Positioning Obsession as a comedy at the Golden Globes is not a good look.
I will admit it. I laughed throughout Curry Barker’s Obsession, usually an uncomfortable laughter, an “Are you kidding me?” laughter. The same kind of laughter I use while watching a Trump clip on X or existing as a woman in 2026.
But I was surprised that Focus Features decided to position Obsession as a Musical/Comedy for Golden Globe consideration, for a variety of reasons beyond the film not being that funny.
For one thing, there’s just the logistics of securing that future Oscar nomination everyone’s been talking about. If Navarrette were nominated in Actress Drama, she’d have a better shot at winning in this category, propelling her Oscar campaign. Two Sandra Hüller Golden Globe nominations could cancel each other out, Ruth Madeley in Being Heumann hasn’t had the breakout year that Inde Navarrette has (yet!), Emily Blunt was the only good thing about Disclosure Day, Lea Seydoux’s Gentle Monster has yet to find its audience (she’s brilliant though!), and Rosalind Eleazar’s awards hopes for Misty Green are fading with each subsequent review. Meanwhile, Penelope Cruz in Bunker is also an up-in-the-air pick, along with Renate Reinsve for Fjord, Carrie Coon for The Liberation, and Virginie Efira for All of a Sudden.
Instead, should Navarrette be nominated in Musical/Comedy, she is up against Julianne Moore in The Debut, which is inherently a musical (and a comedy!), Olivia Wilde in The Invite (she’s getting the best reviews of her acting and directorial career), Zendaya for The Drama, Olivia Colman for Wicker, and Meryl Streep AND Anne Hathaway for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Even if reception for Moore in The Debut is more muted than anticipated, Navarrette has Wilde to contend with (and we don’t even know how popular Wicker will be yet!).
But the most important thing, and the most egregious thing about Obsession being campaigned as a comedy, is that it feels particularly inappropriate after the events of this week, with conversations around women and consent. The crux of Obsession is about a woman’s loss of control of her body. I remember in the theater having a visceral gut hatred for Bear and his treatment toward Nikki—the Nikki who he knew was still in “there,” desperate to get out. The Nikki whom he repeatedly had sex with when he knew his “friend” didn’t consent to it. Obsession is every woman’s nightmare, and it’s disingenuous to think of it as a comedy.
Comparatively, another former Golden Globe comedy nominee, The Substance is also a woman’s nightmare, but at least women were in control of their bodies. Elizabeth (Demi Moore) knew what she was doing when she injected herself with the Substance (and even Margaret Qualley’s Sue knew what she wanted to do when she sabotaged the whole operation!).
By contrast, Promising Young Woman, about one woman’s revenge list on sexual predators, was positioned as a Golden Globes Drama, when it’s also darkly funny, probably funnier than Obsession. But of course, Carey Mulligan’s Cassie had agency and control. And there’s nothing funny about that to a man.
Ultimately, there’s something deeply unsettling about a man’s puppeteering and sexual assaulting of a woman on his terms that’s really, truly, not funny. And of course the ending—with spoiler alert—everything presumably blamed on her, does not leave you with any sort of justice or denouement. Her life is ruined. And Bear’s “the victim.”
At first I thought that this was just another heightening of the "let's put a movie that doesn't announce itself as important" into the Comedy category trend that has really annoyed me at the Globes in recent years (May December in particular comes to mind). But once I thought about it a bit more, I think this is just a sign of what kind of campaign Focus wants to run for this movie. At this point the movie has three things to its name in terms of an Oscar campaign: it's considered cool (especially by younger audiences), people want to talk about it and it made money. And at the heart of the first two (which then caused the third) seems to be this rorschach test quality that the movie seemed to have (even though in my opinion any sensible viewer should immediately arrive at the conclusion thatshe's a victim and he's a monster ). Thus I read this positioning into Comedy as Focus trying to keep the conversation and cool factor alive by not taking a stand on what the film is about: it's probably less about wanting to position the film as a comedy than about not wanting to position the film as a serious drama, both because that might take away from the narrative of the film being a populist hit (especially since there most likely will already be other contenders that are populist hits and serious dramas at the same time) and because "drama" has a connotation that the film is about big important topics (which would thus favour her point of view and through that gesture offer an interpretation of the film rather than keep the conversation as open as possible). Thus for the film to be the "it" film that everyone wants to talk about, it has to float in ambiguity and the term "comedy" probably offers that more easily.
If this is the approach, I find it quite reprehensible as it is basically the distributor being afraid of turning idiots and creeps off of their movie because they can get more money and awards by placating those people. It would also add another layer to what already feels like one of those movies that people will talk about in the future as representing a lot of stuff about the cultural moment right now in the way that we talk about Fatal Attraction representing those same things in the cultural moment of the late 80s.
Thank you for the discussion! I think it also demeans the film by making it something to laugh at when it's really tackling an uncomfortable subject.