r/moviecritic • u/Spirited_Alfalfa_343 • 13h ago

Why do you think Navarette has gotten so much awards buzz for Obsession but Ejiofor has gotten none for Backrooms?

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I know Clark has some limited screen time but Ejiofor absolutely steals every scene he’s in. His two separate monologues with Reinsve are just as good as anything Navarette did in Obsession. As I said earlier, is it the lack of screen time for Ejiofor?

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u/Rare-Acanthisitta706 10h ago

Furthermore, to say that obsession is predictable is baffling to me. Yeah if you'd seen remotely any promo material for the movie, you would know that she would be a psycho gf. But the praise the movie is getting is from the fact that it wasn't just a "psycho gf" movie. You wouldn't expect her to be jailed in her body losing her autonomy. You wouldn't expect Bear to be so "ok" with it, making him more of an antagonist. And I for one certainly didn't expect any of the cat stuff.. Yes, some moments like the car scene you were waiting for exactly how the scene plays out.. but that's exactly what created the suspense. Usually horror movies use darkness, sound, or creepy visuals to scare you. This scene was a regular ass flirty conversation, only using context to create the scariness.

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u/TweeKINGKev 6h ago

The other thing is you’d think she was gonna be obsessedly in love with Bear but it goes beyond just being in love with him, the guy couldn’t even go to work.

Even worse, he couldn’t even go to the bathroom without her going into a rage, those are 2 things I didn’t even think they’d think about when detailing the plot.

I figured at most it would be her showing up places she wasn’t invited to (a boys night out somewhere, a private family function that she didn’t really have any business being at, things like that) but they took it to her not even letting him take a piss with the door closed.

All the meanwhile she knows she’s essentially trapped in her own body watching it from the inside as evidenced by the message she left and when she uses the wish on him, then he dies and she just snaps out of it horrified to see what her body (out of her control) has done to all their friends.

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u/Cold_Bison7065 7h ago

”You wouldn't expect her to be jailed in her body losing her autonomy.”

Absolutely this, you nailed it. There are a lot of men who watched Obsession and completely missed the real horror of it. So for them, it was just an obvious movie.

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u/Remarkable-Debate428 4h ago

Women mistake relatability for originality. Obsession at its core is just a monkeys paw story with a new coat of paint. Backrooms is actually original. I’ve seen both movies multiple times and like both, but women act like Obsession made some poignant narrative when we’ve been had movies about the “nice guy” and “be careful what you wish for”.

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u/SecondaryAnonymous2 4h ago

I think you're being a reductionist. They both have themes that have been written from many angles, I prefer Obsessions execution. I'm a man ftr. I didn't like Backrooms all that much, and that's okay that we like different things for different reasons, but let's not be all like "lol woman, you don't understand"

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u/Impossible-Wing3388 3h ago

I agree its a basic monkey paw story at heart. But its what they do with that and how they applied that new coat of paint that makes it so good. Ill take a great monkey paw story over a trying too hard monster in a maze story any day

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u/Straight_Speed_6162 7h ago

Adding to your point that even in the car scene you knew what was coming they really subverted normal pacing in that scene that the exact moment was hard to predict

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u/Yikrawrface 21m ago

Absolutely this. Something you gotta give these comedians turned horror movie directors is their immaculate timing.

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u/trackabandoned 8h ago

Listen I went in blind, thinking it would be a thriller/drama and my damn fight or flight was activated. I was so unprepared for any part of this movie lol

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u/Puzzleheaded-Wait785 6h ago

I could predict almost every scene from the prior scene while watching it, and I'm not exactly a genius.

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u/Lia-Loo 7h ago edited 6h ago

I think that Obsession is a very wonderful subversion of the “psycho girlfriend” trope. And yes if you went in blind it would be completely unpredictable for the most part. However, I watched the trailer before going and from that alone I could tell it would be about Bear’s obsession, not about Nikki’s. They frame it with Bear making the wish first, not Nikki alone acting crazy. We can see from the trailer that because of the wish, Nikki loses her autonomy immediately. It’s obvious from the trailer and the first few minutes of the movie that Bear is the obsessed one. It’s not unexpected at all if you just comprehend and infer based on those. People who act all surprised about Bear being the antagonist makes no sense. Other than that though, everything else was as you said. Bear being such an evil selfish ass about what he did to the end, the kills, the sad details about Nikki, the cat stuff, were unpredictable.

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u/ralexh11 4h ago

It's a monkey paw movie lmao, extremely predictable horror trope. Backrooms was less predictable because it was more abstract and had less of a story. You can say Obsession was a better movie overall but to try and claim it wasn't predictable is BS. I knew Sarah would be killed immediately when when she showed a healthy interest in him and that he would end up killing himself at the end as soon as he started having second thoughts about what he did. The horror genre itself is like this most of the time so I wasn't surprised but Obsession was littered with tropes that are the reason the horror genre will never really be top tier for me except the few rare exceptions.

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u/Jing-Ao 37m ago

"you wouldn't expect her to be jailed in her body losing her autonomy" is exactly what I expected when bear broke the stick and she started to act completely different. And this is 15 or 20 minutes in. The plot was pretty obvious from that point on

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u/FreemanCalavera 19m ago

I mean, I kind of expected a twist because I knew there was no way anyone in 2026 would make a film with the message “wouldn’t it be scary if you had an actual psycho GF?”. It was fairly obvious that it would take a critical look at relationships and the male view of female autonomy, especially since the premise could be roughly summed up as “a guy is granted a magical wish for a girl to love him, but the monkey paw curls”. Anyone making a wish like that in the first place is a red flag because you’re literally asking for somebody else to be brainwashed.

But I agree with your overall point that expectedness and unexpectedness generally does not affect a film’s quality, unless the film is actively built around unraveling an intricate mystery: in that case the reveal being exactly what you expected can kind of ruin the vibe. Both films had their expected and unexpected beats, and I overall thought Backrooms was better.