Backrooms vs Obsession vs Joe

 

By Joe Gibson

 

I schedule my videos on our YouTube channel a long time in advance. This can cause problems when, for whatever reason, I am improperly prepared come recording day (though recent developments have mitigated that) or I notice a glaring irreconcilable issue with the premise of the video or the completed file does not sit right with me. Since I script out many of my videos, I have the option to do this and just redeem a half-baked video into a blog post in such cases, but it is still quite annoying to shuffle things around to fill that slot. This essay went through multiple iterations before its midsummer recording and subsequent forestalling to August and untimely scrapping.

 

When Backrooms came out, I watched it in theaters. A couple weeks later, I was able to watch Obsession because, frankly, for a good while, it seemed like that film would never leave theaters, as I then watched Obsession another time the week after that. I think of myself as a perceptive moviegoer, but as I learned when I tried to write a “First Impressions” blog post about either film, I didn't actually have that much to say about them, even up until I tried to put these thoughts in video format. 

 

Up until my most recent rewatch of both films that sparked this iteration of the essay, (second for Backrooms and third for Obsession overall), I had resigned myself to the idea that I just have less to say. And that's a weird spot for me. I turned my disdain for the new Animal Farm film adaptation into a meaty blog post about Chairman Mao, but I had nothing to say about two new genre defining horror classics? Admittedly it took me a couple weeks to formulate my thoughts on Mao, in which time I probably should have done a rewatch of that film. As I mentioned, I now have rewatched both films with the capacity for pausing and most importantly, discussion with people more passionate about both these films than I am.

 

When you pair Backrooms with Obsession in a sort of cult film double feature, some cosmetic details about these films soar to the forefront of discussion. That works as a transition statement to the point I’m trying to raise, but it also is very possible that some of you have watched neither film or just one, so I am going to have to give some exposition about both films. So, I had a transition statement to skip over the exposition and then another sentence reintroducing the need for further context, is that a detransition statement? Good thing I didn’t finish this in June. 

 

 

In Kane Parson’s Backrooms film, we follow Chiwetol Ejiofor’s character Clark in his job and to therapy and through his aspirations and frustrations. The Backrooms, as levels of misremembered locales of the real world, provide an opposite perspective to his therapist Mary’s specific brand of CBT. His tenuous connection with his employees, once he has been in the Backrooms long enough, destabilizes into a misanthropic borderline cannibalistic possession of others that he gets to exert over the Still Life copies of ambiguously random people. At the same time, the horror in the movie shifts from simple survival horror to psychological horror with a confrontation between Mary and Clark to a slasher v final girl chase of Mary and the main entity in the film to finally existential horror as Mary is still not safe as ASYNC may not let her leave their facilities in the Backrooms, which themselves have made a Still Life of her. Her backstory, given through flashbacks matches the mundane to the magical with her mother’s delusion in some ways foreshadowing the nature of the Backrooms.

 

On the other hand, Curry Barker’s Obsession is about a young man called Bar who pines for his coworker Nikki. It plays out as a Greek tragedy of old showing the story of Bar’s cowardice, or alternatively it functions as a modern style morality tale where Bar’s obsession leads him to cross a threshold into the Twilight Zone where he should have been more careful as to what he wished for. In any case, after failing to confess his feelings to Nikki on his own terms and even after failing to answer honestly when she asks him point blank if he likes her, his transgression in the story is wishing that she loved him more than anything in the world. That sounds rather benign, but the discourse surrounding the movie has honed in on the fact that if you actually describe what happens without the magic, they go drinking at a bar, Bar separates Nikki from their group and makes a choice that gets her to think she loves him without her being capable of coming to that conclusion herself. The question of if Bar is taking advantage of Nikki comes up multiple times, and from there on, Bar makes the worst decision possible at every single moment, not learning his lesson even through the end. 

 

Upon a first watch, the horror comes from the tension of watching this new Nikki act not quite right, misunderstanding her social cues, manipulating Bar, snapping out of her role abruptly at times, and eventually murdering their other friends. Upon a rewatch or two, it becomes clear that the real Nikki is the more prevalent antagonist than the Wish Nikki that most stories of this premise would have you fear. Nikki’s suffering is still actually central to the film (both Nikkis but especially the real one that is fighting against the wish for the entire journey), and right at the end, Wish Nikki actually prevents Bar from making a climactic decision of one last instance of cowardice. 

 

From the midpoint on, Bar knows that his own death is the only thing that will break the spell, but he chickens out of shooting himself and instead overdoses on pills…but is about to vomit them out when Nikki wishes for him to love her. Not allowing your protagonist to make their climactic choice probably means something specific about the nature of the ways Bar and Nikki overwrite the other’s agency, but for the sake of this conversation, it may mean that they are coleads, especially since the final scare is Nikki coming back to consciousness in a situation with three dead bodies she has no way of talking her way out of. (Behind the scenes, Bar’s actor added in the final cowardice from the character, noting the pattern that Bar would do that because he had not grown at any point in the film.)

 

What I’m trying to say here is that if I show you two films where a relatable yet mentally unstable lead crosses a magical threshold that ends up causing the suffering of a leading lady who also has claim to the protagonist label and ends up outliving him, then those are the details we have to focus on in that conversation. Furthermore, the mental states of the lead characters are inextricably tied to the horror in a way we can't really ignore when comparing them. Clark wishes for a different world order based on warped memories of the past, and this manifests as the uncanny Backrooms and the Still Life copies it makes of him, Mary and random other people. Bar is an awkward, anxious coward who wishes for the girl he likes to love him under terms he decides and tries to modify to his comfort, which manifests as a new personality supplanting Nikki that is even worse at emotionally regulating than Bar is. So internal or external uncanny doppelganger replacement. At the same time, Nikki’s erratic nature while under the spell resembles her prior instances of drug use, which furthers the allusion to date rape. If you watched the movie and doubted that the date rape analogy works as an objective correlative throughout, rewatching the movie helps with that, because Bar never actually wants to release Nikki from his spell; he just wants a more palatable Wish Nikki and will draft any spell he can to get there.

 

Both films ambiguously include some thinking entity behind the magic. If the Backrooms is misremembering the real world, to what end, why and how? Is it something related to the mysterious Ivan Beck or do The Backrooms exist from something deeper and older than humanity and the experiments that unlocked it? This will sound weirder out of context, but Wish Nikki’s prose about Hansel and Gretel sleeping together implicates an older figure teaching them how to sin together, which is significant because the reveal that Nikki saw Bar as a brother comes out around that time in the movie, and if we thread these plot points, the similar sense of humor, cadence and casual sadism in the speech of Wish Nikki, the two (or possibly one trans) retail worker and the Curry Barker cameo helpline could point to some entity behind the wishes controlling these people.

 

Under this framework, I have felt confident in labeling both Clark and Bar as Tragic Heroes, and if you have followed the discourse online surrounding Obsession, you will know that that is an excellent way to get yelled at. So, I should clarify. Though the Oedipus type Tragic Hero is a good person whom fate and duty screw over, that is not indicative of all or even most of the Greek Tragic Heroes to say nothing of the waves and waves of literary Tragic Heroes that have come since. Framing a story around a person’s fatal flaw that destabilizes the world around them and ruins their life is enough to make that person the “Tragic Hero.” Add back in the fact that Greek tragedies often stipulated condemnation from heaven or the extant magic system, and the ways that the Backrooms eat Clark alive and final wish overrides Bar’s autonomy (after the seeming hive-mind of wish users that talk in the same cadence pass judgement on him) click neatly back into the Greek model. 

 

 

A Tragic Hero is not the same as a hero because usually the tragedies about each Greek hero cover the period of time where they stopped being virtuous and fell to their flaw. Creon, in Antigone, is a great King making the decision he thinks is best for his kingdom, but he goes against the gods and enforces his will in such a cruel and obstinate way that not only do you root against him but almost his entire remaining family kills themselves directly because of his actions. Ajax, son of Telamon, is one of the greatest heroes in the Trojan War, who valiantly defends the Greeks and does not live long enough to participate in the major war crimes at the end. Sophocles’ play about him is a character study about that time he went crazy with envy over not getting Achilles’ armor and tried to murder his friends before killing himself. The actions of Odysseus in most of the tragedies written after the Odyssey, whether they result in his own death or not, are highly suspect and very unsympathetic. 

 

I should not take it personally, but I am still quite annoyed at how many people have told me I am wrong for calling Bar in particular a Tragic Hero just because they can’t fathom old, established literary terminology being more complicated than a simple binary. The best rebuttal I got to that point is that it is weird to stick to the Greek standards and not the more recent ones, but we see a similar pattern anyways. Macbeth, Rambo (First Blood part 1 specifically), Eren Jaeger and Anakin Skywalker (prequel era specifically) are all war heroes in the backstory, but the main story shows how their flaws lead to their fall from grace as they eventually lose their status or humanity. There is technically a trend of sanitizing our tragedies in recent Western media, as the infinite ending variations of Chess fall on a scale of depressing to bittersweet to happy based almost entirely on how moral Anatoly feels during the final match, but Greek tragedies also sometimes had happier endings that avoided the logical punishment (at least for Medea) so I think the Greek model is still applicable to almost every wave since because of how scattershot it was in the first place.

 

I have thought long and hard about how I would actually define the villain of a story, when considering that they could be either the main antagonist (Voldemort), protagonist (Light Yagami), the main antagonist’s boss (Palpatine or the old wizard archetype) or an incidental cameo (Satan in the Gospels), and I have settled on the main evil character as my definition. If the character fits those criteria as the principal of the evil characters or the evilest of the main characters, then I call them “The Villain.” This, of course, does not preclude Duumvirates or Triumvirates, and it somehow results in Sean Renard being the Villain of Grimm with The Royals, Black Claw and Zerstörer as mere seasonal antagonists, but it works the best for the most amount of stories I have encountered. Bar fits that criteria by the way. I am not disagreeing that Bar is the villain; that is self evident, and what we should focus on is how the story positions his downward spiral as the impetus for a horror movie. I refuse to bear any more lectures from people who define villain as main antagonist, somehow think that Bar qualifies as the main antagonist (instead of protagonist) and do not realize that Tragic Hero does not mean good guy. The online conversations about this movie are insufferable, but the in-person ones have been edifying. If you will still find issues with my definitions here, let us talk this out rationally.

 

 

One issue I have with Backrooms that is actually quite sizable is that I do not fully buy Clark’s descent into madness because it feels like there are about two scenes missing from his arc between when the Still Life corners him and when he has moved in with them and started eating them. The Backrooms bring out the worst parts of Clark, that is self-evident, but his fall from grace does not necessarily track as smoothly for him to fall as far as he does as quickly as he does. The villain of the movie is still technically the Captain Still Life, because Clark killing people and eating Still Life are behaviors coded to the Captain, not him. Clark comes off as too reasonable with his employees for his murderous and cannibalistic turn to come off as foreshadowed in the first two acts; the solution is to add in more moments where Clark mooched or controlled the other characters. Now, a while ago, A24 announced that they will put the movie back out with 15 additional minutes, and that pissed me off because clearly it was missing those the whole time. Then, it came out that the additional 15 minutes was done in blender, which is how Kane did his web series of the Backrooms for the monsters and Hazmat suit ASYNC employees. And, finally, that version of the movie came out, and (according to Variety) the extra 15 minutes was essentially one of Kane’s YouTube videos just exploring one of the hallways from the film, so there is no complete version of this story. It doesn’t make the movie bad; it just holds it back from near perfection. I should note, upon this most recent redraft of these thoughts, that stories such as Euripedes’ Herakles introduced a fit of madness right at the end for Herakles to kill his family. There is better and more subtle foreshadowing in the third act of Backrooms, and if you choose to read into the possible identities and dynamics the shown Still Life have, you get hints towards some further characterization for Clark. If you choose to believe that the redheaded Still Life woman is the copy of his wife or at least represents his wife to him, it helps but is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

 

 

On the topic of Obsession’s character study, there is something interesting about Bar that creates the same ambiguity surrounding his intentions and mental state that the film blatantly displays for its dichotomous Nikkis. At the start of the film, his cat Sandy overdoses on prescription pills. I initially thought the pills were his own and that Bar was short for Barbara, and his friends only called him Baron out of trying to play into his own masculinity issues. Furthermore, I thought the mention of his grandmother early on was only to set up that Wish Nikki might have interpreted them sleeping together in grandmother’s house into her fairy tale inspired prose. Apparently, the pills belonged to his grandmother Barbara, which I could do without for the sake of this tragedy, but it does not really matter. Bar clearly needs some kind of counseling and medication, and whether he is on prescription pills or just has a family history of problems necessitating them does not change much.

 

In any case, in that first scene, he finds that Sandy has eaten the pills with her food, and this serves to foreshadow some plot beats later on. He wants to stay home and mourn Sandy, but Nikki tells him to come to the bar and he comes. He also explains that it hasn’t really set in yet, the death. That scene justifies a later one when Wish Nikki murders Sarah in front of him, and he is visibly not processing it in the moment and folds when Nikki tells him they have to hide the body. His central flaw of cowardice used the same way to show escalating stakes. 

 

Where this gets interesting is that the bottom of the pill bottle says not to eat the pills, which is an odd label to put, and we never actually see Sandy knock the pill bottle down. Bar is not aware of leaving the pill bottle out, but considering that this whole movie exists to document Bar’s inability to take responsibility for anything while he selfishly focuses on his obsession, his inability to see that his negligence would kill his cat is a good visual metaphor. Tragedies (often) have prologues, an initial monologue or primer, but this could also go further if you will permit the tinfoil hat (this is still much less of a stretch than many of the popular fan theories out there about either film).

 

Now once Nikki is under the spell, she wakes up at the slightest provocation as part of the codependence…except for one scene. When Bar is texting Sarah right before Nikki wakes up and kills her, the real Nikki comes to the surface begging for Bar to kill her because the fake one is sleeping. But Bar has time to carry on a whole conversation with her and put on clothes and leave with the fake Nikki asleep. When Bar talks with Sarah, he says he has sleeping pills in his pocket, which is such a weird detail to include because he never uses those pills again, wasn’t wearing those clothes in bed and has no real reason to bring it up. Taking all that together though, it really seems like the film is saying that he drugged Nikki, but he was still scared she would notice him leaving, which suggests he might not be aware he drugged her. And if that’s the case, then that would further justify the suggestion that he left his pills out for the cat in some kind of fugue state. As far as we can tell, the magic in the film is objectively real in-universe and not the result of his delusions. At the same time, the film juxtaposes his feelings with fake Nikki’s, and the ambiguity of the title could be describing his own obsession and not the one he creates. If we accept that he unintentionally killed the cat and drugged Nikki, then his obsession also led him to act erratically, snapping back between two understandings of awareness, and the film is trying to see if we will ignore that for a cowardly man but not a “hysterical” woman. Nikki has a better excuse for her actions in this film. As my subsequent conversations with other viewers has uncovered the realization that her intentions are far less ambiguous than I realized, the pattern seems to be that after seeing her reflection, the real Nikki can surface to try and hurt Bar or herself, after which point the Wish version goes and overcompensates. I prefer the ambiguity, especially since Wish Nikki’s hands aren’t clean of blood entirely given the Sarah incident, but knowing the actual dynamic clears up Nikki’s behavior throughout the film, which is an important step towards giving her back her voice in this story. (This is why Nikki has, I believe, nearly equal claim to the label of protagonist.)

 

Now, which film is better? Obsession. I think it’s obviously the better film. I’ve already highlighted the ways I find the writing to be tighter and more intricate, but I think it is closer than it might seem. I have Backrooms at like an 8 out of 10 personally, and Obsession, while better, is still below a 9. Both films have excellent directing and superb acting; Chiwetol Ejiofor was amazing in particular. And on the finer levels of cinematography and color grading, both films used darkness more effectively than most modern larger studio films. You can still see what is going on, just not as much as you would like to, some of the details blacked out to make it scarier. Many blockbusters annoyingly use a black and orange color scale very arbitrarily, but Backrooms slipped into that naturally to escalate the fear in a scene by juxtaposing the usual white and orange aesthetic of the Backrooms. Naturally, this is another area I do not feel confident speaking on outside of these vague statements, so I have had difficulty articulating this in the prior drafts, and I do not even think I have done the best job now. 

 

Obsession has better characters in my assessment because Mary, aside from her flashbacks, is static until Clark’s arc has run, Clark is less easily understandable than if the flashbacks had been his instead, and his employees really do not amount to much. Conversely, Bar has a layer of audience insert relatability that masks his darker tendencies initially, and his tragic fatal flaw becomes clearer over repeated views. Even though he is very passive compared to most tragic heroes (though I would apparently be remiss not to reiterate that as the main evil character, he is the villain), both versions of Nikki are actually active enough participants in the plot to push it forward as the real Nikki is behind all of her self-harming in a desperate effort to escape her torment. Sarah and Ian are also more complicated characters than I can break down into a single sentence. They have some great characteristics and other flaws that led them to fail to save Nikki. Really, the area that holds Obsession back from a 9 or 10 is worldbuilding.

 

 

Frankly, it would work better if Bar slipped into the twilight Zone momentarily to make this wish instead of the One Wish Willows existing in the world for anybody to buy. As I have mentioned, the corner store employee(s) and Curry Barker customer service cameo speak in the same cadence and tone as possessed Nikki, which seems to imply some hive mind entity is behind these wishes. That raises many questions. Furthermore, no other character in this movie has ever used a wish until Bar makes them aware of it despite the fact that they probably would since Bar did. Ian instantly wishes for a billion dollars once he gets one, and Sarah’s whole subplot revolves around her wish to get into a good school. 

 

The school she wants finally sends her a letter right before Nikki kills her, but Bar opens it after, and the envelope doesn’t disappear which means that Sarah earned that spot in her school instead of wishing for it. More sad, sure, but it comes at the cost of justifying the plot mechanic of a widespread wish toy. There is actually debate on that point; apparently the ink smudges in the letter. If it takes hours after Sarah’s death for her wish to gradually come undone, but Bar’s death instantly breaks his wish, that is contrived. What is worse is that the fix of having the letter instantly disappear would just remind Bar of the willows, which he follows up on in the next scene, so the only reason for that contrivance to be there is to make it seem like Sarah didn’t use a wish.

 

Nikki of course gets to wish for Bar right before his pills kill him, so she never used one either even though she wanted to leave her job, find love and be able to write peacefully, three things that would each make for good wishes for her to try. In terms of other common wishes, we see that homeless people still exist, the world hasn’t ended, etc so the mass marketability of these one wish willows is superfluous and just weakens audience immersion. I understand that Curry Barker has plans for a limited series or sequel exploring other wishes, but the history of the world playing out the same when one wish willows exist is an insane backstory ask. The Backrooms can slot into the Greek myths of the Labyrinth, but the idea that no fringe politician wished an extreme agenda through or a controversy away is impossible. Kane already accounted for the Backrooms opening late into Earth’s history though, if we factor in his YouTube series which gives a distinct unfair advantage for worldbuilding. 

 

Backrooms is still set within Kane’s web series, I think pretty early in the timeline, so the main questions left after the movie are the ones that already existed. That said, the movie does bring in the concept of multiple levels of the Backrooms including a pool level, which was part of the original Backrooms wiki and not something that I thought Kane could legally use. The entity in the film predates other entities in the series, and, though I was worried about possible overreliance on survival horror getting in the way of the existential horror of the Backrooms, I think it threaded that needle fairly well, though again, we are missing scenes of Clark to optimally ease us from the survival horror into the psychological and existential horror.

 

Sometimes, it is hard for me to write about certain films. Though Backrooms and Obsession are films we, as horror fans, will keep talking about for decades, I have been satiated by a few conversations already. It was conversations with people more enthusiastic about these films that got me to think harder about them and finish this post. As more time has passed, I maintain that Evil Dead Burn deserves a slot alongside these two films as a thought provoking 2026 horror masterpiece, but 2026 itself already seems like a return to form year for the cinemas (by return on investment if not quality). Though I can make no promises at this time, I think it would be productive to rank the 2026 films I've seen by the end of the year. Let us know if you would like to see that, and share your opinions on Backrooms and Obsessions in our comment section.