tnrkitect - Musings of an Unconventional Mind

I have watched what feels like an absurd number of movies recently and am trying to work through the backlog. Can I just say I've seen a whole string of movies recently that were just... good? (With one exception.) None I loved with my whole heart, but all of them ambitious with style and a clear vision. Feels like we're in some kind of golden age rn. Obsession, Saccharine, Backrooms, I Love Boosters, Is God Is all came out within the past three weeks.

Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not making original movies anymore.

Obsession (2026). An awkward young man wishes his crush would love him more than anyone in the world, gets his wish, and wishes he hadn’t.

AKA the (first?) huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Even if you’re not that into horror, you might’ve heard that Obsession’s box office in its second weekend was 30% higher than its first weekend, which basically does not happen outside the Christmas holidays when release dates are weird. It cost less than $1M to make, and it’s going to clear easily $100M in ticket sales; as I’m typing this, just two weeks in, it’s at over $95M, and its domestic daily receipts are ahead of the Mandalorian and Grogu movie that’s only been out for a week (although tbf I think that’s probably as much a commentary on that movie as on Obsession).

Anyway! Having gotten that out of the way: the movie. I was actually not that excited to see it, despite the hype, because the premise seemed so familiar. Yeah, yeah, monkey’s paw, love wish/potion/whatever, we know this story. Buffy the Vampire Story had an episode on this in, what, 1998? But the key is in the execution. This is one of those movies where everything feels so thought out and deliberate, and all the writing is so tight. In so many ways, both in execution and themes, it feels like a different iteration of last year’s Companion, which I loved.

I’ve heard a lot about how scary Obsession is, and I guess my scareometer is broken, because I didn’t think it was. However, it’s very tense, especially starting about a half hour in, and things get progressively more fucked up as we go. It’s also not all that gory overall, but the one scene where it is, oh shit it goes hard.

The movie hinges almost entirely on Michael Johnstone as dweeby Bear and Inde Navarette as cool girl Nikki, and they are both fantastic. Navarette in particular plays arguably three different characters, and between the two actors they do such a good job of making every scene SO uncomfortable.

( spoilers )

And it’s funny! Director and writer Curry Barker does sketch comedy on Youtube, and he layers in just the right amount of funny-awkward and funny-horrible moments. I laughe a lot in the theater, even though this is by no means a comedy.

I walked out of the theater not sure whether I’d enjoyed the experience, but the more I’ve thought about it and discussed it with other people, the more it’s grown on me. I might even go see it again while it’s in theaters.

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Corporate Retreat (2026). The young execs of a tech company go on a corporate retreat, which turns out to be an exercise in vengeful sadism by the founder they pushed out of the company.

So this is the exception to that string of wins I mentioned above. It’s worst movie I've seen so far this year, old or new, and it's not close. Alan Ruck plays the founder, and he is entertaining as the sadistic yet pompous self-styled guru of enlightenment. Unfortunately, he feels like he's been airlifted in from some other movie that has a sense of humor, because nothing else in this movie is funny or even apparently trying to be. I think the execs are supposedly to be hateable, but they're such nonentities that I can't even tell them apart, much less muster a feeling about them. I was dismayed when the shady HR gal died fairly early on, because she was the only one who seemed to have attained two whole dimensions, and I genuinely couldn't imagine who the rest of the movie was going to be about. It took probably another half an hour for me to identify the final girl, which is wild in a movie like this. (In fairness, I did miss the first five minutes, so maybe that would have made it clear up front.)

Also, like. Why is everyone currently in this tech company under the age of 35, if the founder was in his 60s? How does that even happen?

Meanwhile the horror parts, where Ruck's character goads the characters to ever greater feats of self-mutilation on threat of death, is just kind of tedious? At one point we spend ten solid minutes watching a series of characters dig one of their eyeballs out with a spoon. One of them failed to do so, but that still leaves four separate eyeballs being removed in the same way! Ten minutes! And the effects were just lol. At one point, a bunch of characters were giving each other injections of a poison antidote, and the injections looked so fake I laughed out loud in the theater.

The one bright spot was the founder’s two henchwomen, who stalk around in nice skirt suits with automatic rifles. I’d forgotten Ruck was going to be in the movie, so I was bummed when he showed up, because honestly I’d rather the movie have been some scheme of theirs.