#70: Four movies about obsessed creeps

Death By Consumption

9/2/25 - 9/8/25

Haters of weather talk look away: it's so nice out!!!!!! Honestly, none of us should be on our computers or phones, with how lovely the weather is right now (I assume the weather is also perfect wherever you're reading this; I don't know how this stuff works). Between the gorgeous weather outside and all the actually-paying-me-money work I have to do, I gotta stop typing this email RIGHT NOW. Let's get to it!

This week, I watched four movies about people with unhealthy obsessions with someone else. I didn't mean for this to happen, but I do love an unintentionally themed week. We've got a gayish creep, a murderous creep, A$AP Rocky as a creep, and a [spoiler redacted] creep. Welcome to creep week!

Lurker (2025) — at Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn

Out of all the movies about someone becoming obsessed with someone else in a kind of gay way (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn, Ingrid Goes West, etc. etc. etc.), none have given me full-body cringe quite like Lurker.

In Lurker, Matty, a retail employee, befriends Oliver, an up-and-coming pop star, and quickly becomes obsessed with him. You can feel Matty’s desperation through the screen as you watch him, time and time again, do or say the thing he really shouldn’t do. It’s like a horror movie where the only horror is social horror — instead of screaming at the protagonist to not go in the basement, or whatever, you have an entire audience practically yelling at the screen, “Don’t say that, you freak!” Instead of jump scares, we were squealing out of secondhand embarrassment.

The more Matty attempts to blatantly manipulate Oliver into becoming his best friend, the more humiliation I felt. Have I ever liked someone so much that I've been this weird about it?? (IRL friends, don't tell me.) Every time the film cut away to one of Oliver's friends, side-eyeing each other at something Matty says or does, I felt a pang of worry that, at some point, someone's friends had side-eyed each other in a similar way about me. Lurker understands that, to us Americans, the greatest horror of all is being seen as a loser.

The film builds and builds and builds alongside Matty’s obsession with Oliver but, tragically, doesn't know where to end. There were at least 5 separate moments in which I thought, “This is a great ending,” before it just… kept… going. But I won't hold that against Lurker too much — pretty much every modern novel or book or TV show has no clue how to end anymore. They all think we want more, more, more. (As always, I'm perfectly happy blaming Marvel for this.) Still, though, I had fun throughout the majority of the movie, and I felt I needed to take a shower after we got out of the theater. Why is it so pathetic to like someone??? Emotions are humiliating.

Red Rooms (2023) — streamed at home

Red Rooms introduces us to a different obsessed psycho, this time a lady obsessed psycho – women can be stalkers, too! It’s a much more restrained film than Lurker, in every possible way, and much, much better for it. The film is also dealing with much darker and more violent topics than Lurker: a woman, Kelly-Anne, is obsessed with a man on trial for the horrible torture and murder of three teenaged girls, which he live-streamed on the dark web to paying customers. Kelly-Anne's reasons for her obsession are kept at arm's length, and never quite explored, which some might find frustrating, but I loved — you spend the movie wondering just what this woman is capable of.

Though the film deals with violent images (in the opening scene, in a very cold and bleak Quebec courtroom, the judge warns the jury — and, you worry, also us, the audience — that they will be shown horrific images that are hard to stomach), but the violence is always kept just on the edge of the film. It’s only hinted at: a half-blurry crime scene photo of a bloody murder, or the screams of the young victims, heard muffled through a thick courtroom door. This is a horror movie with no real horror on screen.

Instead, the film is almost teasing you with the idea of watching unspeakable violence, inviting you to want to see it. Which, of course, would make you no better than Kelly-Anne, who watches the murder videos in the darkness of her apartment. As she watches preteen girls get tortured to death, the camera lingers on her almost beatific face, which glows in the light of the blood-splashed red room on her computer screen. It's somehow even more horrifying than seeing the gore itself.

We don’t learn much about Kelly-Anne, other than the fact that she’s a gorgeous model who also makes a lot of Bitcoin from online poker, and also she’s kind of a freaky hacker chick. (The movie has some of the best “character aggressively typing on a desktop computer to suggest they are hacking something” sequences I’ve seen since, like, the 90s.) Just like the horrific violence, Kelly-Anne is kept at arm’s length, making choices that consistently surprise or shock us, to create one of the most memorable characters I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. Kelly-Anne is a freak, but she's a lovable freak. And if nothing else, I'm grateful to Kelly-Anne for giving me an excuse to post my all-time favorite tweet, which I like to think inspired Red Rooms:

Highest 2 Lowest (2025) — on Apple TV+

It’s always so alarming when a streaming service puts a movie up while it’s still in theaters. I barely had time to contemplate buying tickets to see Highest 2 Lowest before it was suddenly on Apple TV+, ready to be streamed from the luxury of my couch on a rainy night. I still prefer the theatrical experience in general, but sometimes you're just lazy and cheap, you know?

The first half of this movie is insane and bewildering, so much so that I’d question the filmmaker’s abilities if it were made by anyone other than, you know, Spike fucking Lee. There are so many baffling choices (the music in particular is insane). The first half feels aimless and drifting, and features some of the most distractingly bad acting from Ilfenesh Hadera, who (seemingly unintentionally) plays Denzel’s wife as if the character is constantly zonked on quaaludes, her emotions always lagging a step or two behind everyone else. Everything feels off, as if the whole thing is a dream inside a shroom trip inside a Lifetime movie.

But the moment that really made me question what anyone was thinking on set was when Denzel steps into his son’s bedroom, where we see his teenaged boy has a framed Kamala poster on his wall. This scene went on for at least 5 minutes, an uninterrupted single take in which Denzel is acting his ass off, and yet I have no idea what he said because all I could do was stare at the poster behind him. Did no one pull Spike aside about this?! Even if she had won, I find it hard to believe that a Kamala poster would become the new Obama poster, especially for teen boys. Unless Denzel's character is father to a Park Slope #resistance lesbian, there is no reason for this Kamala poster to be on this set! This poster is proof that Spike Lee hasn't interacted with a real person in, like, 15 years.

But midway through, the film suddenly takes off and really never slows down from there. The back half is propulsive and exciting, mostly because the film drops most of the other characters to become The Denzel Washington Show. And he is here to show that he hasn't missed a beat in all these years. There were several scenes that left me with no choice but to say, "Holy shit," after Denzel had finished. Let me be the first to say it: Denzel Washington is a really good actor! Even more surprisingly, A$AP Rocky — who plays an up-and-coming rapper obsessed with Denzel's character, to a dangerous level — manages to hold his own in scenes with Denzel, most notably an electric scene in which they face-off in a record booth, threatening each other via freestyle raps (when it's described like that — by me, a not-cool white guy — it sounds like it absolutely should not work, and yet somehow it does).

It's clear Spike Lee has reached the stage many of the best directors do, when there's literally no one who can tell them no anymore, which probably would have helped him sand down some of the film's edges. I found Highest 2 Lowest simultaneously thrilling and confusing — the first half feels like it's a student film, before swerving into a thrilling piece of work from a genuine master of his craft, before swerving once again, into the strangest coda to a film I've seen in a while. This is a really weird movie!

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish (2025) — on Netflix

It feels like years since I’ve watched one of the “documentaries” Netflix pumps out seemingly every hour, but this story was so shocking when I read the original article, I knew I simply had to see the people who lived it.

For those unfamiliar, Unknown Number is about a teen couple in some random-ass town who start receiving cyberbullying texts from an unknown number. Over the course of 2 years, these teens are harassed by some mystery person who seems to know intimate details of their lives, and hates the girl for really no discernible reason. The documentary unfolds as a bit of a mystery, until the big reveal as to who the culprit is (which I will NOT be spoiling, in the hopes that, if you don’t know the story, you can experience the gag for yourself — and trust me that it is very much a GAG).

It definitely does not need to be this long of a movie — there’s really no need to go into every detail of these kids’ lives, the way the documentary does. But the frequent intrusions from these harassing texts kept me interested because the texts are, unfortunately, very funny. You see, the documentary makes the insane choice of having what can only be described as a “sassy gay robot” doing the voiceover for the texts, which means you get a lispy distorted voice actor angrily reading lines like: “fn trash bitch dont fn wear leggings ain’t no one want to see your anorexic flat ass,” over B-roll of the teenaged girl walking down her school hallway in leggings. I know these texts must have been scary and alarming at the time, but the way they’re presented in the documentary makes them some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. If it's wrong to scream with laughter at a teen girl being called "lonely ugly ass," I don't want to be right!

Unfortunately, once the culprit is discovered, the film takes an outrageously dark and depressing turn (the police body cam footage in particular is... yikes). And, sure, families and an entire community were shattered by this extremely, extremely strange crime. But I still can't shake how funny this crime is — this person is insane! Especially because they are not only participating in the documentary, but participating in filmed reenactments of the cyberbullying!!! We are witnessing truly staggering amounts of gall.

The documentary ends on a somewhat unclear note, without quite answering what the hell this person was thinking — but, to be fair, it's very clear from their involvement in this movie that they still have no idea what they were thinking, other than a desperate need for attention at literally all costs. And you know what? I support it! Give them the attention they want! They've earned it! Put them on The Traitors! Give them a float at Pride! Who gives a shit anymore!

Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (2025) — paperback

I don't love it when a book is a "modern fairytale," but I picked this up at a bookstore based on nothing but the great cover (I always think you should judge a book by its cover, actually — it tells you a lot about the author's taste, and I don't care if that's shallow). The description stated that it was a retelling of the Bluebeard story, but retold as modern commentary on toxic masculinity and domestic abuse. Sure, I thought, this could be good or it could be annoying, but why not give it a try!

I loved the mood of the book — it's dreamlike and gothic, haunting and eerie. Written as a story being told to a chorus of dead women (I think?), the narrator describes the upbringing of a boy who is seemingly cursed, causing everyone and everything around him to die — the longer he stays in a village, and the closer he gets to the people in the village, the worse things get. Plants wither and die, fields go fallow, children start getting sick. He lives a life constantly on the move, and as he grows up and gets married, his wives start dying, one after another. It's all perfectly eerie and moody, but the longer it went on, the more I became ready for it to end. It's all setup, no resolution — one of those books that feels like a fantastic idea that just didn't pan out. I told you modern novels don't know how to end anymore! Unlike this email, which is ending at the perfect time: right now. :)