There are few things more satisfying than sitting in a room full of people genuinely excited to collectively watch something. They understand the assignment. They are there to watch, to listen, to sink into the experience for two uninterrupted hours without treating the cinema like their living room. Odeon Cinemas Group’s recent Scream Unseen screening was an absolute dream and, if anything, proof that audiences who actually want to watch films still exist. There should be far more screenings designed around that idea alone.

The only problem is that most people probably do not realise how loud they actually are.

This month’s mystery screening turned out to be Obsession and, honestly, the moment the final trailer revealed itself to be for the film we were about to watch, my heart sank. My eyes rolled so hard I nearly saw the projection booth. It immediately felt like the kind of film that could not survive being explained in a sentence or two and, worse still, one where the trailer had probably already revealed every meaningful turn before the opening credits had even rolled.

It had.

That is what makes Obsession so frustrating. Buried somewhere underneath the paper-thin plotting, self-serious pacing and endless lingering shots is a genuinely interesting idea. In another set of hands, this could have been a nasty little psychological horror about vanity, impulsive desire and the horrifying lengths people will go to in pursuit of superficial fulfilment. Instead, the film drags an 80-minute idea well past breaking point.

Every time the story threatens to become interesting, it pulls away from itself. Rather than building tension or deepening its characters, Obsession repeatedly falls back on bursts of gore to keep the audience engaged. To be fair, some of those moments are brilliant. When the film commits to horror, it lands hard enough to make you briefly forget the hour of bum-ache-inducing nothingness surrounding it. The problem is that a handful of effective sequences cannot carry a film this hollow.

What makes the disappointment even worse is how perfectly suited the setup is for psychological horror. With its limited cast and confined locations, this should feel claustrophobic and deeply unnerving. Instead, the film mistakes silence for tension and lingering for depth. No relationship develops enough to become compelling, no revelation lands with the weight it should and every time the plot looks ready to properly thicken, the film seems terrified of committing to it.

There are still flashes of vision throughout, and I do genuinely respect what Curry Barker achieved on what was reportedly a very tight budget. Some sequences are executed so well that you briefly catch sight of the far better film hiding underneath all of this. But as a standalone story, Obsession never fully justifies itself. The script feels strangely empty, the performances rarely demand emotional investment and before long I found myself accepting that this was less a film designed to hold your attention than one built for audiences half-scrolling through their phones.

Oddly, despite all of this, I would still watch a sequel. The ending delivers a genuinely fantastic gut punch and briefly hints at the far more interesting film hiding underneath everything that came before it.

Because the premise itself has real potential. A wider, nastier and more ambitious version of this story, one exploring multiple realities and branching consequences born from a single impulsive act, could genuinely become something memorable. That is perhaps the most frustrating thing about Obsession: not that it is irredeemably awful, but that you can constantly see the outline of a much better film trapped inside it, desperately trying to claw its way out.