INDE NAVARETTE AND MICHAEL JOHNSON IN OBSESSION

CURRY BARKER: OBSESSION (2025) AND KANE PARKINS: BACKROOMS (2026)

Be careful what you wish for, and what you look for

After breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price. And: on another screen, after a therapist's patient disappears into a dimension beyond reality, she must venture into the unknown to save him.

And then we must suffer for an hour and a half (thank God not longer), for this (Obsession) is a horror movie, a horror story of love, a tale of love torment. In Backrooms we must suffer for a while longer (its runtime is just short of two hours), but it is a better movie. It is a horror movie too, but it avoids the failing of Obsession, which is to be both cliched and unfocused.

Bear (Michael Johnson) desires Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for a little while, wanting them to be stop being work chums, and that's normal. Then he gets hold of the "One Wish" thingy and makes that old mistake of an ill-designed wish. He turns Nikki into a monster. Her, well, obsession with Bear, a ferocious jealousy, puts them both in danger. He can never enjoy their love. This is a monotonous film, though it can still be absorbing.

It reads like a tale of the 1001 Nights in which the people are transformed into turn-of-the millennium Americans who stumble and stammer, interrupt each other, and drop endless F-bombs. Their clumsy, unattractive behavior is unbecoming of characters so intense of will and pure of heart.

The other new horror movie, Backrooms, is of a quite different, Kafkaesque, abstract kind that blends magic and modern lostness. It's a bit of an Escher-esque puzzle nightmare too. In Backrooms, Clark (a totally committed Chiwetel Ejiofor) runs a big furniture showroom that begins to have some problems - really bad ones. For one thing, its electrical system seems to be out of whack. The lights have a life of their own. So, of course, does the whole place.

The flashing lights turn out to be a sign of a more widely diffused disorder. Many of the big store's spaces, its walls in particular, turn out to be frangible. Clark can push through the plaster, then walk through, and those lead to other walls beyond. We have seen things like this happen on the screen in such films as Cube (1997), The Truman Show (1998), Dave Made a Maze (2017) or even Kubrick's 1980 The Shining (and this spring a couple of people got lost in the endless, Möbius strip subway corridors of the Japanese film Exit 8). Backrooms however made me think of Lewis Carroll, but for how different it is. Where Clark is going is into his own kind of Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but his world is sweaty and tense, without the wonderment and fantasy and humor of those classic books. Can we enter into another world nowadays without its becoming an existentialist Huis Clos (No Exit) nightmare?

Nonetheless Backrooms, the better and, strangely, the more enjoyable of these two films, has the energy of its protagonist's discontentment and anger, along with the chastening irony and ugliness of everyday American life. You wind up in a big room in non-space, and all it has is a bunch of furniture clumped up together in the middle. The movie also has Renate Reinsve of Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World playing Dr. Mary Kline, the therapist who ventures into the terrifying otherworldly dimension of Clark's nightmare space to save her missing patient, as well as the Mark Duplass, who made a series of charming little indie films in the early 2000s, as Phil, a mysterious scientist and researcher working for Async, the organization that discovers and is monitoring the liminal maze into which the story leads us.

I can see why Clark got so wound up in the obsessive nightmare of his private showroom Esher-world that he drew his shrink into it. But I couldn't help wishing, with all their awkward starts and stops, that Bear didn't just give up the whole idea of pursuing or being pursued by Nikki and, when her obsession could not be broken and became more and more threatening and crazy, didn't just get the hell out of town. But sometimes things just turn into a horror movie.

These two, Obsession and Backrooms, are big surprise summer box office hits now (like $100 million box office), both of them produced by first-timer twenty-somethings who turned low-budget horror films into huge successes, showing the power of fresh storytelling and built-in online audiences. The Oscar Expert twins have been taking Obsession seriously as a future awards contender.

Obsession, 108 mins., premiered at TIFF Sept. 6, 2025, showing also at Moscow, Chicago, and many US festivals, opening in theaters May 15, 2026. Metacritic rating: 77%.
Backrooms, 110 mins., opened May 29, 2026. Metacritic rating: 77%.


CHIWETEL EJIOFOR INBACKROOMS

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