We’ve all done it. Some idle Tuesday, midway through your third scroll past a photograph of someone who is never, ever going to love you, you’ll have caught yourself thinking: but what if they just… did? What if the universe, in a rare fit of generosity, simply reached down and rewired another human being’s heart so that it beat — helplessly, permanently — for you? It’s a lovely little fantasy. It lasts about four seconds, until your conscience turns up like a disappointed PE teacher. And it is, once you’ve stripped the wallpaper off, quite possibly the single most horrifying thing a person can wish for. Which is precisely the wallpaper Curry Barker has stripped, with enormous relish, in Obsession.

Here is the pitch, and I’d like you to notice how ancient it is. Lonely lad fancies girl. Lonely lad acquires cursed novelty tat — here a “One Wish Willow”, which is essentially a monkey’s paw that’s been to a farmers’ market — and wishes that girl would love him more than anyone else alive. Girl duly does. That’s it. That’s the monkey’s paw: the oldest, mouldiest, most-thumbed premise in the entire horror cupboard, the one W.W. Jacobs coughed up in 1902 and which everyone from Tales from the Crypt to The Simpsons has been quietly reheating ever since. If you have ever owned a television, you have seen this story roughly nine hundred times. There is nothing new here. Nothing.

…and yet.

What Barker grasps — and what the old portmanteau spook-shows never quite allowed themselves to — is that the monkey’s paw was always more upsetting than Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt were willing to let it be. Those were morality tales delivered with a wink: a greedy toff gets his comeuppance, the Crypt Keeper cackles, roll credits, everyone’s home in time for cocoa. Obsession declines the wink. It takes the identical setup and then simply refuses to look away, following the wish clean past its ironic punchline and into genuinely distressing country, where “she loves you now” curdles into something nearer to a hostage situation. Nikki (played by Inde Navarrette, who is frankly doing more acting than the budget strictly paid for) flickers between adoring Stepford girlfriend and something with far too many teeth, and the film’s real horror isn’t the violence. It’s the ghastly logic of a person whose entire self has been overwritten to want you. It’s the ex who won’t leave, who keys your car, dialled up to cosmic.

And yeah, it’s funny. You’ll laugh, you’ll feel faintly weird about laughing, and here’s the reassuring part: that’s entirely the point. Barker is a sketch comedian by trade — one half of a YouTube double act, which is apparently now a legitimate route to a feature deal, God help us all — and the humour is deliberate to the last twitch. It’s the awful little comedy of a man too polite and too quietly pleased with himself to undo the catastrophe he’s personally ordered, fussing about the edges of a nightmare he technically requested at the till. It’s the specific cringe of watching someone receive exactly what they asked for and slowly realise they now have to live inside it. Think less “jump scare”, more “watching a mate dig himself into a hole at a party while you’re powerless to intervene”. The laughs and the dread aren’t fighting each other. They’re the same muscle.

The genuinely staggering bit, the thing destined for the trivia bins for years, is that this entire nasty little marvel was assembled for roughly the price of a mid-range hatchback, under a million dollars, and has since gone and made several hundred million. Because the ticket-buying public have finally twigged that they’d rather watch one good idea executed with conviction than the ninth sequel to something with a colon in the title (ARE YOU LISTENING, HOLLYWOOD?). Between this and the whole Backrooms racket, we appear to be living through the year that cinema remembered “cheap and confident” comprehensively beats “expensive and frightened”.

Is it a masterpiece? Nah, of course not. It’s a very old joke told exceptionally well by someone who understood (correctly) that the joke was always secretly a horror story. It sags in the middle, where the lad’s passivity tips over from “characterisation” into “why are you still just standing there, you berk”, and if you march in demanding novelty you’ll trudge out grumbling, because the bones of this thing are older than your nan. But go in wanting a lean, mean, genuinely horrible little cautionary tale, propped up by a properly unnerving central performance and a nasty streak of comedy, and you’ll have a grand old time feeling appalled.

Recommended — just don’t go to watch it with your crush. Awkward.

Have you ever been stuck in an office waiting room, or a job centre, or literally any furniture shop after 4pm on a wet Tuesday? You’ll know it when you think of a fluorescent bulb buzzing its own death rattle above your head, carpet the colour of pus, a hum you can’t place, and the slow but certain realisation that, yes, you’ve been here before, you’ve always been here, and nobody—nobody—is coming to collect you.

If that’s you, congratulations, you have experienced the Backrooms and I’ve just saved you twelve quid and a tepid cinema hot dog.

Because that is, essentially, the film. Backrooms, the movie, is 110 minutes of exactly that sensation, projected at you as a screen-size rectangle of piss yellow. Whether you walk out of the cinema stunned or in shambles depends on exactly one variable: how much homework did you do beforehand?

Here’s the thing—this is a gatekept film. It’s got at least a decade of internet mythology behind it. There are wiki entries, YouTube videos (ironically, where the director started) and endless fan-lore about “noclipping” out of reality and wandering through levels like a haunted IKEA. This film assumes you’ve already absorbed all of it. If you have, the film hums along on a frequency only you can hear. The damp corridors and sputtering lights are a little dog-whistle of recognition and you sit there, nodding like a berk, going “ah, yes, of course” while the uninitiated side-eye you like you’re speaking in tongues.

I only know this because I was that nodding berk. I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know the lore, so I sat in the dark feeling very smug and included. My partner, meanwhile, whom I had foolishly dragged along on the promise of “a scary one” spent the full one hour fifty minutes in a state of building bafflement. At about ninety minutes, she leaned over and ask, “is this it?” — that’s the review. That’s the whole film in three words, delivered by a lovely lady who was promised a monster and received a corridor.

And it IS a corridor, and endless one. The direction is competent enough—more than competent, really, I see why Kane Parsons is getting his reputation. There’s a genuine eye for the specific dread of empty office space, like a 1994 insurance firm from which every human has been quietly raptured mid-photocopy. The acting is fine. The story is there, technically, doing its best under the circumstances, though story is a generous word for what is largely a person walking toward a door and then reconsidering. It’s confusing in patches, but upon that there is a point of mercy—it’s not a fault. The confusion is the whole point. Complaining that Backrooms is disorienting is like complaining a swimming pool is damp. That’s what you’re paying for.

The monsters, when they finally decide to enter the shot, are perfectly acceptable. Nicely designed, nicely rendered, the sort of thing that would have you soiling your beanbag at fourteen. They even got the bloke from Alien: Romulus to portray one of them, which makes sense since the bloke is the size of a doorframe. But, and I stress this point, the film is not scary. It’s eerie, sure, it’s unsettling in the way a long, unexplained train journey is unsettling. But scares need rhythm, contrast, and Backrooms has committed so completely to its single droning note that by the time anything lurches out of the wallpaper you’re too hypnotised by the skirting board to flinch. It’s horror as ambient noise.

That brings us nicely to the real problem—one that isn’t the film’s fault at all—and it really annoys me that this review sits back-to-back with Sinners. The hype. Somewhere along the line the internet decided this was the next generational event, like a Citizen Kane of liminal dread, and so audiences are now trooping in expecting to have their skulls rearranged and then trooping out muttering “well, it was alright, I suppose” which is the single saddest sentence in the human language. Because it is alright, it’s fine. It would’ve made a fantastic season of Channel Zero. But it’s a perfectly serviceable, occasionally beautiful film about being lost in a building (and losing yourself) and it never once asked to be a masterpiece. We simply decided it had to be one and then took the hump when it turned out to be a solid seven.

So in conclusion, know the lore and there’s plenty to chew on. Don’t, and you’ll spend the best part of two hours watching a man being let down by a wall, which, now I think about it, is exactly what my wife was doing.

Overall, meh. But a really handsomely photographed meh.

Sinners is a perfectly adequate film – but that’s it, adequate.

It’s not completely shit. The acting is perfectly fine – nobody embarrasses themselves, nobody phones it in. Michael B. Jordan does his thing, everyone else does their thing, and things generally get done adequately. The music is surprisingly decent too, which is more than you can say for most films these days, where the soundtrack sounds like it was composed by someone having a nervous breakdown in a synthesiser shop.

But bloody hell, this thing is about 30 minutes too long. Maybe more. It’s like watching someone tell a perfectly good joke and then spend another half hour explaining why it was funny, complete with PowerPoint slides and audience participation segments.

You can feel where a decent 90-minute film is trying to escape from the bloated 2-hour monster it’s been trapped inside. The first 45 minutes is all set-up. Every scene goes on just a bit too long, every conversation includes about three more exchanges than necessary, and by the end you’re checking your watch wondering if time has actually stopped moving.

But there were three things in particular that bugged me about this film.

First up, we’ve got the classic “one person does something monumentally stupid that puts everyone at risk” scenario. In this case, someone invites the vampires in, because apparently nobody in this film has ever seen a vampire movie before. It’s like watching someone stick their hand in a blender and then acting surprised when it doesn’t end well.

Then there’s the antagonist, who spends precious time delivering what amounts to a TED talk about his evil plans instead of just getting on with the evil bit. Look mate, we get it, you’re the bad guy, you’ve got motivations and backstory and probably daddy issues. Just get on with the murdering, yeah? The monologuing thing stopped being clever sometime around the first Austin Powers film.

But here’s the really mental bit – even without all the villainous chat, the plan still makes no bloody sense. He’s going to burn anyway? What was the strategy there exactly? Stand around explaining things until sunrise? It’s like watching someone play chess by explaining their moves to their opponent for twenty minutes before actually making them.

The whole thing follows the “everyone gets laid and dies” formula with the reliability of a Swiss watch. You can practically tick them off: character development, bit of romance, sexy times, immediate death. It’s so predictable you could set your calendar by it.

The setting and costumes are fine enough – period pieces generally look good because someone’s put effort into making sure the buttons are historically accurate and the dirt is appropriately distributed. But looking nice isn’t the same as being interesting, which seems to be something this film hasn’t quite grasped.

What’s most frustrating is that there’s clearly a decent film buried somewhere in this overstretched mess. Strip away the padding, tighten up the pacing, maybe don’t have your villain explain his entire life story before getting down to business, and you might have something actually worth watching.

Instead, we get a film that’s been hyped to the bloody moon by people who seem to think “adequate” is the new “brilliant.” Everyone’s acting like this is some kind of game-changing masterpiece, when it’s really just a perfectly serviceable vampire film that’s been inflated like a balloon at a children’s party.

The hype is the real problem here. When everyone’s telling you something is revolutionary cinema, you go in expecting your socks to be knocked clean off. Instead, your socks remain firmly in place, possibly even more securely attached than when you started.

Look, if you go in with properly managed expectations – thinking you’re going to see a decent enough vampire film with good production values and competent performances – you’ll probably have a perfectly acceptable time. If you go in expecting the sort of groundbreaking cinema everyone’s been promising, you’re going to come out wondering what all the fuss was about.

It’s fine, I suppose, but I don’t understand why everyone’s acting like it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread when it’s really more like adequately buttered toast.