Before you know something is wrong with Nikki in “Obsession,” you feel it in the music.
Seconds after her aspirant boyfriend, Bear, snaps the One Wish Willow to make her fall in love with him, she walks back out of her house, a little sheepish and newly smitten. But the groaning synthesizer underneath her bashful smile tells you something is off — a crystalline tone now distended, unnerving.
“From that point on, there’s a tinge of darkness,” composer Rock Burwell said of that signal moment in “Obsession.” “It was a complex scene to figure out, because it’s such an intimate moment. How can we kind of get this feeling that’s disorienting, weirdly playful, but also twisted and concerning? It’s the personification of that wish manifesting in real time, and the viewer becoming aware that something is awry.”
That song, “R U OK” is a standout moment in Burwell’s score for “Obsession,” the breakout horror hit of the summer. The film shot Curry Barker onto the A-list of new directing talent and made a star of Inde Navarrette and her virtuosically unhinged performance as Nikki.
As “Obsession” hits streaming after two months of dominating theaters, the film is getting preemptive Oscar buzz, too. Part of that attention is aimed at Burwell’s score, a masterpiece of electronic minimalism in which pitch bends and hard clashes create the dread and whiplash that make the film so tense.
As artificial intelligence and corporate consolidation threaten film and TV budgets and opportunities for emerging artists, Burwell’s work on “Obsession” is a potent argument for reinvesting in young, edgy talent.
“I’d be lying if there wasn’t a bit of impostor syndrome that comes with doing your first feature and it’s so well-received,” Burwell said. “But I really hope that there will always be a place for that person in the industry, where people resonate with the enthusiasm and passion of original ideas. I really, really hope that never dies.”
Burwell — a tall, measured 31-year-old whose sharp cheekbones and gently ringleted hair could have led him in front of the camera instead — spent his early composing years with a musicians’ collective in his native New Hampshire. On the patio of Lawless Brewing in North Hollywood, not far from his home in the Valley, where he still lives post-“Obsession,” he recalled moving to L.A. in 2019 with a rapper friend and ferociously networking on no-budget projects in the indie music scene.
He entered Barker’s orbit in 2024 when the director’s comedy team, That’s a Bad Idea, was looking for original music and a mutual friend hit up a producer Burwell collaborated with.
“They came to my spot and we produced a comedy song, like a Lonely Island type of thing, and they shot a music video to it,” Burwell recalled. “It was during those weeks that the rumblings of ‘Obsession’ began, and Curry got it greenlit. We liked working together, and he saw that we had a similar wavelength, and he just kind of tossed it up, like, ‘Hey, how would you feel about scoring a feature?’”
“It’s an insane thing to wrap my head around, to even hear any part of the film be possibly considered for any sort of Oscar looks,” Burwell said. At first, “it was like, ’Am I the guy for this job?’”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
That film would go on to gross more than $400 million on a budget of less than $1 million. Like Zach Cregger with “Weapons” or Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms,” Barker built on the run-and-gun inventiveness of the sketch-group internet scene to helm a culture-shifting horror hit on a minuscule budget. Now Burwell has emerged as the spine-tingling Angelo Badalamenti to Barker’s David Lynch, or maybe a synth-patching Bernard Herrmann to Barker’s Alfred Hitchcock.
The “Obsession” score is an ingenious showcase of decay and reinvention, taking day-spa keyboard swells and wringing them out beyond recognition. “You Wished for This” careens from ponderous ambience to shredded digital noise; The two parts of “Love is in the Air” recasts the yearning of a classic Hollywood love theme into a blood-soaked rictus grin.
“I’ll never forget the first time I binge-watched ‘Twin Peaks,’ and how it made me feel,” Burwell said. “There was this uncanny valley where it’s so beautiful, but it’s so raw and visceral and dark at the same time. I think that’s kind of the key to my heart. Curry looked at this film as a romance film disguised as a horror film, to explore these more complex emotions rather than just drilling in on the horror. I think allowing these things to develop, and then twist them, explore the darkness within them, was what was successful.”
The “Obsession” score has already blown through a couple vinyl pressings, proving that young fans want to revisit the music on its own terms. “That’s the most surprising and shocking part to me,” Burwell said. ”The entire time working on the film, I was only looking at how the music can serve each scene. But I’ve had people messaging me saying, ‘I haven’t had a chance to see the movie yet, but I can’t stop listening to the soundtrack,’ which is really cool.”
Burwell’s life may change again if the film keeps up its Oscar buzz. “Sinners” and “Weapons” proved ambitious horror can indeed sway the Academy. A microbudget director saving the summer box office with a thoughtfully gruesome movie about naivety, misogyny and consequences is an inspiring Oscars meta-narrative. Burwell’s music would be an outsider pick for a score award, but a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-caliber choice to win.
“It’s an insane thing to wrap my head around, to even hear any part of the film be possibly considered for any sort of Oscar looks,” Burwell said. At first, “it was like, ’Am I the guy for this job?’ But Curry believed in me, and ultimately, I believed in myself, and it’s been a push and pull battle of owning it and feeling really proud, and then second-guessing the human element of seeing something you worked on at such a large scale.”
Burwell is slated to compose for Barker’s follow-up, “Anything but Ghosts,” about a pair of cynical paranormal investigators who encounter the real thing. He said it’s too early to know if he’ll be tapped for Barker’s reimagining of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” for A24, but he has his fingers crossed. He’d love to write for a full orchestra someday — “That sounds so cool. I don’t want to cosplay as a classical composer, but I’d love to get to a point where I feel like I can write something that really can stand on some ground in that field.”
In the meantime, he’s dropped a few singles from his shoegazey solo side project, Museum Complex, that hint at how his score work might translate in a wall-of-distortion band setting. He may have pop opportunities, too. Burwell said he’s flattered by recent online praise from the likes of Ethel Cain, Flying Lotus and Kid Cudi for his score. “I’ve looked up to Kid Cudi for decades, and to see the ‘Obsession’ cast out raging with him on stage, and [him] having such high praise for the film, it’s crazy to know he’s heard my music,” he said.
As Hollywood frantically tries to replicate the success of “Obsession,” other aspirant directors and musicians are trying to reverse engineer the right-place, right-time magic. There isn’t a set path to a hit like “Obsession,” Burwell said, beyond doing the work and making ambitious friends. Even as culture permeates up from the internet, being around the corner is important.
“People have asked me what’s a piece of advice you could give to aspiring composers or musicians. It’s the proximity effect of being close to people working on things,” Burwell said. “Even though we live in a modern age where anyone can work on anything remotely, it’s still the fact that Curry and I lived five minutes away from each other, and we can meet up in person and get a true feel for each other, that meant more than anything else.”
The eerie ambient music that drives “Obsession” — so artfully serrated and delicately mangled by Burwell — emerged from a counterintuitive creative nuance that AI could never capture. If there are any lessons for Hollywood to learn from “Obsession,” it’s to not take shortcuts to the prize you’re longing for.
“If we’re in a postapocalyptic landscape, art is going to be one of the things that still connects people,” Burwell said. “You never quite know how things might take shape if you don’t really have a plan B, and just look ahead and stay passionate. You never know what call you might get, or who you might get connected to that could change your life.”
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