This week, the independently produced horror movie Obsession, which cost either $750,000 or $15m depending on whether you count its actual budget or acquisition cost for its studio, officially passed the latest Star Wars movie at the box office (the film has so far made over $165m in the US alone).
It’s not a coincidence that this happened on a weekday. Obsession’s box office power lies not just in its astonishing weekend-to-weekend strength (including the virtually unheard-of trajectory of increasing grosses on its second and third weekends) but in its powerhouse weekday grosses. This past week, as it approached the one-month mark in theaters, it was averaging over $4m on its weekdays. At the same point in the run of Avengers: Endgame, that movie – the biggest summer blockbuster of modern times – was pulling in half as much.
When all is said and done, Obsession will (probably) not make as much as Avengers: Endgame, though its return on investment is far more astronomical. But this intimate and occasionally gruesome horror movie about a meek twentysomething named Bear (Michael Johnston) who wishes for the devotion of his cool-girl crush Nikki (breakout performer Inde Navarrette) only to accidentally curse her with a form of unnerving possession, has the kind of cultural cachet needed to break through in a post-pandemic, post-superhero moviegoing landscape.
I saw this first-hand venturing out to see the movie a second time with a paying crowd on Thursday. Normally at a Times Square multiplex in Manhattan, the big Thursday-night draw would be a previewing blockbuster officially opening on Friday, like Steven Spielberg’s new film Disclosure Day; for a movie that’s already been out for a week or more, Thursday is typically its lowest-grossing day of the week. But the 300-seat auditorium used for a 7.30pm showing of Obsession was nearly full, just as similar shows across the city had been all week.
As a critic, I first saw Obsession in a small screening room, and though its creepiness, shocks, and mordant laughs played fine to an audience of a dozen or so journalists – I gave it a positive pre-release notice – the full audience experience felt different. Waves of laughter and murmurs of discomfort crested through the crowd, and though the movie’s particularly shadowy lighting made it difficult to see, I did catch plenty of viewers with their hands on their faces, aghast as Bear’s wish (and his passivity) causes Nikki (or, more accurately, her puppeted body) to become increasingly unhinged. Multiple pairs, seemingly couples, covered each other’s eyes in affectionate mutual quasi-agony. When the movie reached its grim-but-fair conclusion and rolled its credits, chatter quickly rose, overtaking the usual quiet shuffling toward the exit.
Outside the auditorium, I spoke with a few groups about their decision to come out on a Thursday night, temporarily aligning them more with all-hours obsessives like me rather than the typical moviegoer who might attend one every few months, if that. Some of them were indeed cinephiles, including a young woman who had already seen the film and organized a group of uninitiated friends to come check it out. As such, the group framed the specific weeknight outing as more of a convenience, an offshoot of trying to find a time that worked for everyone. That itself seems telling about the force of the film’s buzz: this was enough of an event to coordinate the schedules of half a dozen presumably busy twentysomethings. Clearly this wasn’t a normal occurrence; one of those friends hadn’t seen a movie in theaters since last year’s A24 comedy Friendship.
So what motivated everyone to make this specific trip happen, uniting AMC A-listers with once-a-year types? Almost everyone cited buzz about the film, both from real-life friends and online discourse. One guy specifically pointed to news about the movie delaying its streaming premiere indefinitely creating the impetus to not just wait for home viewing. At the same time, other forms of home viewing seemed to goose interest, too, as others mentioned TikTok clips, specifically of a scene where Nikki reacts to Bear lightly pressing her on a personal question during a date with an escalating, panicked “no, no, no, no, NO, NO, NOOO” (in a scene that has reportedly led fans to swarm the real location to recreate).
Another group of young women described their own range of reactions to Nikki’s wish-forced behavior: “At least I’ll never be that crazy,” followed by “am I that crazy?” and then “I feel like I’ve been that crazy.” Obviously part of the movie’s appeal is the social lens of watching this woman fly off the handle, though reactions like these, framing it as a degree of craziness, raise the question of whether viewers really think of Nikki as a prisoner within her own body, possessed by a force attempting to inhabit a devoted human relationship, or simply performing an outsized version of typical relationship possessiveness. That queasy mix of relatability and potential caricature probably only helps the movie transcend its horror roots and become more of a social conversation piece. One woman had heard certain details about the film beforehand – not necessarily spoilers, she clarified, but discussion points, especially about Bear and how sympathetic he was intended to be in the film. Watching the movie, she did notice laughter that she thought flirted with feeling inappropriate, like certain moments were landing more like dark comedy than they should have.
I don’t disagree; Obsession is clearly intended to have blackly funny moments, but a second viewing did underline just how same-y some of its scenes are in walking that line between abject horror and cruel-fate humor, as Bear reacts with the same frozen-body, stammering-language inability to control what he’s conjured. Yet in watching and talking to audience members, it became clearer how a relatively straightforward monkey’s-paw story, even one that flirts with repetition, contains enough grabby ambiguity to make the movie a decide-for-yourself must-see. Writer-director Curry Barker has even spoken about mixing different takes in an early, pre-wish scene, to intentionally muddy the question of whether Nikki returned Bear’s feelings before she loses control of her faculties.
Obsession’s success probably also speaks to the lack of movies attempting to replicate some form of the twentysomething experience – this was a young-skewing crowd even by Times Square standards – even in a heightened way. Consider that Obsession’s fellow surprise smash Backrooms, which has followed a more typical big-opening-big-drop trajectory, was directed by a 20-year-old, fueled by a highly online phenomenon, and yet is still about characters closer to middle age. Hollywood is forever chasing crowd-pleasing feel-great all-demographic experiences, and movies like Project Hail Mary prove that this can still be a lucrative market. But a movie like Obsession creates a rarer impulse: to go and watch even if it makes you want to look away.
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