Movie Night! ‘Winding Down…’ Edition

My last day of employment, in my current role, is actually on Monday but that’s a Bank Holiday so… My last working day is tomorrow and, it all feels about as weird as you’d expect. I’m just tying up all the loose ends now and there’s not else left to do after that. Daily work stuff continues to move forwards but it is slowly leaving me behind and while that’s only to be expected, it still feels odd. Oh well, just a couple of days to go until the weekend and then I can stop ;o)

In the meantime, reading has been a little difficult to focus on, this week, so I’ve broken it up a little with a few movies here and there. There have been a whole load of rewatches (I won’t go into those here, lets just say that they involved alligators) but I did make time for a a couple of ‘first time viewings’; one excellent and the other… Not so much… That’s better than my usual success rate though so I’ll take it :o) Let me tell you about them…

‘Obsession’ (2025)

After breaking the mysterious ‘One Wish Willow’ to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.

I’ll kick this one off by saying ‘wow, that was intense’ but also that I have no sympathy for Bear whatsoever. If you’re going to wish for someone to fall in love with you and not give them any say in the matter… Well, you deserve a wish that’s interpreted a little too literally. Don’t get me wrong, some scary shit happens to Bear and the movie leaves you in no doubt of that. Bear’s story is just very much one of ‘be careful what you wish for’, rather than anything else.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder whose obsession the title of the film is referring to…

Nikki though… Her journey is chilling as we watch her suffer under the influence of a wish that she never even saw coming. Inde Navarette puts in a real star performance, switching effortlessly between manipulative and just plain out of control, often in the same breath. It’s the moments where her real personality comes through though, that really show us what has been done to Nikki and add a note of tragedy that runs alongside the chills and the scares.

I tend to stay away from films that run over ninety minutes but I’m really glad I made an exception for ‘Obsession’, a film that ended up really getting under my skin and one that I had to keep watching, especially when it became clear how it had to end.

‘Random Acts of Violence’ (2019)

Todd Walkley and his publisher Ezra made their careers crafting a comic book based on a real-life serial killer called Slasherman. On a press tour to announce the launch of their final issue, they visit the town where Slasherman wreaked havoc twenty years earlier. Upon their arrival, a series of new murders unfold… murders that look eerily familiar to imagery in Todd's Slasherman comics.

Now I’m not a hundred percent sure what happened her. That blurb promised just the kind of film that I’d enjoy but when it came round to actually watching it… I pretty much tuned out. The kills were decent enough, and the aftermath for each was definitely eye-catching, it was just the leadup that felt a bit flat. The kind of leadup that turned ‘Random Acts of Violence’ from something potentially excellent into something that I had one eye on while I was doing other stuff. The ‘big reveal’ wasn’t bad, just a little too heavy handed to be really effective.

‘Random Acts of Violence’ wasn’t a bad movie, just one that ended up becoming ‘background noise’. I checked it out but I can’t see myself watching it again.