I don’t have a lot of reviews this month. However, I am fond of my write-up on Obsession, the surprise hit of the summer, that I wrote after seeing it for the second time in theaters. I didn’t catch it at its TIFF Midnight Madness premiere, but now it has become one of the festival’s biggest success stories. Watch out for the spoilers, though!
Obsession
United States of America, United Kingdom | 2025 | 109m | English
It really bugs me when I feel ho-hum about a movie that seemingly everyone agrees is amazing. When I had time to watch something else after Scary Movie, I looked at the showtimes and decided to run into a screening of Obsession for round two, just a couple weeks after I first saw it.
I’m still left mostly underwhelmed. This time I focused more on the story and the characters and ignored its dull, too-dark cinematography. The horror in Obsession is two-fold: first, there is the creepy, erratic behavior of Nikki after she is wished into loving Bear more than anyone else in the whole world. The second, of course, is Bear’s willingness to perpetuate this cursed, unnatural relationship long after it becomes plenty apparent that Nikki is not in control of her body—that her true consciousness is buried under the curse and she isn’t consenting to any of this.
The key scene of the movie is when Nikki regains her voice while “She” is sleeping and begs Bear for death, while Bear responds by asking what’s so bad about being with him and backs away, leaving her to herself. A better script, I think, would have treated this scene as a turning point, treading further down this path—giving us more interiority into, well, both of these characters. It could have doubled down on the horror of Nikki’s powerlessness and shined a brighter light on the banal evil of Bear’s actions. Instead, the next scene drops this narrative thread and the movie falls back into a familiar groove of being “scary” by setting overloud music to gory shock value.
The choice to frame the story around Bear’s perspective and the horror that happens to him puts the audience in an odd position. The movie simultaneously asks us to feel afraid when Bear feels afraid—seeing Nikki stalking him from the corner of his room or suddenly appearing from the shadows to bash his friend’s skull in—while also telling us that he’s the real villain of the story. The titular “Obsession” is his, of course. What, then, am I supposed to feel when he realizes he’s been fed his own cat? Catharsis? Satisfaction that’s he’s getting a taste of the misery he’s inflicting on Nikki? I don’t know about your theater, but I didn’t hear any cheers in the audience when that scene hit.
Buried underneath the script of Obsession, screaming to get out like the victims of the One Wish Willow, is a far more interesting (and scarier) movie framed from Nikki’s perspective. I suppose you could argue that the way the movie manipulates you into being sympathetic for Bear because the erratic behavior of his girlfriend spooks him and the audience at the same time is some kind of meta horror. (“Oh my God, can you believe people think he’s the victim? We live in a society fr.”) As it is, though, Obsession isn’t scary so much as it’s just unpleasant. Before cracking my own willow, I’d wish that Obsession de-emphasized the “creepy” scenes of Nikki and grappled more deeply with the themes that it only gestures towards.
Disclosure Day
United States of America | 2026 | 145m | English, Korean, Russian
I almost gave this 3.5 stars until I realized that that’s how I scored Minority Report and no, despite sharing a sci-fi conspiracy plot, 2000s lens-flare-on-chrome aesthetic, and overlong runtime, I did not enjoy Disclosure Day as much as Minority Report.
Spielberg is undoubtedly a great director. Probably one of the best there’s ever been. His gift for building long-form suspense and mystery—drip-feeding the audience pieces of the puzzle throughout the story, hyping up things narratively before visually revealing them—is on display here, although not quite to the same effect as he has done in something like Jaws or another of his alien stories, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are several masterful, unbroken camera takes that follow characters on the move and swirl around the environment to great effect. There were definitely sequences of this film that had me deeply engaged. It’s well crafted for the most part.
But the story and reveals too often struck me as anticlimactic and outright goofy. There’s a naive portrayal of the masses’ blind trust in broadcast news—of all things—that truly only could have come from the pen of a boomer. This would have felt dated a decade ago—now, in 2026, it’s all the more laughable to imagine all of America, let alone all of Earth, stopping dead in their tracks, mid-World War III, to pull up an impromptu local news television broadcast and accept everything they see uncritically, at face value. Don’t think too hard about it—it’s confirmed “ground truth pixels” or whatever the hell the movie’s explanation was. Sorry, but I snapped out of the movie magic at that moment. If you too thought that scene was silly, You Are Not Alone.
My real issue with Disclosure Day may be my own problem—that this movie is at the end of the day a rather straightforward alien tale and not what I wanted it to be, which is an allegory on certain real-life government-obfuscated truths that the public has the right to know. I mean, of course the figure that emerged from the chair in the final minutes of the movie wasn’t going to actually be Jeffrey Epstein, but come on. You simply can’t convince me that Steven Spielberg doesn’t know something fucked up about Hollywood elites that the hoi polloi isn’t privy to. This movie was set up as his chance to say… something, but bro really just wanted to tell another story about big-eyed little Martian men. What a let down!
Still, I get the feeling that Disclosure Day is going to be analyzed and scrutinized to death over the years. The movie opens on a scene of pro wrestling, as if to prime the audience to view everything they see from their news, government, and entertainment as kayfabe. Children’s hands reach out to each other evoke Michelangelo’s famous fresco. A crucifix pierces a palm. Don’t get me started on all the Kabbalistic left-eye symbolism. Yet I don’t think this movie is going to prove to be Spielberg’s Eyes Wide Shut. It’s going to be remembered mostly as an above-average late-career movie from a guy who even at 80 years old still loves simple space alien stories.
Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps
Canada | 2024 | 275m | English
I appreciate movies that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Castration Movie fits the bill. It’s raw. It’s a big middle finger to the usual rules of cinema. Yeah, it’s 4.5 hrs and still an incomplete story. Yeah, the whole thing is shot on camcorder. Yeah, it’s filled with unlikable characters having unsimulated sex. Got a problem with that?
There’s really nothing that’s off-limits here. Moments that usually would be hidden away in the darkness of one’s own apartment bathroom late at night become cinema. Fact and fiction get blended together: those fresh surgery scars aren’t CGI. It’s undeniably self-indulgent at times—I could have done without one or two of those full, unbroken musical performances. Even the very first scene of dialogue goes on for an uncomfortably long time. I get the feeling that a lot of this was improvised and little of it was cut. I also get the feeling that one scene was there only because Louise Weard got a kick out of getting pissed on and making us watch. Yet the whole thing felt authentic to me on the level of a documentary. It’s truly immersive; you’re brought into the intimate daily lives of these abrasive, not-quite-well-adjusted people. You’re seeing things that are normally left to the imagination of 4chan posts. It felt real, like it or not. By the end I was already thinking of where to find part 2.
Other Movies I Saw This Month
- Scary Movie (2026) [3/5]
- Cat People (1982) [2/5]
- A Wedding (1978) [3.5/5]
- Jumping (1984) [3/5]
- The Island Closest to Heaven (1984) [4/5]
- Hotel Chevalier (2007) [2.5/5]
- The Darjeeling Limited (2007) [2.5/5]
Best Movies I Saw This Month
- The Island Closest to Heaven
- Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps
- A Wedding
Worst Movie I Saw This Month
- Cat People
Josh Anderson 