Obsession / Bad Timing

When Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025) came out in cinemas a few months ago, a small debate emerged online about audience reactions and the director’s intentions. Was this a film about dating a “crazy” girlfriend, or about misogynistic fantasies of domination and control? Although most online discourse could do with more nuance, in this case it is important to be categorical: Obsession is unambiguously a film about a r*pist.

A few weeks after the film came out, Elena happened to organise a screening of Nicolas Roeg’s masterpiece Bad Timing (1980), and she noticed a parallel with Obsession: here too, the male protagonist thinks he is the good guy, even as he psychologically and physically tortures the woman he is with. But even more striking was a Letterboxd review from a user who seemed to misunderstand Roeg’s film in the same way that some people missed the point of Obsession: Bad Timing, to this viewer, was highly relatable as a film about the horrendous experience of… dating a “crazy” girl.

In this episode, Elena and Manuela discuss the ways in which Barker’s and Roeg’s films approach a painful topic, wrongfoot their audience, and progressively give viewers the information they need to understand what is really going on.

Hard Truths is an ⁠⁠Animus⁠⁠ film podcast. As often as they can, Animus founder and editor Elena Lazic catches up from London, UK, with her twin Manuela, who can usually be found across the pond in Paris. Expect animated conversations about cinema, digressions into unrelated topics, and trivial facts from our personal lives. Do NOT expect to immediately be able to tell us apart.