Decades from now, when audiences look back at the year 2026 in movies, it’s difficult to not think that Obsession will be a point of fixation. Curry Barker’s small-budget horror film became one of the biggest breakouts of not just this year, but the past several years in movies. A huge part of how the film accomplished this was through positive word-of-mouth and through the skillful crafting and utilization of online discourse in the film’s own marketing.
For example, the now iconic “no, no, no, no” dinner scene from the film was released as a clip online the same weekend the film opened and became a viral meme within hours. This led to the film breaking containment and becoming a fixture of online discussions well before the majority of people had even seen the film. This led to people checking out the film to become a part of a pop-cultural moment and participate in the wide-ranging discussion of the film, how it got made, and the themes it grapples with.
Obsession’s second weekend gross was higher than its opening weekend gross as a result of this, an upward trend that persisted for several more weeks and simply doesn’t happen in the modern age. However, several months removed from all of this now, some of the more negative long-term side effects of all of this are now coming into clearer view, and one of the biggest of these has been the internet’s incessant infatuation with star Inde Navarrette.
It’s not exactly a stretch to see why people are fixating on Navarrette. She’s a young woman who is incredibly charming and obscenely talented. Even prior to Obsession’s release, the buzz coming out of the film’s festival debut months earlier was that the film was impressive and that Navarrette’s turn as Nikki was outright iconic. When the film finally premiered for general audiences, all of that early positivity turned out to be completely warranted, with Navarrette’s performance being incredibly impressive.
Prior to her role in Obsession, Navarrette had been a struggling actress, having appeared in shows like 13 Reasons Why and Superman & Lois in minor roles. But by putting her front-and-center as the face of the film in the vast majority of the marketing materials and especially the would-be-viral online stuff, Navarrette was catapulted quite suddenly to a whole new level of exposure. For her part, she seems to have handled the whole thing quite well, adapting to this new level of fame with relative grace. Just last week, it was announced that she is now going to be starring as Rogue in the Marvel Studio’s new X-Men film, and this seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for many people online.
In the modern, hyper-saturated digital age, people have strong opinions about seemingly everything and have multiple platforms through which to share those opinions at length. One of the trends that has emerged in recent years is a vehement backlash towards anyone who is garnering success or is in multiple projects within a certain period of time. We’ve seen this in recent years with Pedro Pascal and Zendaya. Now, that same reaction is occurring with Inde Navarrette, wherein people online seem to feel as if they’ve seen too much of her, and those who once championed her rise to fame with Obsession are now turning on her.
This is all ridiculous. There’s been a whole lot of discourse in the past few weeks about rumored projects that Navarrette was offered but chose to turn down in favor of X-Men, and to be perfectly frank, that’s just not anyone’s business but hers. This is indicative of the whole parasocial element of modern fame and success; people feel as though because they watched Navarrette’s rise to this level in real-time, they have some sort of authority relating to her.
I do not know Inde Navarrette, and neither do you. She does not owe anyone on any social media platform anything, and people would be well served to remember that in relation to any and all such performers. It’s completely fine to be a fan and be passionate about a given piece of art or a performer, but it's something else entirely when you begin to feel entitled to dictate details about those things.
If only there was a recent successful movie that was entirely about how becoming so infatuated with someone and attempting to impose your own perception of that individual upon a real, three-dimensional, complex human being could be dangerous for all parties involved… if only there was a film about such an obsession, that online people could look to and actually engage with on a substantial level, rather than just scratching the surface for the purposes of memes and pedantic plot summaries. If only.
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