If you know me as a friend or as a client, you know I love engaging with a good story. Specifically, I’m drawn to darker films or books that ultimately are about an aspect of the human experience we often don’t care to look at.
So, I watched the indie films Obsession and Lurker within a few days of each other. One a box office unexpected success and the other a quieter film. Both, however, deal with the themes of love and obsession—and now I’m obsessed with both of them!
Obsession has become the film everyone seems to be talking about. It’s all over the internet—It’s been a box office success, sparked endless online conversations, and left audiences simultaneously stunned and wanting more. The film genuinely terrified me and kept me at the edge of my seat. It somehow captured the ordinary as terrifying. It’s tense in the way psychological thrillers or horror films sometimes are—I could not look away. You leave the theater, but part of your nervous system stays there.
Lurker is a quieter film that hasn’t received nearly the same attention, but leaves you genuinely disturbed and curious. It didn’t scare me so much as make me deeply uncomfortable. I could not look away while watching Obsession, but Lurker made me cringe at times and I found myself almost wanting to look away, embarrassed for the main character. It captured something painfully recognizable. Watching someone slowly lose themselves in another person can be harder than watching outright horror.
So, these films made me start wondering about why stories of obsession seem to be everywhere right now. Why are we so captivated by them? Is it simply because they’re suspenseful or scary, or are they tapping into something much more familiar?
Most of us will never experience obsession the way these characters do. But most of us know longing. We know what it’s like to replay a conversation after we’ve left an event. To wait for a text that never comes. To wonder why someone ghosted us or chose someone else. Or to check a social media profile more times than we’d care to admit. We know the feeling of wanting to be seen, included, admired, or chosen.
Obsession is those very human experiences turned all the way up. It’s like listening to punk rock at 10. Or, better yet, it’s playing Every Breath You Take by The Police on repeat. I can’t believe I once thought it was a love song, a true child of the 80s and early 90s.
Although Obsession and Lurker tell very different stories—one through romantic fixation and the other through proximity, status, and belonging—I couldn’t help noticing that both are asking a similar question.
What happens when another person stops being someone we know and becomes someone we need?
Neither film is really about love. They are really not about obsession. They’re about identity.
As I kept thinking about them, I found myself coming back to Carl Jung’s idea of individuation—the lifelong process of becoming who we really are instead of defining ourselves through someone else’s approval, attention, or expectations. That’s a simplification of Jung’s thinking, of course, but I think it captures something both films circle around.
When our sense of self feels uncertain, another person can begin to carry more psychological weight than they were ever meant to. They stop being just another friend or partner and they become The Answer.
Attachment theory offers another way of understanding this. People with insecure attachment often experience relationships more intensely because closeness becomes tied to safety and self-worth. That doesn’t mean someone with insecure attachment becomes obsessive—not at all. But it may help explain why rejection or distance can feel disproportionately painful. The relationship begins to feel like it’s about survival rather than connection.
What struck me most in both films is that the object of obsession gradually disappears.
Not literally, but psychologically.
The person is no longer seen for who they are. Instead, they become a symbol of everything the obsessed person believes they are missing—love, status, purpose, belonging, certainty, even a stable sense of self. Ironically, the more desperately someone needs another person, the less able they are to truly know them.
I also wonder whether these stories resonate differently today than they would have twenty years ago.
We spend so much of our lives watching other people. We follow strangers online, keep up with influencers, know where people vacation, what they eat, who they’re dating, and how they decorate their homes. We mistake access for intimacy. We compare ourselves to carefully edited versions of other people’s lives.
Most of us navigate that world without losing ourselves.
But maybe it has blurred the line between admiration and attachment in ways we don’t fully appreciate.
Freud wrote about unconscious wishes and the ways our earliest relationships continue to shape what we seek in adulthood. Jung focused more on the lifelong task of becoming whole. They approached the mind differently, but both understood something that these films capture so well: we are often searching for far more than the person standing in front of us.
Perhaps that’s why Obsession and Lurker stayed with me. One frightened me because of where obsession can lead. The other unsettled me because it felt uncomfortably close to ordinary human experience.
As a therapist, I’m reminded almost daily that the desire to be chosen is universal. We all want to matter to someone. We all want to belong. Most of us have moments when our sense of worth becomes tangled up in another person’s response to us.
The difference is that healthy relationships allow us to become more ourselves. Obsession asks us to disappear into someone else.
Maybe that’s what these films are really asking us to consider—not simply how obsession develops, but what we’re hoping another person will give us in the first place.
And perhaps that’s why one film terrified me while the other made me want to hide behind a pillow.
Sometimes horror is easier to watch than recognition.