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Obsession or Backrooms: Which one is better?


Everyone in the world heard the rave about the competition between the movies Obsession and Backrooms. Personally I watched both of them and in this blog I will talk about which one I found better.

First, let me start with their plot. If you don’t know the plot, I will be summarizing in some sentences that are not that long. If you need a longer description their story, it is explained in one of my other blogs. So, Obsession is a movie about a guy named Bear making a wish for a girl, Nikki, to love him more than anyone in the world and Backrooms is a furniture store owner named Clark finding endless maze-like rooms in his store's basement. So as you can see totally different types of horror Backrooms is more of a liminal space thriller and Obsession is a psychological horror. But they also have a lot in common. Their directors are both YouTubers in their twenties Kane Parsons who directed the movie Backrooms is 20 years old and he is the youngest director of the company he worked with, A24. Meanwhile Obsession’s director Curry Barker is 26 years old not as young as Parsons but still young for such ratings and Barker didn’t have any big company to work with like A24 the budget of Obsession is about 700K which actually is a really small number compared to what Parsons worked with which is 10 million dollars. By the way, it is not a big number in the movie industry but still is huge compared to Barker’s. Both movies do not have a lot of side characters in them so the movie usually goes around the same people. For example in Obsession we don’t see a lot of people other than Bear, Nikki, Sarah and Ian. Now I will talk deeper about the meaning in both movies so if you haven’t still watched the movies, these may contain spoilers so be careful.


I will have to start with Obsession. I will have to say it deserves every single penny that it earned, all the ratings it earned cause with such less money it is impossible to make something this intriguing and this exciting I mean it was such a great movie not just like in the horror movie genre actually I wouldn’t even consider it a horror movie if there wasn’t the car scene (I will not be explaining the car scene because people shouldn’t miss that jump scare it is such a good one.). The movie is actually telling much more than a guy with a crush. It tells how being obsessed with anything that much can harm you. After that topic let me talk about the angles the scene in the bedroom with Nikki in the corner crying and watching Bear sleep and her uncanny valley makeup (it is kind of a disturbing makeup style) is shot so well that you can’t really see her you just see her silhouette but you can see the sadness and anger in her face just by the little light on her face. What makes that happen is Inde Navarrette’s amazing acting. I actually didn’t know a single thing about her but her acting is so good that you really think she might be like Nikki in real life. If you didn’t watch the movie when Bear makes the wish with the One Wish Willow she actually gets like an entity in her which captures the real Nikki and Inde does the contrast of both so well. For example the scene where real Nikki is talking while the entity is sleeping and telling Bear to kill her to free herself from this trouble is so disturbing and also the viral scene in the restaurant where she goes super whiny and says “No, no, no don’t do that. I thought we were having a nice date. Why does it matter? I thought we were having a nice date.” It was amazing like the whole movie theater got silent while she screamed. Other than that I could talk and talk about this movie. I am pretty positive that it deserves the 94 percent it got on Rotten Tomatoes and more. I don’t really have a bad comment on it.

Obsession Trailer (Warning: It contains a little blood)



As for Backrooms personally I thought I would love it but unfortunately I wasn’t the biggest fan. Yes, it was a little scary because of the sounds and all the liminal space effect but there were so many plot holes that we couldn’t get and weren’t explained. Like if the rooms remember the people who were in them why did it remember Clark’s ex wife was she in the Backrooms before and why was she in there. Why did Clark go insane in minutes and figure that he could eat the entities in the rooms. Where did he find Captain Clark and in the opening scene the ASYNC employee was clearly getting eaten by Captain Clark so if Clark went after that happened how did the rooms create his entity was his store already in the rooms these are some questions that I have in mind for the movie. My other complaint about it is the acting and the scenario is so poor while Mary was running after Captain Clark she had such a straight face it was quite weird and it felt like they didn’t even have a scenario they just freestyled it on the set so it wasn’t amazing. My last negative thing I will say about the movie is there weren’t any original entities from Parsons’ Backrooms web series even the Bacteria isn’t in the movie so let me be honest I really don’t think it deserves the 90 percent it got on Rotten Tomatoes but still wasn’t the worst.


Backrooms Trailer


In my opinion we have a clear winner. Obsession is definitely the winner of the war. I am waiting impatiently for Barker’s new movie "Anything but Ghosts". I think he is going to crush it again so if you want a new movie to watch I would definitely check out both but if you have only one shot I would definitely recommend that you should go see Obsession.

 
 
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