Obsession

[Frank Cox]

I'm a bit surprised nobody else has started a review thread here for Obsession.

This is pretty much Fatal Attraction for today's young people. And it's very good.

The actress who portrays Nikki (Inde Navarrette) does an extraordinary job of portraying the character. Her facial expressions are remarkable, and her ability to instantly bounce between coherent and insanely manic is what makes the movie work.

I played Backrooms a few weeks ago and liked that one quite a bit, but Obsession is better yet.

The new generation of young movie directors (at least these two guys) are really hitting it out of the park.

[Jim Cassedy]

We ran a studio preview of OBSESSION back in early May, and had the director and the main
star for a Q&A. It did fairly well when it opened several weeks later, and the crowds seemed
to like it. While I haven't seen the movie, during the preview, I noticed how dark it was. I'm
not talking about the plot- - I'm referring to the the director or cinematographer's decision to
use low key lighting, and the fact that in many shots I saw on screen during a tech-check,
the actors were back-lit with their faces often in shadow. We were running it in BARCO HDR,
and we received several e-mails or questions from customers about the dark image. One
customer even questioned if we had somehow accidentally run the non-HDR version and
also asked about when the last time was that our projector was calbrated. ( Just for the
record, I could not have run the wrong version, because at that time, we didn't even have
a non-HDR version in house. And if we had run the HDR version using the standard
playback macro, it would have looked so awful that we would have had gotten numerous
complaints about it. As for calibration, a BARCO tech had been on site about a week
earlier and checking light levels was just one of the things he did while at the theater.
Some simple Google-ing turned up several threads on Reddit and elsewhere where
people were commenting about the lighting. (or lack of it) I think the HDR actually
exaggerated the low key/backlighting style the filmmaker decided to use, and this
was probably one movie where the 'standard' version looked better than the HDR.

[Chris Haller]

I saw Obsession in our smallest house at the time with an NEC NP-NC2003ML and it looked great; it was dark, but there was good contrast and it felt very watchable to me outside of like the bedroom scenes, which were dark on purpose. Our audiences are not terrible discerning when it comes to picture quality, but as our resident projection manager, I thought it was quite watchable in SDR. I wonder if the HDR version really leans into the blacks in a way that the standard DCP doesn't.

Also man that NC2003ML is such overkill for that small a screen. I tried to pitch moving it to our sister theater where a 1402L is struggling to power their biggest PLF screen ahead of Avatar and was basically ignored. Such is the way of things.