‘Obsession’

With a reputed budget of $750,000, Obsession has already taken $374 million at the box office. 2026 has seen two films – Obsession and Backrooms – provide an antidote to mainstream Hollywood’s big budget superhero ‘IP’ movies. Years of Disco eventually produced the backlash of Punk. Could years of the special effects dominated superhero movie produce a return to the low-budget indie flick? Maybe. Maybe not.

Obsession is a contemporary horror. It’s Eraserhead meets The Shining meets The Exorcist, with cringe-horror moments and the magical premise of Big. Stylistically it’s dark, literally a dark aesthetic of shadows and silhouettes often with a deep focus.

When the weak protagonist makes a wish for his crush to love him more than anyone else in the world, her love becomes extreme, toxic, and violent. She turns into a deranged psychopath. The moral of the story is clear – be careful what you wish for.

The film moves through a series of tonally different modes. Normality mode (indie movie romcom), creepy mode (psychological horror), and violent confrontation mode (shock horror). Each mode is spliced together with a deliberately jarring jump-cut. Each one also provides a heightening of the tension followed by a reset at the start of the next section – the protagonist forgives his girlfriend and they makeup. It’s a partial reversion to normality.

In the first of these mode switches, the protagonist goes from almost instant infatuation with his crush (indie movie romcom mode) to immediately backing off from her (psychological horror mode). This poses questions about believability, but every time you question the story, the pace pushes ahead, producing some genuinely scary, shock horror frights.