Obsession and Backrooms, seen a week apart

Some weeks the programming chooses your theme for you. I caught Obsession on a Monday and Backrooms the following Friday, with nothing in between but the usual life, and only afterward did I notice what they had in common: both are about coming apart. One takes your will. The other takes your bearings. They are not in the same sub-genre. They are barely in the same conversation. And watching them so close together turned out to be the most instructive thing I could have done, because the gap between them is the whole argument about where horror is going.

Obsession

Obsession is the older animal wearing newer skin. Its bones are the most classic ones we have, the watcher, the wanting, the slow narrowing of a life under someone else's attention, and for a while you think you know exactly the film you're in. You do not. The twist is not a reveal you can spoil; it is a turn in what the horror is about, and I won't take it from you. I'll only say it moves the violation inward, from the door to the self.

Which brings me to Nikki, and to the thing I have not been able to put down since.

The film's central horror is Nikki's loss of free will, and I want to be precise about why it lands as hard as it does, because "gross" is the easy word and the wrong one if you stop there. There is very little blood in Obsession. The revulsion is not in what you see done to a body; it is in watching a body do things while the person inside it watches too, helpless, present, aware. That is the gross factor. Not gore, but consent torn out at the root. The wrongness of a hand that is hers reaching for something she is screaming not to touch. We carry a deep and animal disgust at the idea of being driven from inside our own skin, and the film knows it, and it presses exactly there, with restraint, over and over, until the squirm stops being physical and becomes something closer to grief. Some viewers will call it hard to watch. They will be right. But it is never gross for its own sake. Every degradation of Nikki's will is in service of an argument about possession: who is allowed to want, and what is left of a person when the wanting is no longer theirs. That is the cut that means something. That is the one that scars.

And that is why I'd put money on this writer and director. Anyone can stage a shock. What is rare is the discipline to make discomfort signify, to build a gross-out that is also a thesis, and to trust an audience to sit in it. Obsession takes the oldest shape in the genre and finds a live nerve nobody had touched in quite that way. That is not a trick. That is a sensibility. Sensibilities have staying power. Tricks have a season.

Backrooms

Backrooms belongs to the new liminal school: the hum of fluorescent tubes, the damp carpet that goes on forever, the architecture that means nothing and therefore means everything. It is built out of the internet's favorite dread, the sense that behind the world there is another world, identical and wrong, and that you could fall into it through a seam you never see coming. As an exercise in pure atmosphere it is often remarkable. There are stretches where the film simply waits with you, and the waiting is unbearable in the best way. No monster yet. No exit. Just the buzzing and the yellow.

What I admire most is its nerve. It refuses the things a more cautious film would reach for: the reassuring cut to a control room, the character who explains the rules, the third-act lore dump that turns terror into trivia. It trusts the empty hallway to do the work, and a lot of the time the empty hallway delivers. This is a film pushing at the limits of how little a horror story can hold and still hold you.

But pushing at limits is also where it strains. The liminal mode has a structural weakness. It is so committed to disorientation that it can forget to give you anyone to be disoriented with. By the end I was unsettled but not wounded. I had been somewhere terrible and come back, and I could not have told you who I'd lost there, because I'm not sure the film ever let me meet them. It is a genuine experiment, and I'd rather watch an honest experiment than a competent retread. I just don't think it is the kind of thing that follows you home. It is the kind of thing you describe to a friend as interesting, which, said about horror, is its own quiet verdict.

The week, in sum

Both films are worth your evening, and I'd hand them to different people. Backrooms to the friend who wants the floor to drop out, who reads horror as a place to get lost. Obsession to the one who wants to be implicated, who reads it as a place to be changed.

But if you're asking which maker I expect to still be carving five years from now, it isn't close. Backrooms pushed a limit and showed us a room. Obsession took a room we'd all been in a hundred times, locked the door behind us, and made us watch ourselves do the unforgivable. Only one of those I'm still flinching from.

Deeper Cuts

Every review here ends in the stacks. These are related works that share a particular wound, for when you end the story and you are not ready to leave the dark yet.

If Obsession got its hooks in

Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levin. The quiet theft of a body's autonomy: a woman who senses something is wrong inside her own skin and is told, gently, by everyone she trusts, to smile and let the grown-ups manage it. Levin works in the same register Obsession does. The horror is procedural, social, polite, which is exactly what makes the violation unbearable. Classic shape, nerve touched in a new place. This is the lineage Nikki's story is writing itself into.

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The original of this specific wound. A will eroded from the outside, an inner self narrowing room by room until it dissolves into the pattern on the wall. You can read it in less time than the film runs, and it will leave you flinching the same way. If you want to know where the "driven from inside your own skin" nerve was first pressed, it was pressed here, more than a century ago, and it has not healed.

If Backrooms got its hooks in

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski. If the film gave you the hallway that should not exist, this is the house that grows one. Danielewski's labyrinth is bigger on the inside and colder the deeper you go, and the book's own body, footnotes folding into footnotes, text peeling off the page, makes you feel lost the way the film only wants to. The founding document of the liminal mode, and still the one nobody has bettered.

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. I complained up top that Backrooms never lets you meet anyone to be lost alongside. Annihilation is the liminal nightmare that fixes that. Area X is the same wrong-geography dread, the same world humming behind the world, but VanderMeer hands you a person to come apart inside it. Read it for the version of the experiment where the disorientation has somewhere human to land, and see whether you agree that the company makes it worse.