I liked Obsession, though it felt very similar to Talk to Me
I just got out of my showing of Obsession. It was a great film, but it felt oddly like a film I had seen already. I figured out this is because it reminds me so much of the story structure and premise of Talk to Me (2022) while somehow feeling less profound and "smart" with its concept.
I'm curious if others picked up on the similiarities between the two films:
• Both films introduce us to a supernatural object or product that is a viral sensation in the film's world
• The main character interacts with this supernatural object to get something they want:
in Obsession the main character wants to get the girl he likes to love him. in Talk to Me, the main character wants to speak to her recently passed mother again.
of course, both of these wishes come with a catch and side effects.
• Both of the main characters start to regret their choice + circumstance, but each of them routinely switch back and forth between resisting + giving into their temptation that this object is providing to them.
• Both main characters become addicted to getting what they wanted, brushing off their friends' concerns and falling further into a delusion that they could somehow make their circumstance fit into their lives despite the repeated red flags and disturbing happenings.
• Both characters confide in the original source of where they got the object from and aren't given help.
• Both of the characters' choices essentially sacrifice someone close to them and replaces them with some otherworldly demon or spirit.
• Both of the sacrificed / possessed / replaced characters are implied to have been sent to somewhere else. Talk to Me visually shows us some kind of hellish place where the friend's little brother is being held hostage, while in Obsession we hear what seems to be the real Nikki suffering on the phone.
• In both films a proposed solution to break this scenario is to kill the person possessed.
• Both films have the main character die at the end for the person originally taken control of to be freed.
• Both films seem to also converge paths on meditating on loss and filling a void (with something unhealthy and detrimental to people around you) despite their main diffrentiator being a romantic versus familial void.
These are the similarities I noticed, I'd be very curious to see if those involved with Obsession took some inspiration from Talk to Me. I enjoyed both films but I found almost everything about Obsession predictable, maybe because so much of its story beats and structure feel like something familiar, since it feels like Talk to Me did a lot of first (and I'd argue better)
This isn't to say that the social commentary that's there in Obsession doesn't land, I just felt Talk to Me took bigger swings and hits harder emotionally with its concept in ways that surprised me and felt unexpected.