In the meantime our screens fill with action and horror: profitable, plentiful, and leaving a particular kind of gap. Which is why Mojoku Hilang, and La Luna before it, are worth stopping on. Two rom-coms, arriving close together, that don’t just revive the form but quietly reshape it.

The reshaping is easiest to see in what these films do with the couple. In Mojoku Hilang, Adi is a corporate man sent undercover to a Perlis kampung to claw back Mojo, a viral cow that the villagers have kidnapped to stall his company’s takeover of their farms. The woman he falls for, Ayu, isn’t a love interest parked beside the plot; she’s the farmer’s daughter leading the resistance, the loudest voice against everything he was sent to do. The romance doesn’t run alongside the community story. It is the community story, compressed into two people on opposite sides of it. That’s the trick the film pulls: you can’t root for the couple without rooting for the kampung, because they’re the same wish.

La Luna works the same idea from the opposite direction. Its inciting incident is a lingerie store opening in Kampung Bras Basah, a village held in place by a stubborn religious leader who won’t permit change, or fun, even as the kampung plainly wants both. The store is a clever device: it forces the film’s real subject, tradition against change, into the open through the whole ensemble rather than a single couple. The romance is seeded early, but the film keeps reeling it back whenever the community’s story needs the floor. It plays less like a romance with a village and more like a village film that happens to contain a romance.

That inversion is the genre’s actual innovation, and it isn’t by accident. The Western rom-com is built around a couple, supporting friends and family are woven in, but the frame stays on the two leads and their particular problem. These films widen the frame. The couple is one thread in a larger fabric of neighbours, elders, outsiders, and the place itself, and the romance reads as organic precisely because it’s never asked to carry the picture alone. It’s a structural choice: put the community in the foreground and the love story stops feeling like formula and starts feeling like real life, where individual journeys are always a small part of something collective.

None of this makes them less rom-coms. It makes them a different species of one: unhurried, ensemble-driven, and unmistakably local without straining to be. They aren’t pitched at a Western market and they don’t feel derivative, because the thing that distinguishes them isn’t a gimmick bolted onto an imported formula. It’s a way of telling stories that were already ours. If this is what Malaysian filmmakers can do by taking a tired genre and running it through our own idea of community, then the drought between great rom-coms might finally be worth the wait. Here’s hoping it won’t be a drought much longer.

Mojoku Hilang is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post What Mojoku Hilang Understands About the Malaysian Rom-Com appeared first on Goggler.

The thing about beauty is that we’re not supposed to care about it. We’re told that beauty is skin-deep; that it’s in the eye of the beholder; that it’s what’s inside that counts. But nobody can deny that beauty is a huge part of myths, and myths about beauty abound even today. Beauty is a critical aspect of any culture — what they prize most in terms of femininity, behaviour, physical desirability. As the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy is the ultimate litmus test for what society values.

In modern Western culture, of which The Odyssey — the ancient epic — is a foundational text, beauty often means what White society considers desirable. No wonder a Black Helen has caused so much distress among the detractors of The Odyssey‘s 2026 film counterpart. Lupita’s obsidian skin is antithetical to their perceptions of physical perfection. For them, white-as-beautiful is not only desirable, it’s inherently natural.

The most recent incarnation of Helen in film was in Troy (2004). Diane Kruger was the face that launched a thousand ships. Kruger, who was born in West Germany, certainly didn’t have the Mediterranean features you’d expect in a Greek woman if historical accuracy was important. But her casting makes sense when you remember that Wolfgang Petersen, who directed Troy, is also German. Clearly, to Petersen, Kruger represented ultimate female beauty. Remember another German who had a big hard-on for Aryan perfection back in the 1940s? Exactly.

Anyway, Hollywood has a long history of miscasting White actors in historically ethnic roles. Anyone remember the hysterical handwringing when Elizabeth Taylor was cast as Cleopatra in 1963? The silence there speaks volumes about how the Hollywood machine decides who belongs and whose bodies are viewed as legitimate. If whiteness is the default setting in Western media and society, it’s unsurprising that the only time criticism arises is when a person of colour is given a supposedly ‘White’ role.

Interestingly, Nyong’o isn’t the first woman of colour to embody Helen. Probably the first to break the mould was, naturally, the original Star Trek, which cast a French-Vietnamese actress named France Nuyen as Elaan of Troyius. And in typical 1960s-style sci-fi, she wore a sparkly silver bikini. And Nyong’o isn’t actually the first Black actress to be Helen. That honour goes to Galyn Görg, who played Helen in Xena: Warrior Princess.

For all that, in all likelihood, Helen of Troy, had she existed and as the Greeks understood her, was probably fair-skinned (not in the Caucasian way we think of today, but Mediterranean). Homer did describe Helen as “white-armed.” But this was shorthand at the time for women of high social status, whose skin was very light because they had the luxury of not working under the sun. True beauty, then, as Homer understood it, was more than skin-deep.

Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world because she was a combination of many qualities the Greeks prized. Beyond physical beauty, she was legendary for her bearing and deportment and for her seductive voice. She had the power to make her husband Menelaus — full of rage and bent on punishing her for abandoning him for Paris — drop his sword and spare her life just by looking at him.

Those who oppose Nyong’o’s casting in Nolan’s The Odyssey should remember that Helen’s race is a non-issue, because there never was a real, historical person, the daughter of Zeus hatched from an egg. Myths are not historical documents. Anyway, just a century ago, Americans didn’t even consider Greeks white. So what’s the big deal about a Black Helen?

What the backlash against Nyong’o reveals is how strongly Euro-centric ideals continue to dominate. I don’t believe Nolan’s decision was politically driven. I think he simply cast one of the best actresses of her generation — and the fact that this reads as a provocation, rather than as obvious, is the whole problem. Helen of Troy is still capable of triggering wars today — cultural wars, that is. Not because of who was cast, but because of who can’t stand to see her cast that way.

Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post The Most Beautiful Woman in the World Was Never White appeared first on Goggler.

The film’s premise is simple: the sheep live in deliberate forgetting. When something hurts, they un-remember. They believe death is a story, that dead shepherds turn into clouds. It’s a coping mechanism dressed as folklore. How many of us have told ourselves tomorrow would come?

Let me start with the CGI as Framestore has done something remarkable here, the sheep look like woolly, vacant and deeply ridiculous sheep but their eyes carry emotion. You forget you’re watching animated animals and start believing a Merino ram can solve a murder.

The pacing is excellent. The first hour, in particular, is a masterclass in balancing mystery, comedy, and genuine heart. Mazin’s screenplay is carefully crafted, every clue lands, every red herring earns its place, and the jokes land without undercutting the stakes. There’s a scene where Mopple refuses to forget a dead sheep, choosing memory over comfort, and I genuinely teared up.

The voice cast is absurdly stacked and delivers beautifully. Louis-Dreyfus gives Lily a bright, determined authority. O’Dowd brings soulful warmth to Mopple. And Cranston’s Sebastian, the black sheep, is gruff, tragic, and ultimately heroic. Special mention to Bella Ramsey as Zora, a high-energy lamb who asks all the right questions. The human characters are fine. Jackman is charming, Thompson is underused, and Galitzine does his best. But honestly? The sheep outshine them at every turn. When you start wishing the humans would get off-screen so you can get back to the woolly detectives, you know the balance is slightly off.

Personally, once the mystery resolves and the film pivots fully to its emotional ending, the pacing stutters just a little. The villain reveal works logically, but the final confrontation feels rushed compared to the leisurely, loving setup. It also tackles the idea of the outsider beautifully. The winter lamb, rejected by the herd but cared for by George, becomes the unlikely hero. The film argues that the loners, the ones pushed to the margins, are often the ones who see clearest. It’s about limitations, too. Lily can’t read, can’t write, can’t speak to humans. But she can observe. She can remember and she can choose not to look away. And yes, it’s also about potential. A flock of sheep solving murder sounds absurd. That’s the point. The film never mocks its characters for trying.

The town of Denbrook is quaint in the best way but the bright, fresh colouring is what stuck with me. Pastoral greens and golden sunlight, with none of the muddy desaturation that plagues so many rural-set films. The animal POV shots are clever without being gimmicky and the mise-en-scène is packed with intentional choices that reward repeat viewing. The costuming, for instance, has colour parallels that serve as a subtle visual Chekhov’s gun. The casting of the human actors mirrors the vocal qualities of their sheep counterparts. Even the muted earth tones and sensible tweeds of the townspeople contrasts with the almost painterly brightness of the sheep’s meadow, reinforcing that the animals see the world in clearer, more vivid colours than the humans who stumble through it.

Look. This is a movie about sheep solving crimes. If they hadn’t done it well, it would have been a tragedy — not for the sheep, but for the rest of us, already starved for anything original. But they did it well. It’s charming, heartwarming, tear-jerking, and unexpectedly profound. It’s a movie worth giving your full attention, because beneath the woolly puns and baaaa-lliant one-liners, there are layers of meaning about memory, loss, and the courage it takes to keep remembering. The film also reached a relatively older audience. Scroll social media and you’ll find a pattern: adults posting tear-stained selfies outside cinemas. Parents wiping their eyes while children remain blissfully unbothered. The movie might have been marketed as a children’s film but it’s not really for children. The film is packaged for the inner child but speaks to the wounded adult… the one who knows some endings aren’t happy, and the best we can do is keep showing up anyway.

I’d had plans with Aunty Mel. She was the family’s archivist. I told her once that when I felt more settled, more human, we’d work on something together. Now she’s gone and I have a project to do with her notes and her voice in my head.

She would have loved the movie.

The Sheep Detectives is now streaming on Prime Video.

The post The Sheep Detectives Is a Children’s Film for the Wounded Adult appeared first on Goggler.

The moment the casting is announced, everything about her gets dissected by men on the internet. She’s over-scrutinised and flamed for anything she says or does, and the hate train that follows always runs on the same three rails: her attitude, her looks, and a flimsy appeal to the “source material.” It ends with review-bombing the film, and with her being blamed for its critical or box-office performance. It happened with Captain Marvel, it happened with Snow White, and now it’s happening with Supergirl.

According to these men, these women are rude, unlikable, or both. Milly Alcock has addressed it head-on: she knows the backlash is coming, she can’t stop it, and it’s become the baseline for “simply existing as a woman” in the superhero space. “Whose opinion do you really care about?” she said. “If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.” Predictably, this was taken personally. Alcock is now rude, unlikable, off-putting — on the strength of two comments. She’s blamed for every failure the film meets, the reasoning being that her personality is what’s driving audiences away. The “attitude” in question is that she stood her ground and said what she thought.

The next one is exactly what it sounds like. They tear down the women’s appearances: she doesn’t look the part, she’s “ugly,” full stop. Alcock’s face has been picked apart, down to her teeth, with comparisons to Cha-ka from Land of the Lost and claims she’s too ugly to sit through a film for. She’s been slotted into a line-up of actresses these men hold “responsible” for the downfall of Hollywood, because a woman is only as good as how hot she looks, and the women in their movies used to be “beautiful.” The catch is that the actresses from those supposedly beautiful eras get shamed too, accused of filler or surgery when they’re either just ageing or were pressured into procedures they were told their careers depended on.

The last card pulled is that these actresses disrespect or ignore the material their film is based on. Alcock admitted she hadn’t seen the 1984 Supergirl — a film most people haven’t seen and are actively advised to skip. That didn’t stop it becoming fuel. Every piece of promotional material got picked over for something usable, even the trivial stuff gets weaponised, like asking why a bulletproof Supergirl has a pierced ear. The point isn’t the pierce; it’s that anything will do when the goal is to doom a film before release because the wrong woman is fronting it.

The through-line is Rachel Zegler. Every Alcock hate-post reaches for her. Zegler ran the same gauntlet when she was cast as Snow White: her looks attacked on announcement, largely because she’s Latina and therefore “not white enough” for a line the film changed and addressed in its opening scene anyway. Her interviews were combed over, nowhere more than her comments on the original. She said the 1937 film frightened her as a child and hasn’t aged well; she said the romance plays as creepy, and that the remake shifts Snow White’s motivation from waiting for a prince to wanting to lead, as her father did. Robert Pattinson has spent a decade mocking Twilight and gets laughs for it; Zegler said milder things about Snow White and got death threats for being “ungrateful.” That’s the whole essay in two sentences, same act, opposite consequence, sorted by gender. She was made the sacrificial lamb for a film that was doomed from conception, and she’s still the example these men reach for whenever they need one.

And sure, not all of these films are good. Every film has flaws worth pointing out. But the endless noise has created a real problem: genuine criticism now gets ignored, overshadowed, and lumped in with the pile-on. Snow White has real issues, but none of them are Zegler. There are real criticisms to make about Supergirl‘s screenplay, but that isn’t Alcock’s fault. Instead of a productive conversation, that criticism gets drowned out or assumed to be part of the same cesspool. Every film should be open to criticism, but misogyny in plain sight is not criticism. When you think about it, the main reason Zegler was flamed was that she held valid criticisms of the original Snow White, which she absolutely has the right to make. That her hate stemmed from voicing real criticism of a film is telling. And as misogyny blends into film criticism, it threatens more than the state of criticism itself, it threatens media literacy as a whole. Being able to honestly criticise a film is a crucial part of media literacy, and pushing real criticism out, even bullying people for making it, only makes that literacy die out faster.

It’s the same song every time. However well a leading actress does, however good she is, the failure of the film gets pinned on her, usually when she’s the best thing in it. Zegler and Alcock are the beating hearts of their films; the real weak spots are obvious, and neither woman is one of them. But the moment a woman fronts one of these films and declines to stay quiet, the failure is hers to carry.

Supergirl is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post The Girl Gets the Blame: Alcock, Zegler, and the Hate-Train Formula appeared first on Goggler.

That courtesy didn’t stop me sneaking a peek at what the creature was watching. And cinema, as an art form, has not yet reckoned with the lengths this thing will go to. The depths of its hunger. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before — that eerie yellow glow, those lights, that handheld lurch. It took a second to place it.

The person two seats down was watching the YouTube version of the film. The one playing, right now, on a screen ten times the size of their phone.

It had been a while since I’d tasted disappointment that keenly in a cinema. But there it was: not distraction, not boredom — preparation. They weren’t half-watching. They were cross-referencing. Somewhere between the trailer and the ticket, watching a film had become homework, and the homework was the lore.

We have come to dub it exactly that — the “lore.” The family tree of every character, the timeline behind every reveal, the cinematic universe’s tax filings. The explainer videos, the lore dives, the breakdowns of a film, a book, even a relationship scandal — multiplying by the second. Modern audiences are more obsessed with the context of a story than the experience it delivers. They don’t want to be unsettled. They want to be briefed.

Which is a problem, because horror is a genre built on experience. A ride. It runs on not knowing.

Take Iron Lung, adapted from the indie game of the same name — minimalist horror in its purest form, an atmospheric descent told through sound, flashing images, and just enough dialogue to set the stage and no more. What followed its release wasn’t praise for that restraint. It was a race: video after video sprinting to be first to “uncover” the mysteries of The Quiet Rapture, as though the film were a locked box rather than a feeling. Nobody wanted to sit in the dark with it. They wanted the map.

Why not leave the lore to the Markipliers and David Szymanskis of the world, and let the rest of us just take the ride?

Because the modern audience member is no fool. They need to know. What is life, after all, without a piece of lore in your pocket to drop at a café table and impress five people with?

Here’s the irony: the films that became phenomena did it by withholding. Inception still has us arguing about the spinning top, and Nolan offers nothing but a shrug and a smile — because that shrug is the fuel. It’s what powers the late-night arguments about what could and couldn’t be true. Backrooms began life as a single 4chan post; the theories descended in a deluge, the creepypastas multiplied, and Kane Parsons turned it into a short film with over eight million views that explains nothing. It simply is. It leaves you with questions, and the questions are the point.

Even Star Wars — now one of the most relentless lore machines ever built — didn’t open that way. A New Hope dropped us mid-war, no encyclopedia required: empires, rebels, laser swords, a little green man, go. We trusted the filmmakers to fill it in later, and they did. It was only once the lore became the product, decades on, that the magic started leaking out.

That’s the thing we’ve forgotten to protect. Not knowing isn’t a gap in the experience. It is the experience. The dark is supposed to be dark.

Backrooms is still showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post We’ve Turned Horror Into Homework: Backrooms and the Problem with Lore appeared first on Goggler.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: yes, I’m Chinese. Specifically, I’m a quarter Teochew. I don’t speak the language, but my mom understands it, and my family does share a history with the one in the film — both my great-grandfathers came from China to Malaysia for work and sent money home through the qiaopi letters. But I didn’t know much beyond the surface until my mother explained it on the way out of the theatre. She was crying because the specifics of their story were on screen. I didn’t have that going in. All I knew was that they came here to work. So the thing that got most of the audience, the shock of familial recognition, is the one thing I can say for certain didn’t get me.

Which is what I can’t stop thinking about. I’m inoculated against this. I said so, two examples deep, before the lights even went down. The familial-grief machinery is the front door, and I’d bolted it. So the film came in through a window.

The window was a cookie. There’s a moment where she pours out little rainbow cookies for her son, then stops him from eating them all so she can post some to Musheng’s children, and it cuts to them squealing as they spill out. Those cookies were my whole childhood. I’d beg my mom for them every time I saw them at the supermarket. I wasn’t crying about migration or letters or a heritage I only half-hold. I was crying about a snack. It was such a small thing, but that’s exactly the point, it got past everything I’d braced against, because I never thought to brace against that.

And once it was in, what it reached wasn’t grief. It was the friendship. A single mother, voluntarily raising two families, sending letters and money and a massive cut of pork to a dead man’s children out of nothing but loyalty. Part of me clocks that this is essentially twentieth-century catfishing, and the montage does raise real moral questions I don’t want to wave away. But she does it entirely by choice, expecting nothing, because she knew her friend wouldn’t want to leave his family hanging. It’s not often you see this kind of sacrifice written out of friendship rather than romance. Maybe I’m just a sucker for that. But it’s the thing I always want more of, and the film drives its whole engine on it.

None of this makes me blind to what’s wrong with the film, and some of it is genuinely wrong. The South Asian villains are handled appallingly, flatly racist, present only to cause chaos and then vanish, doing no work the story actually needs. And the late swerve into dementia is a cheap grab for tears that’s frankly embarrassing to see in 2026. These aren’t quirks I’m willing to fold into the charm. They exist to wring more crying out of you, full stop, and that’s the oldest trick in the tear-making machine. Dear You doesn’t escape that machine. What it does is one interesting thing with it.

Most of these films treat the past as a device: a flashback, a memory, something you cut back from. Dear You just moves in. There’s almost no present to cut back to, the flashback isn’t a detour from the story, it is the story. And I think that’s why it got past me. There was no safe present-day frame to sit in and brace from, no “this is the sad part” signposting to see coming. By the time I clocked what the film was doing to me, it had already done it. I can’t prove that’s the mechanism, but it’s the closest I’ve got to an honest answer for why this one and not the others.

The bad doesn’t cancel the good; I’m holding both. This is a genre that lives or dies on making you cry, and to do it, it will always stoop. I’m not pretending otherwise when I say it hit every note the others have missed for me in years. It’s deeply flawed. It also took me apart. Dear You is far from perfect, but it knows exactly what it’s trying to be, and while it’s not revolutionary, it’s a small, hopeful step out of the machine it was built by.

Dear You is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post I Went In to Prove I Wouldn’t Cry. I Brought My Mom to Watch Me Fail. appeared first on Goggler.

Dear You follows Xiaowei (Li Sitong), a debt-ridden man who travels to Thailand in search of his estranged grandfather, Musheng. Family lore holds that Musheng abandoned his wife Shurou decades ago for a second wife and family in Thailand. Xiaowei hopes to find his seemingly wealthy grandfather and squeeze him for his rightful inheritance. Instead, through a series of qiaopi remittance letters Musheng sent home over the years, Xiaowei rediscovers his family’s forgotten history of migration and sacrifice.

Dear You uses the lives of two families to explore the historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora. Yet there were some things I wished they had done differently. The three main areas of contention for me are the Chinese diaspora’s interactions with the local Thai community; the problematic depiction of rival migrants, and the ending’s ‘twist’ regarding Nanzhi, the supposed second wife who Xiaowei discovers was his family’s secret benefactor for decades after Musheng’s unknown death.

The first aspect that struck me as lacking was how Dear You minimally engages with the Thai society that the Teochew migrants are embedded in. Beyond Musheng’s fleeting exchanges with rickshaw passengers and the predictably corrupt policemen suppressing local businesses, the wider Thai community barely registers. I understand the intention: to emphasise how indispensable the Teochew clan was, providing shelter, companionship and emotional survival for people united by homesickness and a desire for better futures.

That communal backbone is invaluable, but no diaspora exists in a vacuum. Migrant communities negotiate with, adapt to, and reshape the societies they settle in, even while preserving their own cultural identities. Here, however, Bangkok often feels little more than backdrop scenery. Thai is barely spoken and Thai culture practically absent. The result of this cultural insulation is, ironically, to make the Teochew people’s separation and stakes feel lower. Surrounded almost entirely by his own people, Musheng could have been anywhere in China.

The film stumbles more worryingly in its handling of the South Asian gang who terrorise Nanzhi’s hostel business. Their attempted extortion culminates in the hostel fire that almost claims dozens of lives, a pivotal sequence that alters every major relationship thereafter. Musheng’s rescue of Nanzhi’s father earns her enduring devotion, while his violent retaliation against one of the arsonists lands him in prison, costs him his savings, and indirectly begins the decades-long exchange of qiaopi letters between Nanzhi and Musheng’s wife, Shurou.

What troubled me was how the South Asian characters exist solely as stock villains. They are depicted as greedy, violent and murderous, yet the film offers them neither perspective nor motivation beyond advancing the plot. This risks unnecessarily vilifying South Asian migrants. Inter-ethnic tensions certainly existed, but given that the film centres on the Teochew enclave of Bangkok’s Chinatown, wouldn’t local Thai antagonists have made more dramatic sense? A surrounding Thai community, watching an immigrant population entrench and expand in its midst, carries its own proximity and fear of the other — and that resentment boiling over towards the Teochew migrants could have created a far more organic conflict.

One choice I genuinely admired was the film’s refusal to grant its central reunion an easy emotional payoff. By the time Shurou finally meets Nanzhi towards the film’s end, dementia has already stolen much of Nanzhi’s memory. Shurou spent decades harbouring resentment towards this “second wife.” Now, having finally reconnected, Nanzhi can no longer remember the sacrifices she made.

Though this was powerful, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the film stops just short of its true emotional potential. Beyond sitting together and taking selfies, the two women share surprisingly little. I kept wishing Shurou would retrieve the old qiaopi letters that Nanzhi had written to her. Imagine the emotional punch of watching Nanzhi rediscover fragments of her forgotten friendship through words she once penned.

Dear You knows which heartstrings to tug, but leaves many compelling ideas under-explored. That might matter less if it were simply another domestic melodrama for China. Yet Lan Hongchun clearly has international ambitions, having premiered Dear You at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. If Chinese filmmakers hope to speak to audiences beyond the mainland and beyond the Chinese diaspora, then their stories must embrace more critical nuance and complexity, not just easy emotionality.

Dear You is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post Dear You Wants to Make You Cry. It Should’ve Made You Think. appeared first on Goggler.

Fear morphs as society does. Generations are marked by what frightens them, and each fear is a snapshot of the world that produced it. Film is built to catch this, especially horror, a genre that exists to put fear on screen and hold it still. It’s why the classics don’t bite anymore. The slasher we threw on at slumber parties traded on the home invasion—a fear that better locks and security systems have quietly defused. We don’t fear the stranger at the door now; we fear being watched. So Halloween plays at a distance, like a postcard from an anxiety we’ve already outgrown.

Obsession runs on an old blueprint—”be careful what you wish for” is one of the oldest stories there is. So why does this version land when the fear underneath it is centuries old? Because Curry Barker knows exactly who he’s playing to.

Horror’s core audience is women, and that’s not incidental. The genre’s most durable trope is the final girl—proof that a woman can outlast the worst a film can throw at her. She isn’t a model of good behaviour; plenty of final girls come apart by the end. But her endurance is the point, and it’s why the genre keeps asking the same question: did she do anything wrong? Midsommar asked it. Jennifer’s Body asked it, flopped on release, then became a cult text precisely because a later audience recognised itself in it. Obsession has walked straight into this lineage. Almost every conversation about it circles the same drain—is Nikki the villain? Did she do something to deserve this?

Barker makes it extremely clear that Nikki is the victim — no ifs, ands, or buts. Honestly, the first time I saw the discourse around whether Bear was actually the villain, I was shocked it was a question at all. Before Bear makes the wish, Nikki outright tells him that if he has feelings to confess, now’s the time — the perfect window he’s been waiting for. And he doesn’t take it.

In interviews, Barker has said one of the reasons he cast Inde Navarrette was the “bro-y type of sassiness” she brought to Nikki pre-wish, which underlines how thoroughly Bear is “totally in the friendzone.” He’d intended those early scenes to play more girl-next-door, but Navarrette’s performance made him realize that having Nikki become that girl-next-door after the wish was far scarier. Pre-wish, Nikki sets her boundaries down firmly and clearly, and Barker never lets you mistake her for the one in the wrong. The bro-iness is so central to who she is that its disappearance is unmistakable — there’s no reading in which this is still the same Nikki. Barker and Navarrette drive home that everything she does after the wish is done without her consent.

There’s a clear, explicit intention behind Barker’s choice to tell the story through the male character’s eyes. We have no choice but to watch as Bear strips an innocent woman of her autonomy while refusing, again and again, to take responsibility for it. There’s something far more horrifying in following Bear’s journey instead of Nikki’s — we’re forced to sit with the man as he dodges accountability and bends a woman to his will rather than face what he’s done.

The film’s dread isn’t built on surprise but on its opposite. We know what’s coming; the unease comes from being made to wait for it, helpless. That’s what makes Obsession land with younger audiences — it reflects the world we actually live in. Having your autonomy stripped while everyone looks away is one of the most terrifying realities imaginable in a culture built to prize self-sufficiency.

But the most horrifying part is quieter: the entire time, the real Nikki is trapped in her own body, completely overwritten by an artificial, magically generated love for Bear. And you start to feel for Wish Nikki too — because she doesn’t want to love him either. She was made to. You can’t blame real Nikki for any of it; she isn’t the one acting. But I’d go further: you can’t blame Wish Nikki either. Barker said it himself — “Bear’s wish itself is cursed.” From that wish spawned a whole new psyche, cursed from the moment it existed. Wish Nikki’s entire being is locked onto Bear, and you can’t fault her for going to the lengths she does, because that’s what she was built to do. Her going “crazy” is actually the one sliver of autonomy she has left — and you can’t blame her for wanting to keep existing.

This is also where the Longlegs comparison finally means something. Longlegs floated free of any particular moment; its evil was abstract, ambient, nowhere and nowhen. Obsession is the opposite—rooted so firmly in now that you recognise its people. I’ve met men like Bear. So has everyone I know. If the One Wish Willow were real, something like this would happen. Watching Nikki not unravel but fundamentally rewire is frightening because of how plausible it is.

Good horror earns relevance by refusing to look away from what’s actually wrong. By that measure, Obsession doesn’t just survive its own hype. It justifies it.

Obsession is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

The post Obsession Knows Exactly Who It’s Scaring appeared first on Goggler.

The row in front of me was filled with a group of kids no older than fourteen. They were talking during the previews, but I was willing to let that slide because the movie hadn’t technically started yet. But right off the bat, despite the very large “no photography/videography” notice that had appeared on the screen seconds before, one of the kids started filming. She unashamedly recorded the entire opening sequence. It appeared as if she was waiting for the title card, but gave up and put her camera down when it seemed to take forever to appear. Her phone, however, made a reappearance during the scene where Clark first enters the backrooms. She proceeded to take multiple photos, no doubt to post as an Instagram story to prove to people that she was there and that she actually “saw the thing.”

She wasn’t the only offender. Throughout the film, the kids were a massive disruption who would not stop talking (except one, who was asleep the whole time). They kept fighting over the communal popcorn they’d bought, and at one point, the debate got so heated that a kid hoisted the box above his head like Rafiki holding up Simba, blocking an annoyingly large portion of the screen. That was clearly the final straw for the man directly behind them, who delivered a resounding shush. It quieted the shenanigans, but only temporarily — before long the noise crept back up, until one of the friends in the group finally snapped and told them all to “shut up!”

Maybe part of me should have expected this. The Backrooms began in a niche corner — a single 4chan post — but has since cemented itself as an internet staple. From that creepypasta came not just Parsons’ web series, but a flood of memes and multiple video games that gained serious traction on Roblox and Fortnite, drawing in exactly this young crowd. But here’s the thing: as much as they think otherwise, Gen Alpha is not the target audience of the Backrooms. The film takes on the sinister, eerie tone of the shorts — which makes sense, given it’s a direct extension of the world Parsons has spent years building on YouTube. But these kids’ introduction to the Backrooms wasn’t Parsons’ videos. It was the game playthroughs. And what’s integral to those? Dramatic “I’m freaking out” reactions from the streamer; because a horror reaction video with no reaction isn’t much fun. That makes perfect sense for the medium. The problem is that these kids have grown so accustomed to those loud, view-baiting reactions that they’ve started mimicking them in the theatre.

But is that necessarily their fault? This generation never received cinema etiquette training the way we did — not to the point where it’s ingrained. Movies aren’t the medium they grew up on; videos and streams are, and that’s one more thing the pandemic quietly took from them. They’re used to consuming media at home, where a movie is often a second thought playing in the background while they look at another screen. And even the streams they watch are usually just background noise to something else. So when they walk into a Backrooms screening, two problems come with them. The first is the bad behaviour we’ve all clocked, again and again, and not just at Backrooms: the open chatting, the obliviousness to the theatre as a public space, the constant phones. It’s the clear product of an education these kids never got, and it has plagued every cinema hall since the pandemic.

This isn’t to say phone use is unique to Gen Alpha — it’s crept into adults too, as watching a film alongside a second screen at home became normal. But what’s most frustrating is the blatant disrespect, possibly not even conscious, in kids straight up recording bits of the film to post online. It’s disrespectful to the other people in the room, and to the art itself. Since Backrooms premiered, bootlegged clips have flooded TikTok and Reels and been chopped into memes, racking up millions of views without the slightest attempt to hide that the footage was illegally taken. Given how much of it is out there, no wonder these kids shrug off the anti-piracy disclaimers before the film — they’ve seen the clips already, so what are the odds anyone stops them? Plenty of them sneak in below the age rating in the first place, so the same flippancy carries right through to taking out a phone and recording in plain sight. And as concert culture trains everyone to document everything, the “I need to record this to prove I was here” instinct has bled into the theatre — in direct defiance of one of its oldest rules.

The second problem is the recreation of the big reactions they’re used to seeing their favourite streamers have. I went around asking friends about their own Backrooms screenings, and quickly realised my experience wasn’t unique. One told me a row of boys sat directly behind her were so loud that “every time there was a jumpscare they would scream so loud, making it scarier than it was.” Another said the group behind him was “rowdy and not really engaged, poking in with random remarks and chuckles at the worst times.” Because commentary-over-content media has exploded in popularity, people now carry that instinct into the cinema with them. I’ve nothing against commentary — it’s a big chunk of my own YouTube diet. But that commentary is made in private and put out for people to watch on their own time, not performed live in a public room. There’s now a constant need to be “funny” in the theatre — to elicit reactions to your reactions, to get people laughing at you laughing at the movie. And even if the first crack lands, every one after it lands a little less, until it stops being funny and just becomes a nuisance.

But then this got me thinking: wasn’t going to the theatre meant to be a communal experience? And if there’s one genre where that’s most true, it’s horror. No one wants to be scared alone. Even if you go by yourself, buying a cinema ticket means choosing to be scared in company — just not people you know. You’re there for a sense of community.

But theatres now seem split into two camps: people who think they’re entitled to talk because they paid for the ticket, and people who think they’re entitled to the experience they signed up for — which, for as long as anyone can remember, has been quiet company. There’s a right answer here. At its core, the theatre is a public space. You buy a ticket to sit with a community, not to carve out a private box for you and your friends.

Part of me feels bad complaining about children this much, because a lot of this genuinely isn’t their fault — they couldn’t control the pandemic. But the stubborn, repeated failure to register that other people are in the room starts to wear you down. And I’ve realised that both problems they bring into the cinema stem from the same place: these kids have never had to exist in an environment they don’t control. They’re not used to sharing space with anyone beyond family and friends. They make themselves at home in the theatre because they’ve never had to be anywhere that wasn’t home. And when outright lawbreaking happens in plain sight, alongside that blatant disregard for everyone around them, it’s clearer than ever what all that control has curdled into: entitlement.

Sympathy wanes after a realisation like that, and you’re left with the question: have we become too lenient? The pandemic took this etiquette away, but nothing says we can’t put it back. Right now, the only people I know who’ve had a decent Backrooms screening went at odd hours — and it isn’t fair that respecting the rules should mean hiding from everyone who doesn’t. “You do you, I’ll do me” might pass as a philosophy everywhere else, but bring it into a cinema and it stops being live-and-let-live. It becomes a wrecking ball.

A movie screening isn’t a private show. We aren’t here to watch you, or to find out how funny you are. We’re here to watch the film in quiet solidarity. That’s the backbone of the cinema experience — and it’s starting to crack. It’ll keep cracking if we let it.

Backrooms is now showing in Malaysian cinemas.

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The film’s most unique aspect is that it’s narrated by a Giant Pacific Octopus named Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina). Once a free cephalopod, Marcellus was captured and now lives in a public aquarium. He mourns the loss of the ocean and grates at being held prisoner by an inferior species who gawk at him in his tank. Marcellus is the spirit animal of anyone who prefers their own company to the maddening crowd. They say hell is other people and I bet Marcellus would agree. 

Like an eight-limbed David Attenborough, Marcellus observes his human captors. He grows fond of Tova, an elderly cleaning lady who, like Marcellus, prefers solitude to the company of her own species. When she gets injured and needs to train a young man named Cameron to replace her, Marcellus sees that the two bickering humans share more than either knows. Realising that Tova and Cameron are the keys to the other’s healing, Marcellus makes it his mission to connect them before he dies. 

The performances were great. Sally Field as Tova is excellent (isn’t she always?). Tova is just the right balance of wise grandmother, pernickety mentor, softly mournful widow, and broken-hearted mother. Lewis Pullman pulls off Cameron well, without sliding into unseemly teenage angst (honestly, he’s too old to be called “the juvenile” by Marcellus). And Alfred Molina as Marcellus has likely found his best role since Doc Ock. 

Now, I really like the heavy and hard-hitting stuff, especially when it comes to loss and grief. For me, The Leftovers and the Buffy episode “The Body” are peak television when it comest to sorrow and loss. But I acknowledge that not everyone gravitates towards such visceral and painful stories. I also recognise that’s what makes Remarkably Bright Creatures special and important. 

It’s a light, gentle movie that admittedly feels like something Lifetime would make rather than Netflix. At its heart is a simple story about loss, but also about finding healing and love – not just romantic love, which seems to be the only kind Hollywood knows and finds commercially viable, but love in other forms: love for one’s community, love across generations, across species. 

It’s a positive sign that a major streamer like Netflix would commission and support films like Remarkably Bright Creatures, which was based on the novel of the same name by Shelby Van Pelt. These days it seems that the only thing on our screens are images of pain and loss, all dialled up to 11. Maybe that’s why the cosy subgenre has been enjoying a boom. We’re seeing a real interest in cosy mysteries, cosy fantasy, even cosy horror. 

So it’s unsurprising that a quiet story about an elderly lady and a young man seeking connection is just the palate cleanser people are craving. Remarkably Bright Creatures offers a cosy drama that’s high on warmth and low on drama. It may deal with the grief of child loss and parental abandonment, and it may be told through the eyes of a cynical octopus, but at its core is a deep humanity. 

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter that Remarkably Bright Creatures didn’t resonate with me emotionally in quite the same way that it did with so many others. I appreciate that this movie exists, that it offers comfort, even catharsis, to those who connected to it. And it was a good reminder that we are all more closely connected than we could ever have imagined. 

Remarkably Bright Creatures is now streaming on Netflix.

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