Warning: Spoilers for the movie Obsession are ahead!

Even if you haven’t seen the horror blockbuster Obsession, you’ve probably seen breakout star Inde Navarrette’s face. And you’ve most likely seen it sunken into an exaggerated frown. This is the expression that spawned a thousand memes, the most viral of which have become a canvas for men’s sexist attitudes toward women. There’s the one caption that says “how your gf looks at you when you ask her to block the guy who ‘raped’ her in 2019” (168,000 likes). There’s another version of this meme where they’ve made the character look visibly overweight, probably using AI, and changed the caption to “Her best friend at the bar when you introduce yourself” (116,000 likes).

Obsession is ostensibly a cautionary tale about male entitlement. It features a young man, Bear, who is too cowardly to admit his feelings for his friend Nikki. In a moment of frustration, he turns to a cheap novelty toy he bought at a crystal shop called a One Wish Willow. “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more then anyone in the entire world,” he pleads, unintentionally unleashing vast supernatural power and setting off a chain of events that will lead to his destruction.

On the surface, it’s the anti-incel horror movie of a generation. But the film’s aesthetics were almost instantly adopted into the canon of viral misogynistic rhetoric. As I wrestled with that, it led to me to consider that Obsession—as a story, as a cultural phenomenon, and as a new generation of Hollywood icons—may not be about women’s liberation at all.

The story of Obsession’s success is a remarkable one. It’s the only original film besides E.T. to actually increase ticket sales from its second and third weekends outside the holiday season. It was written, directed, and edited by a 26-year-old YouTuber named Curry Barker, who initially just hoped it would get distributed on the indie horror streaming service Shudder. Instead, it became a box office legend. (Alongside the success of Backrooms and Iron Lung, we’re living through a stratospheric moment in YouTube horror history.)

I knew I had to see this movie in theaters, and I dutifully dragged along my brother and my fiancée, who did not sleep for a week afterward (I’m sorry, Anna). I’ve been a horror fanatic since I was a kid and gave myself night terrors watching The Twilight Zone. I love the genre so much, even when it feels like the genre does not love me back. I’ve seen countless women brutalized onscreen in ways that haunt me, sometimes because these scenes mirror the actual crisis of gender-based violence. It’s not always pure fantasy. Sometimes it’s a reflection of real misogyny and real torment of women.

Initially, Obsession felt different. It seemed self-aware. Yes, the extreme physical violence was disproportionately against women—like basically all genres of film for decades. But the context for these scenes felt like a subversion of the norm. After Nikki bashes her friend Sarah’s face into a brick 22 times until her eyeball is hanging out of her skull (for the crime of being attracted to her boyfriend), she slinks over to where Bear is sitting in shock and reminds him “This is your fault.” And it is! It literally is his fault! But as I watched the reactions to Obsession, I realized that a lot of other people were viewing it differently.

Of course, there are always going to be men posting on Reddit about how the obvious male villain is actually the victim. But a more benign and troubling point came from all the warnings I saw shared online that Obsession could trigger people based on how Nikki was acting. A fair number of people, including some established critics, suggested that her character was acting how an abusive woman with Borderline Personality Disorder might in a relationship. I was immediately reminded of how real-life women like Amber Heard have been diagnosed from afar with conditions like BPD to explain how they’re the real abusers. In reality, BPD is not inherently correlated with physical violence (it certainly does not turn someone into a psycho killer), but our inclination to distrust and blame women who are being abused has reinforced stigmas around reacting to that abuse and having conditions like BPD.

Before Nikki starts killing people, her insecurities and attachment to Bear do escalate in the way I can imagine could be triggering to someone who has been in a toxic or abusive relationship. But Nikki is the victim of Bear’s abuse, not the other way around. I can’t help but connect this back to all the stories of real women who are labeled abusers because they had normal reactions to their male partner abusing them. In this case, Bear has trapped Nikki in a psychological prison. It’s based on a supernatural plot twist, but that level of emotional distress isn’t too dissimilar from the dynamic of real abusive relationships. Real victims do sometimes respond in ways that seem, well, “crazy.” Sometimes real-life outsiders don’t have the context to see that a “crazy” woman is actually a victim of abuse, but Obsession viewers do!

Seeing those viral Nikki memes that undermine women’s rape allegations and mock the idea of the “fat friend” initially felt at odds with the feminist premise of Obsession. But is the movie truly a feminist portrayal of an abusive relationship? I’d argue no. It’s a choice to depict a woman stripped of her autonomy as an increasingly violent monster, one that may seem empowering but actually feeds directly back into the victim-blaming rhetoric that dominates our culture.

Navarrette said she was inspired by Mia Goth’s now-iconic portrayal of an isolated, suppressed young woman in rural 1918 Texas becoming violent and unhinged in Pearl. I can see the similarities, and in both cases, these performances stem from realistic conditions that women are subjected to throughout history. I love Pearl, but after seeing real victims compared to her in the comments of TikTok videos, it has reminded me that audiences are not necessarily capable of separating the “crazy woman” archetype from real women.

This doesn’t mean Obsession is a bad movie. It’s a phenomenal film on multiple fronts. It’s witty, engaging, hilarious at times, terrifying at others, packed with technical prowess and bolstered by exceptional acting. If I graded movies solely on whether they were feminist or if their audiences understood them, I would end up with a pretty tiny collection I actually enjoyed. And on the flip side, I can even find feminism in movies that had no intention of being that way.

Take the 2007 horror/comedy Teeth, which is one of my favorite movies and one that makes me want to throw up every time I watch it. It’s rife with scenes of sexual violence, some of which are played for laughs. But the revenge element of vagina dentata and the harsh critique of religious purity culture within the film make it meaningful to me and lots of other women. Finally we get some truly violent comeuppance in a narrative that accurately, if offensively, portrays just how much sexual violence women and girls encounter on a regular basis throughout their lives. I won’t spoil the ending of Teeth, but it’s way more satisfying than what happens to the male characters in Obsession. Their deaths are quick and painless compared to the endless torture Nikki suffers.

Another question about feminism and film is what happens offscreen and who is elevated by the success of movies like Obsession. Navarrette and Barker are probably the biggest winners, at least so far. Navarrette’s social media following has exploded, there’s early Oscar buzz for her performance (which I fear is unlikely, because the Academy tends to overlook horror, but that’s for another newsletter), and she’s already clinched another starring role in a music video by Taylor Swift’s favorite new artist Sombr. People also figured out that she actively likes Johnny Depp’s Instagram posts, which is pretty disappointing, but I’m not really surprised. I think we have a long way to go before the masses understand the damage wrought by Depp’s DARVO campaign. I’m not expecting Navarrette to be our next feminist thought leader, and I also don’t think she needs to be #ended over this. And she won’t be. She’ll be better than fine. (We can also do without the “everything Inde Navarrette has ever done wrong” threads based on a handful of social media actions, though. Criticize and move on!)

When it comes to Barker’s success, I am genuinely happy for him. Really. I mean, I show up for these movies. I bring people to them. I talk and write about them. And I will also say it is a little painful to hear about the “club” for male horror directors that there are no women in, when the appearance of women’s suffering onscreen is what created the club. I would love to see Coralie Fargeat, who wrote and directed The Substance, join the club—which to be clear, is an amorphous community of male horrors directors befriending and lifting each other up, along with the media ecosystem that showers them with praise and ensures hype, buzz, and future opportunities. I would also love to see Nikyatu Jusu, Karyn Kusama, Zelda Williams, and other women filmmakers join this kind of club. Imagine a take on Obsession from a woman and how it might depict these same themes.

As I perform this kind of cultural critique, I’m always thinking about what I can do personally to help change things. Watching more women-led and directed horror films? Check. Creating more buzz for them myself? I’d love to, so stay tuned for this upcoming fall season when I have some plans forming for how I can do that. The last thing I’ll leave you with is this new piece from Rayne Fisher-Quann about the misplaced urgency behind a lot of culture writing about gender. It is so good and has already impacted the way I’m thinking and writing. Now, if you’re in the pathway of this heat wave, please stay cool and safe out there!