It’s a bit amusing that Curry Barker, a director in his mid-twenties who has just made one of the relatively few good Monkey’s Paw movies in recent years came to the idea not from the classic horror story of that name by W.W. Jacobs but from the Simpsons segment in “Treehouse of Horror II”. At this stage most people of my generation and younger probably do know the reference more from The Simpsons than literature, but he might be the only one open about it. But honestly it’s fitting that the impetus for Barker’s Obsession would come from a comedy show given his movie is very aware of the twisted humour inherent to the premise. It is after all perhaps the quintessential variant of horror irony -you wish for something you think will be good, but because you haven’t considered all the angles and implications it winds up turning out horrifying. Every fantasy has a terrible dark side it posits, and there is something creepily funny to that. And Barker also has fun with the other absurdit...
In the long history of revenge movies, not often has the prospect of taking revenge felt genuinely frightening. And not in the sense of the protagonists being caught and facing tangible consequence for what they consider a righteous goal but society at large will not; no, in a moral sense of doing harm and the horror of that, no matter what harmful act beget the whole idea entirely. It’s a very interesting theme that sets Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is apart from other movies of its type, and gives it a tension so many revenge thrillers don’t bother to address. I’m especially curious about how it comes across on stage, Harris’s filmmaking debut being an adaptation of her own off-Broadway play that won a handful of Obie Awards in 2018. Certainly through stretches of this movie you wouldn’t be able to tell it was crafted for a more visually limited medium -although other aspects certainly bear the hallmarks (a series of ESP exchanges that likely originate as asides). But the themes are clea...