experience, saying ""I grew up watching my dad in The Exorcist, and there's something haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film. But it's something that also becomes iconic, and we tried to deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance, but your second chance was inside of a movie?" It works really well in the film, as Max is struggling with her grief and seeing a version of her mother and wanting to save her, even when knowing that Nancy isn't real.

    I had heard that this film was really good, and I'm glad I caught it on Tubi, I found it much more moving, as well as funnier, than I expected.

Thoughts on Backrooms

    At the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan, I went with a friend to see Backrooms, a 2026 sci-fi psychological horror film directed by Kane Parsons, based on his webseries and inspired by the Backrooms creepypasta, and written by Will Soodik. 

    The Backrooms creepypasta has a lot of Internet lore to it, but started with an anonymous photo taken in 2002 posted on 4chan in 2019 of a large, empty room with an unsettling yellow appearance, taken at an empty furniture store in Wisconsin. The photo led to people expanding on the concept of liminal spaces, with interconnected Backrooms and dangerous creatures that roam the spaces. The Backrooms has inspired indie video games and short films, as well as the "innies" world of Severance and in American Horror Stories. 

    Kane Parsons, then 16, uploaded a short horror film in 2022 titled The Backrooms (Found Footage) under the name Kane Pixels, presented as a VHS tape by a filmmaker in 1990 who goes through the Backrooms and is pursued by a monster. The short film was a great success, leading to a series of short films with more backstories added to it, and Parsons got a deal with A24 to develop a mainstream feature length film of it.

    The film takes place in 1990, and starts with a VHS tape shot by researcher Naren Wayne (Avan Jogia) going through the Backrooms, where he gets separated from his group and is chased and attacked by an unknown monster. The story continues with two main characters: furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is struggling with alcoholism and going through a divorce, and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who promotes her self-help audio tapes in local commercials (as does in Clark promoting his furniture store) and who is working through her own trauma from having grown up with a mentally ill, agoraphobic mother. She has him do a role-play exercise with her playing his wife, which leads to him blowing up at her in abusive rants about paying for everything and supporting her while she's a law student, revealing a lot of pent-up anger and nastiness in Clark.

    Clark, having been kicked out of his house by his wife, has taken up residence in the store, and through electrical outages and flickering lights, discovers an invisible portal through the wall of the store's basement and walks through the wall into the Backrooms, a labyrinthine expanse of dull yellow rooms, with narrow pathways leading to small doors or windows, with piled-up furniture, mysterious voices heard from recordings, and the growling sounds of a creature in the distance. Clark escapes the creature and returns back to the store, but when he tells Mary about it, she thinks he is having delusions from alcohol withdrawal and is skeptical and patronizing towards him. 

    Clark brings along two young people, the assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him film the Backrooms as proof of his claims, where the VHS video is more like Kane Parsons' original web series. When calamity happens and Clark isn't returning for more therapy appointments, Mary goes to the furniture store and discovers the Backrooms for herself.

    I found this movie really interesting. I didn't know anything about the Backrooms, so a lot of the lore I had to catch up on before seeing the movie, and I liked the set design of the maze of rooms, as well as the sound design, especially when the monster is eventually revealed, with fantastic practical effects that were portrayed by a real person (actor and former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi), but with an uncomfortable puppetry movement. I liked how weird and unsettling it felt, and I liked the found footage style of the VHS camcorder videos, even if it followed found footage cliches of cutting off just before the big bad is seen.

    I did like how the Backrooms changed based on a person's memories and traumas, and being a misremembered copy of reality. A line that is repeated a couple of times is when Clark says, then later Mary, that to describe the Backrooms to someone is like trying to describe a dog to someone who has never seen one before, and getting some details right, but still making it sound confusing.

    Chiwetel Ejiofor is fantastic in this film, playing a guy with just barely constrained rage bubbling under him, and he did some great forehead acting in one scene, seeing his forehead scrunch up as he emoted. Renate Reinsve was really good in playing someone trying to play the role of the understanding, calm therapist while wrestling with her own childhood trauma and repressed issues.

    I especially liked the in-movie commercials where Clark is dressed up as the pirate mascot of his store, with a peg leg strapped to his leg while trying to hobble on it, and a fake parrot on his shoulder, and promoting the furniture store; and Mary in her commercials for her New Age-like therapy audio tapes promising to "open the windows" to further enlightenment and understanding.

    It was good going into this movie cold, as there were some reveals that were in the web series with the backstory of the Backrooms but that I didn't know, and Mark Duplass in a bureaucratic role that feels akin to Paul Reiser's role in Aliens made me hate him a lot, and he's a director/actor who seems like a nice guy, but who I've never liked as an actor, so it was a funny moment of feeling vindicated in not liking him when he popped up.

    I'm happy that my friend and I saw this together, and that I could catch up to the Internet lore to these liminal spaces.