The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and gore-heavy shockers before, so I don’t understand how anyone can figure this is the best movie of the year. To me, the extremely high Letterboxd reviews tell a story not about the film’s overall quality but about the filmmaker’s popularity with an online generation. 

Perhaps the greatest signifier that I may simply be losing my grip on what makes a movie good or bad is what a great time I had with $0 budget indie Ramekin, a 70-minute single location horror thriller with a main cast of three unknown actors that’s currently floating around on Tubi. College student Emily (Jamie Saunders) is living in an awful sublet situation when she gets a call from her mother letting her know that her reclusive grandmother on the other side of NYC has died. Emily takes up residence in her late grandmother’s home and becomes immediately fascinated with a very normal looking ramekin, which then starts to appear in random parts of the apartment. Emily comes to realize there’s something supernatural going on when she is physically unable to throw the thing out of a window, and when it prevents her from leaving. The two manage to communicate somewhat via Emily’s questions and the ramekin’s slight movements, which eventually leads to an altercation over the ramekin’s insistence on watching the shy, self-conscious Emily shower. As an apology, the ramekin begins to offer her gifts in the form of cupcakes and cash which it manifests within itself, and plays music for her, all of which allow the ramekin to slowly infiltrate her mind. 

Under the ramekin’s influence, Emily devotes all of her time to composing poetry, most of it containing violent imagery about blood and death. In fugue states, she holds a knife to her own throat and destroys upholstery. She also becomes utterly narcissistic, continuously praising her beauty, her body, and her creative work. This leads to a schism between her and her best friend, a lovely but dim-witted girl named Jane (Renee Adrienne Vito) who speaks with a Valley Girl’s vernacular. At the same time, Emily befriends Mark (Adriano La Rocca), the neighbor who had previously brought Emily’s grandmother her mail and took out her trash for her, who somehow overlooks all of Emily’s strange behaviors because of his interest in her. When Emily finally goes too far, Mark breaks off contact, but is lured back inside for a final visit, during which Emily kills him, pouring his blood into the ramekin, which seems to drink it. Things only get stranger from there. 

Ramekin is an odd duck. If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is what makes it so strange. Even at seventy minutes, it threatens to get repetitive at times, especially in the sequence in which Emily continuously moves the ramekin to the dish drying rack only for it to reappear on the kitchen table; despite this, I never grew bored with it. I can only assume that the ramekin itself was moved around with magnets, and all of its other special abilities, like manifesting money and sweets, occur between cuts. I can see this easily being a film that other people will find boring or dull, but the performances by its nonprofessional actors are utterly compelling. I love that the actor portraying Mark has bad skin, and that I can’t tell if Jane’s overreliance on “like” as a placeholder word is a scripting choice or just something that came from the performer. Jamie Saunders is tasked with carrying this entire narrative with only an Ikea dish as her scene partner, and she manages to do it with aplomb. The jokes here land, and although one is never truly frightened by the ramekin, it’s still effectively creepy when it needs to be. My only real problem with the film overall is that it ends with an “all just a dream” fakeout, which I think was unnecessary. Just let it end on the bummer ending! I feel completely alone in my apathetic-to-negative reaction to Obsession, but if you’re like me, you may find more to love in this genuinely original oddball cheapie about obsessive behavior.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond