already missing writing essays thinking of starting a substack because god knows I love to yap about my interests and fod knows I love to be heavily educated on those topics
I started tutoring my little cousin on gr11 English in mid May (aka with one month of school left before exams) and this kid went from getting consistently around 50% on essays to 79% on his final essay, and I am SO proud of him. The plan is that we're gonna do a summer 'book club' with more practice essays to prep him for gr12, and with how fast he improved in just a month I'm really excited to see what he can do with more one-on-one instruction!
Another not-really-an-essay-more-of-a-review of a popular current horror film by an ascended YouTuber. A lot of comparison to Backrooms. There's a spoiler at the very end (in the final paragraph), but I warn you before I say it. Otherwise, you can read this even if you haven't seen Obsession or Backrooms.
Though I'm not familiar with director Curry Barker -- unlike Kane Parsons, the other YouTuber-turned-big-league whose wave-making horror film I saw last week -- I did know going in he was primarily a creator of sketch comedy. Despite the big YouTuber narrative going around after these films crushed The Baby Yoda Movie at the box office, I don't think it's meaningful to draw too much connective tissue between Barker and Parsons. They both came from YouTube, sure, and in that regard represent the internet as a space for indie creator potential, but they inhabit two totally different worlds, and their influences and approaches to storytelling could not be more different. So, too, are the relative strengths and weaknesses of their films.
Parsons brought to Backrooms a unique visual sense, generating iconic imagery, something both fresh and liable to linger in the collective public imagination. Of course. His YouTube output aren't really conventional films so much as showcases for unreal spaces he whipped up in Blender. The analog film grain draped over everything made it possible to present fantastic spaces as real, and to have the audience accept that; but there was no possible way to render humans anything except uncanny within that medium. This novel approach limited a lot of Parsons's development as a conventional storyteller, which shows in Backrooms with the clumsy, awkward way much of the character work is handled.
As a sketch comedy artist, Barker -- again, not actually familiar with his work, so sort of guessing here -- likely had much more skill in filming people, in writing dialogue that flows and builds and pays off, and he brings a very naturalistic, very organic feel to the character work, the exact thing missing from Backrooms. Conversations appear on screen already started and cut off before they end, there are a lot of lines that get sort of babbled and the film doesn't seem to care too much if you understand them, and it's fine if you don't because it's just chatter, it's just these characters being themselves. This naturalistic grounding makes the core horror element of the story, the very unnaturalistic and weird way Nikki acts, stick out exactly as intended. Though she eventually rises to histrionic extremes, even when relatively "normal" she is subtly offputting in comparison to the other characters, which of course enables the buildup to her big insane moments.
The downside is that the film is visually uninteresting. Backrooms lingers because of the way it looks; all of Obsession's memorable images are entirely of the actors, particularly Nikki and her odd movements and facial expressions. There's an almost complete blandness to the cinematography, everything is directly utilitarian, everything is about showing the information on screen clearly and nothing else. As a directorial effort, it's a lot less exciting than Backrooms, though not because Barker doesn't bring anything to the table, only because "good directing" is commonly associated with amazing imagery, not amazing management of actors or timing or pacing. Perhaps unintentionally, the blandness of the framing sometimes turns out to be an advantage: one of the film's biggest scares comes at the end of a long, simple, shot-reverse-shot conversation that lulls the audience into a false sense of security before the explosive payoff.
This film works better as a film than Backrooms does. It's more cohesive, its parts slot together much better, it doesn't have any false notes or missteps in key scenes. At the same time, it's much less groundbreaking. One can point to Kubrick and Lynch as ancient influences on Parsons, but the filmmakers Barker seems to imitate are much more contemporaneous, much more hot right now: Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger. Like Nope or Weapons, Obsession plays less like outright horror and more like a tense, dark horror-comedy, with as many laughs as it has scares. Both the laughs and scares are effective, the film is very fun, this isn't really a criticism (because Peele and Cregger have both made good films), but it does feel a lot more like this is simply a style that is popular right now and Barker keyed in on it, compared to Parsons who is bringing something fresh to the big screen. (Notable that Peele, like Barker, also started in sketch comedy.) And both Peele and Cregger have a more inventive visual eye than anything Barker shows in Obsession.
Nonetheless, I liked Obsession as much as I liked the best movies of those other directors. The visuals don't need to be flashy when the script works and the acting works. There's an aspect where the film doesn't seem interested in really interrogating its premise or its characters that could seem like a weakness but winds up meaning that the core emotional reactions aren't diluted or diminished. Bear never claims his wish wasn't actually granted, despite it becoming increasingly clear that when he wished for Nikki to love him Nikki was replaced with someone who is not Nikki; nor does he claim that what Nikki does isn't love, despite her doing many utterly pointless insane things that strain the believability that she is doing them "out of love." The stuff with the cat, for instance. Or the fucked up Hansel and Gretel incest rape story. Ultimately, those odd edges -- regardless of any interpretive work the viewer does upon them -- are resolved into the story going to the murderous heights it was obviously going to go to from frame 1. But a horror movie going where you expect it is often exactly what makes the horror work. As it does here.
Final note, small complaint (with spoilers, so stop reading if you haven't seen the film yet). The film should have ended with Ian never appearing again after wishing for the billion dollars. His random manifestation during the climax just to instantly die feels like lazy loose end tying (we HAVE a character, we MUST find a way to shed his blood). It makes the brutality of the whole story stronger if someone who didn't make a shitty wish walks out of it scot free.
