Obsession and Backrooms are interesting because at first glance it seems Backrooms has higher memetic payload and will suffuse itself into the culture more successfully. I've seen many people comment on the movie and its themes, it's a movie about how therapy bad, it's a movie about how AI bad, it's a movie about the zoomer experience of growing up in modern society, it's a thematically leaking movie, it's like you described a movie to an alien and asked it to make a movie. All very valid theories, all very interesting, I would even say the movie was written in such a vague way to invite as many of these theories as possible, which is not a good practice, in my opinion. If you have something to say, you should say it directly, being vague is often evidence that you have nothing particularly valuable to say. And people can feel it, the mixed reaction is generally right because people can sense the movie is trying to bait this sort of "elevated theorizing" on it. I never fall for such cheap tricks so the best thing I can say about Backrooms is that the cinematography was great. I actually got jump scared twice, and it's not even a scary movie, compared to Obsession which jump scared me exactly zero times, even though it had plenty of them. So it's a great testament to Kane Parsons as a director.
obsession was the first of the modern "horror movie as simple literal moral fable"s I've seen that honored each side's perspective and responsibility for the phenomena in question, rather than being one-sided and therefore overly political and narrow. great film, great work of art, great
But I think this tweet captures why Obsession is actually the movie that will last longer because it does feel like a simple moral fable that is fair to both sides of the argument and thus survives scrutiny over time. The writer is not baiting you with vagueness or false information, the writer is showing you some truth (a certain dynamic of male/female relationships that's common in society now) and then building a story off that true dynamic that's useful to both sides of it. I already went over how the movie does this in my previous posts about Obsession, and while I don't know if RonenV here means it in exactly the same way I do, he probably does.
Another movie I watched recently that also does this sort of thing well is the new He-Man movie. That movie's theme is masculinity, what it means to be a real man and so on, and it does a great job at balancing the negative and positive male archetypes, as well as the female ones where they matter. One of the scenes I liked the most, that's most illustrative of the attention to detail the writers paid thematically here, is the one where Skeletor grabs his evil witch by the arm forcefully and she gets visibly horny about it. Then, in the end, after He-Man becomes a Real Man, there's a focus on her looking at him with desire but reluctantly so. She was fully into it with Skeletor, she was reluctantly into it with He-Man. It's perfect!
Skeletor represents the tyrannical masculine, dominant (decisive, confident, in his frame, emotionally stable) and aggressive (unpredictable, angry, cruel, forceful), and that combination is what his evil witch is attracted to. I mentioned before how because I look like I'm from a favela, I attract a certain niche of girls (and bottom men) which is the same as the relationship that Skeletor's evil witch has to him. Usually they're broken girls in one way or another who have not properly integrated the masculine within them, and that comes out as desire for the overly aggressive male. Sure, they want me to fucking slap them, choke them, step on their heads as I fuck them from behind, that's fine, that's normal even, I exist to serve. But then if you decide to be a real sick bastard, a truly evil motherfucker, and you decide to impose your actual twisted desires on them, kissing missionary while saying I love you, they actually complain. Like, what the fuck? Women, am I right?
This is why the witch is reluctantly attracted to He-Man after he transforms. She is attracted to him physically, he's a tanned blonde God of beautifully sculpted muscles, but she isn't attracted to him mentally. An integrated man is dominant but has his aggression under control, which means there's less surface area for her tyrant-animus projection to collide with, and that translates to less attraction. An integrated woman, when faced with Skeletor-like signals, has a negative reaction, "that guy is probably going to kill me, I need to get away," whereas an unintegrated woman when faced with the same signals will have a positive one, "that guy is probably going to kill me, that's so hot."
The movie's writers getting this archetypal representation right for this sub-sub-character who has so few scenes available to her is evidence that they're paying attention, which they are, because they also got every other archetype right too. The entire movie is archetypally correct across all levels that matter for its themes. This doesn't mean it's the best movie I've ever seen, it's a movie, it works, its writing is correct, if you're going to the movies and you have no preference on what to watch, it's a safe pick. Obsession, on the other hand, is a must-watch, as it's likely going to penetrate the culture deeply.