Universal is having a hell of a year. They will likely have the most profitable Best Picture contender come Oscar time, as well as one of the most profitable films of all time when factoring in budget. And those two movies are The Odyssey and Obsession(which is Focus Features, but that’s under Universal). They have become the first studio to cross the $4 billion mark for 2026, which means this is one of their best years ever.
The Odyssey is likely to sweep the Oscars and become one of the defining films of this year, but the other movie people should be thinking about is Obsession. It isn’t just that it has made an absurd amount of money simply because it was a good idea. It isn’t that the lead performance by Inde Navarrette is one of the best of the year, if not the best so far. It’s also that the film reflects what’s happening in American culture right now in an honest way.
Obsession has ignited a culture war debate every bit as big as The Odysseyhas; it’s just that the conversation has been mostly confined to TikTok and in some corners of Feminist Film YouTube. It didn’t make the same kind of news because it was never about sticking it to the Right, or calling out the villains in Hollywood’s ongoing narrative. It has, however, deepened the conversation around sexual politics in our modern day.
Allow me to explain.
Obsessionhas become a litmus test. How you see the film will reveal who you are. It has two different camps of viewers—people who think it’s about controlling men or incels needing to possess women, and people who see it as the opposite: that women are powerful destroyers who are never satisfied and will ruin your life if given the chance. Both of these ideas pushing up against each other are what make Obsession such a great film and not just your average horror flick.
But now, Voice Memo Guy and Obsession have become linked, at least in the world of TikTok discourse.
It was the voice memo that launched a thousand TikToks, and everyone had to chime in. But what I found interesting was how it was then blended in with Obsession to further expand the discourse about women, consent, and men.
All it makes me think about is how afraid everyone is all of the time. And to me that is what makes Obsession such a brilliant movie. It is moments like these that I wish I were smarter and a better film writer so I could put into words how I see it, but I’ll give it my best shot.
Curry Barker plays with this idea on his YouTube channel, always hilariously, the anxiety of men when it comes to women, like this:
So why is it funny? Because it is the truth. It acknowledges that there is a baseline reality of men who like cute girls. But then, it has the layer of safety by making fun of those guys, not the girl. As long as they’re the joke, they are in the safe zone. But of course, if you macro out from that and look at the bigger picture of what’s happened to men in movies of late, you’ll see why the perspective of the male viewer is so essential in Obsession.
Even if the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening [tm] have meant that the alpha hero has become diminished (One Battle After Another, The Odyssey, Obsession), that doesn’t mean that, at least in Obsession, there isn’t another way to view the film. Sure, you can see it as the ultimate MeToo screed, but you can also see it more as how difficult it is now just to ask a woman out.
Obsession is a wink and a nod to how absolutely crazy it has become not just to try to date, but to navigate your way through a relationship without being seen as abusive, oppressive, or any number of complaints women routinely have about men.
On the other side, young women, especially Gen Z, are raised to see men (heterosexual men) as predatory, whereas in the queer world anything and everything goes and there are no limits on sex and almost no one is dragged out into the public square and shamed for any of it. Heterosexual men, however, have been mostly muted or dampened in pop culture, and it does seem like women are simply afraid because every man is a predator and every woman is a victim.
Here is how TikTok users have tied Obsession to Voice Memo Guy to paint a picture of men as predatory.
So to me, that is what Obsession reflects as black comedy and satire. I expect some men and some women will see the film completely differently. How did you read the movie? Did you see it as these women do, as a kind of “rapey” movie about how men want to control women, how they always want to rape or assault you, and never want a “normal” relationship?
Obsession is what I think of as stealth storytelling. Horror has become a great way to explore truthful things while staying under the radar of the hive mind that demands all films send the “correct” message and that all people be “correct.” It’s a killer for art and film. The same thing happened in the 1950s with the Hays Code. Filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock flirted with the boundaries, especially Hitchcock, of what you could get away with.
The “Woke Code,” you could call it, isn’t as strict as the Hays Code was. It’s mostly voluntary, which makes it almost scarier. If you are caught out, you are not admired the way, say, Hitchcock might have been. Your career and reputation are destroyed. But the end result is the same. I found deeper themes in films like Weapons and now Obsession that explore truths buried deep beneath the surface.
