Big Screen Scares: OBSESSION and BACKROOMS

The YouTubers have arrived. We’ve occasionally had filmmakers emerge from amateur efforts on that site, for better (the Filipou brothers’ scary Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are massive leaps beyond their channel’s horror shorts) and or worse (Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is a dull, cliched, irritating horror film). Now 2026 seems to be doing its best to say there’s perhaps more promise to be plucked from those ranks of creators, like television and music videos and theater before it. Funny that so far they’re all horror, which has often been a calling card for new indie voices. It’s been mere months since play-through poster Markiplier’s independent adaptation of the video game Iron Lung turned a big profit in theaters. I found the movie a bit repetitive and disorienting, but was quite impressed by how it was effective on its own terms. He played to his strengths making a one-location movie in which he essentially sits at the controls and plays the game. Now we have two more YouTuber film debuts: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms. Judging them on formal control and narrative ambition, it’s clear that they could be two big new talents. 

Barker’s Obsession has a simple premise: what if there was a magic wand that gave you one wish? He has this device fall into the hands of a young man (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on a girl (Inde Navarrette). He can’t quite bring himself to admit it to her, even though she’s given him multiple opportunities. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s self-conscious. Maybe he’s stressed. Maybe he’s afraid of rejection. Maybe it’s a toxic stew of all of these things. He can’t be honest with himself; how could he be honest with another? He doesn’t entirely believe the magic wand—a One Wish Willow he finds by happenstance in a witchy novelty shop. But that doesn’t stop him from using it to wish the girl would “love him more than anything in the world.” Anyone whose ever read, or even heard of, “The Monkey’s Paw” can guess where this is going. She becomes demonically obsessed with him with occasionally unpredictable results (like duct taping his front door shut from the inside while he sleeps). And, dud that he is, he likes her obsessiveness. Mostly. For a while. (The tape thing gives him slight pause). 

Barker gives the movie a great creepy crawling pace and lets the two lead performances wiggle around in the premise’s discomforts. He shoots in a boxy aspect ratio and glides the camera with an eerie otherworldliness as the actors play out the inevitable tragedy. Navarrette in particular does well signaling otherworldly devotion and dissociative trauma in the same wide-eyed glances. It’s clear that the movie is aware the young man is the villain, and the girl is trapped in his wishful delusion. She’s not really in love with him, and there are weird supernatural cracks in the intensity of her clinginess. Eventually it erupts in horror gore—but the sense of surprise is pretty much gone. The shallowness of its insights catch up to it. I’m sure it’ll be a great, provocative watch for people who’ve never had thoughts about male entitlement, unhealthy relationships, or wishes-gone-wrong before. For the rest of us, it’ll be admiring the filmmaker’s chops while wishing the script had a little more meat on the bone. 

Parson’s Backrooms is an even more impressive feat. As a work of sustained mood and space it’s incredible. He builds one of those great movie places and gets a little lost in it. But who can begrudge that? I was completely enveloped by its sense of a porous boundary between the reality and surreality of its premise. To be on its wavelength practically demands leaning in to try to see around the next corner as the camera slowly turns. Based on a series of YouTube shorts he made in his teenage years—Parsons is still only 20!—it concerns those eerie liminal spaces that were all the rage in meme horror some years back. Have you ever been alone in an empty office building or a back hallway in a mall that’s been almost, but not entirely, cleared of furniture? Now imagine a maze of those rooms, inconsistently lit, with distant muffled footsteps, and an increasingly surreal sense of architecture. Halls go nowhere, doors open onto stairs, stairs lead to doors, doors lead to ramps, ramps lead to rooms that narrow to another door. You get the picture. All of it is set to ominous low rumbles and the buzz of florescent lights. It is unsettling, but pulled forward by an inquisitive momentum. What is this place? I was uneasy, but also didn't want to leave.

That’s the same sensation, and compulsion, for the lead character, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s the owner of a struggling discount furniture store who discovers, late one night, that he can step through a wall in the basement and end up in this befuddling place. And then he just has to know more. The movie’s at its best as it follows these excursions, sometimes in creepy clean digital photography, sometimes in fuzzy Blair Witch-style VHS found footage aesthetics. (It’s set in a strangely convincing 1990—15 years before the director’s birth, another unsettling realization.) I honestly could’ve watched Ejiofor and his two employees, camcorder in tow, explore this space for the entire runtime. The camera creeps along with them, sending shivers with each half-glimpsed shadow in the darkness just beyond our perspective. But the movie moves perhaps too quickly to broaden the scope and jumps to some big character shifts when the mystery of the moment was enough. There’s also a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who worries that her client has lost it in delusions describing the backrooms, and has odd flashbacks implying her own traumatic backstory. She goes looking for him. Then there’s a guy in a white lab coat (Mark Duplass) who seems like he’s going to explain things, but mercifully doesn’t know much more than we do by that point. To Parson’s credit, there is no answer, but that does leave the movie saying only: Huh, look at this place. Weird, right? But, hey, this is a weird place worth seeing! 

Road to Somewhere: TAMMY

Melissa McCarthy is a movie star and that makes me very happy. It’s not just that she’s incredibly likable, intensely sympathetic, and awfully funny in everything I’ve seen her in. She’s also a woman who is over forty and isn’t a supermodel. Even when she is in a bad movie, she’s wonderful. That her talent and charm is recognized on a level that makes her an Oscar nominee and a bona fide box office draw is good enough. That she has chosen to cash in on this recognition by writing herself a starring role in a big studio movie, then made room for a generous ensemble of beloved actresses of all ages, shapes, and sizes is even better. Tammy, which she co-wrote with her husband Ben Falcone, who also directs and appears in a brief role, is an unkempt road trip comedy that pokes around Midwestern towns, celebrating underdogs wherever it may find them. It’s a little scattershot, a little uneven, and the direction creaks with the slips of a safe first-time filmmaker shooting blandly, putting the camera in a spot to capture the comedy and little more. But when jokes land it’s gut-bustingly hilarious, and when they miss, at least the film is still so warm and generous.

That generosity of spirit stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the Hollywood comedy machine. So often R-rated comedies (and many PG-13, and some of the PG) are purposelessly crass, uncomfortable, and mean-spirited, usually omnidirectionally, but mostly punching down to those least worth laughing at. Look at how smug a Grown Ups or Horrible Bosses or Bad Teacher can be, asking us to sympathize with obliviously privileged upper-middle-class (almost exclusively white) people being cruel to each other and laughing at those who would stand in their way, or worse, dare to exist outside their group. The quiet revolution of Tammy is the way it finds compassion for characters of all types. At its center is a working-class woman whose blundering rudeness is a cover for her insecurity. She comes by her sloppiness honestly. She’s ground down by the world and the  movie decides to help her pick herself back up. She has a good heart underneath her surface slob – tangled hair, greasy T-shirts, baggy shorts, clutter and litter – and the movie is kind enough to see that.

It starts with the woman of the title late for work at a KFC knockoff. Her car’s busted after she hit a deer or, as she puts it, a deer hit her. It’s the last straw, so her boss fires her. After throwing a comical fit through the cheap restaurant – “That’s not chicken!” she hollers at the patrons – she storms home and finds her husband (Nat Faxon) cheating on her with a neighbor (Toni Collette). Then, tearfully trying to maintain composure, her suitcase breaks open, spilling belongings every which way as she leaves. Tammy can’t take it. She storms over to see her mother (Allison Janney) and demands the car keys, vowing to leave their stupid small town once and for all. Her grandmother (Susan Sarandon) thinks that sounds good, packs her booze, and runs away with her. Together they set off for Niagara Falls, but one thing after another (a jet ski accident, drunken disorderly behavior, and more) puts roadblocks in their path. They’re loud, wild, and difficult, quick to bristle at any slights real or perceived. They’re quite a pair. 

The loose, episodic plotting takes them to campgrounds, roadside diners, a BBQ, liquor stores, fast food joints, jail, and a lakeside mansion owned by a distant relative (Kathy Bates at her most lovable). From time to time, it even threatens to tip over into a small-time caper. There’s a pair of robbery scenes that had me laughing hysterically through McCarthy’s fumbling bravado, clumsy mannerisms, and others’ reactions to her. Through it all Tammy struggles with finding a new, more productive path for her life and her randy grandma struggles with alcohol. There are moments of real drama between them, as drunken sniping hurts and diabetes is deadly serious. But mostly it’s a lark that regards their plight with sympathy. It’s a road movie without much of a sense of direction and once in a while spins it wheels, but that seems to match the lead duo’s lives pretty well.

As setbacks, both accidental and self-inflicted, weigh her down, Tammy just keeps charging forward. There’s this small gesture that never fails to make me snicker. She moves forward with total slapstick confidence until she pauses for a brief flicker of doubt – am I behaving strangely? – before doubling down on her commitment to whatever physical gag she’s in the middle of. McCarthy is as dexterous with slapstick as she is with banter and petulant outbursts of profanity. Here she’s a star who lets others share center stage, as generous as the movie she wrote. Everyone, from Sarandon and Bates, to small roles for Gary Cole, Mark Duplass, Sandra Oh, and Sarah Baker (of the terrific monologue that was the high-point of the most recent season of Louie), do fine, charming work. It’s the rare comedy that likes just about everyone, except for the few who deserve a smidge of scorn. But even that goes soft by the end, for the most part.

This sweet, charming, warm-hearted movie is a fun, shaggy, hangout with loveable misfits on a likable self-improvement journey, even if they didn’t realize it at the time. It’s worth the trip. By the end, it’s been a noncondescending Fourth-of-July Midwest tour celebrating the drunk, the sloppy, the unlucky, and the striving, while recognizing their need to make changes for the better. It’s a loving movie full of all manner of average folk: mothers, daughters, and granddaughters; lesbians; fast food workers; bluegrass bands; police officers; farmers; low-level criminals. And they’re all okay in Tammy’s eyes. It ends up being a holiday-weekend tribute to America, land of rough edges and kind hearts, where a woman with a mess of a life can head out into the heartland and figure herself out.

History of Violence: ZERO DARK THIRTY

Zero Dark Thirty is a mercilessly suspenseful thriller, a truthy drama that’s powerfully absorbing as it moves to a foregone conclusion. It is recent events turned into instant ambiguous myth, history rendered cinematic while the ink’s still wet. The story electrically told has intense feelings within. Telling of the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, especially when starting by playing a mix of static and audio from emergency responders on 9/11 over a black screen, can kick up a desire for revenge. But this is not a movie in which a swooping, heroic camera with broad, patriotic blasts of triumphalism executes a bad guy. Much like Alan J. Pakula and William Goldman’s handling of the then-fresh Watergate scandal in their terrific 1976 film All the President’s Men, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal play out their procedural through the eyes of the professional people who gathered and sorted inconclusive intelligence, chased down tantalizing leads to dead ends, and sweated out difficult decisions every step of the way.

These are professional people and we are allowed access to their seemingly insurmountable tasks. Detainees are painfully tortured for information that is at best tangentially helpful. Informants meet deadly ends. Bureaucratic shake-ups force shifting strategies. Our guide through it all is a tenacious agent played by Jessica Chastain. She, like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, her closest cinematic relation, is powered by a steely determination to see this investigation through to the end. She guides, prods, and cajoles her coworkers to push further, to simply get something done, even when the exact nature of the something is very much hidden, unknowable in the murk. An officemate in the CIA’s Pakistan office played by Jennifer Ehle asks Chastain how her needle-in-the-haystack operation is coming along. This is a film in which the needle is always clear, the haystack always in the way, and the argument for much of the time is how to analyze a handful of strands. The film is nearly ten years of setbacks and dead ends that are suddenly energized by unexpected breakthroughs, becoming a stop-and-go rush to a long awaited finish line.

Bigelow makes this into the highest-stakes workplace drama imaginable. Violence is used sparingly in the film, occurring suddenly in the field, away from the halls of power where characters try to make sense of it. The supporting cast is rich with great actors doing quickly sketched, jargon-filled, vivid character work. Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez, Harold Perrineau, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and James Gandolfini move around the world of the film, some suits, some military, some Navy SEALs. They each have a job to do and set about doing not a mere patriotic duty, but what they feel is best for their own careers and the lives of their coworkers. A life-and-death mystery plays out simultaneously secretly in cubicles of agencies and embassies and in clandestine spycraft, as well as on a world stage. The latter is kept carefully in the background, through glimpses of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech and Obama’s anti-torture comments on 60 Minutes seen only on TVs pushed into the farthest sides of shot compositions, yet their images are still in sharp focus. Year after year, the big picture, the ultimate goal, remains clear; it’s the foreground, the immediate, that grows fuzzy.

Through the accumulation of detail and interplay between interior and exterior spaces, danger grows and recedes. Through tense focus pulls and quietly layered compositions, the film draws tension out of mundane and brings the mundane into moments of tension. So much is instantly felt when a gust of wind allows a pair of black boots to be glimpsed underneath the hem of a burqa. All is not as it seems. Much like the expertly terrifying sequences following a combat zone bomb squad in her previous film The Hurt Locker (also scripted by Boal), Bigelow creates sequences in which little details add up to sustained nerve jangling suspense. In the opening scene – our protagonist’s first day in the field – she’s instructed to bring a pitcher of water to an interrogator preparing to waterboard a detainee. She draws it from slush in a scuffed blue cooler in the corner of the grimy cell. Torture is shown as a process, a technique, horrifying and casual. Later, there’s a scene in which a maybe suspicious car slowly makes its way into a sandy forward operating base, each puff of its dusty exhaust pipe cause for (hopefully false) alarm.

It all builds, of course, to the raid on Bin Laden’s discovered compound, a mission the details of which are both secret and well publicized. It plays out here in a suspenseful set piece expertly crosscut between grubby night-vision, smoothly dim digital photography, and Chastain sitting before a bank of communications devices back at the base. The special effects are persuasive, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor’s editing and Greig Fraser’s cinematography are crisp and confident, but this is more than mere edge-of-the-seat climactic action momentum. Though it’s certainly that too, an earned sequence of thrills that come partially from exhilarating clarity at last rising up. Rather than building to a bloody, fascistic blast of propagandistic violence, Bigelow plays the violent acts as almost perfunctory. Osama is barely glimpsed. The soldiers maintain utmost professionalism. The aftermath is relief at a job well done mixed with mournful exhaustion.

This is a self-reflexive and sometimes critical look at events that could have been glorified, that could have easily been cheap thrills on a way to a flag-waving triumphant climax. Instead, Bigelow is interested in creating deep thrills, rooted in character, painted in ambiguity and subtlety. This isn’t a movie that’s about a country’s proxies getting righteous revenge. This is a movie about watching a professional, capable agent getting the job done the best way she knows how, with the best information she can get at any given time. It’s ultimately exciting and moving not because of sentimental human-interest material. No, this film is too crisp and focused for detours like that. What makes this film exciting and moving is how sharp and subtle the character at its core becomes. Chastain creates a matter-of-fact, driven hero, continually underestimated, taking ambiguous steps to symbolic victory. This is not a film that tells us how to think about recent history, but rather, through the eyes of a memorable character, shows it in a convincing, exciting tick tock procedural of uncommonly involving suspense and complexity.