Critics gave Obsession 94%. The audience says 52%. The gap is the story, not the cast.

Critics love Obsession. The little wish-gone-wrong horror film from writer-director Curry Barker sat at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes as of July 22, the kind of number that usually means a consensus.

The actual audience never signed it. We measure what people say about a film in public social media conversations, the unprompted kind. Nobody filling in a review form, nobody clicking stars, just people talking after they watch. For Obsession, that was 2,798 reactions and counting, collected daily, classified, and scored.

The audience verdict: 52% positive, 22% mixed, 27% negative, an overall score of 62 out of 100.

That is a 42 point gap from the critics on the same yardstick. Both numbers measure the share of positive verdicts, apples to apples. For comparison, The Odyssey's much-discussed critic gap is 26 points. Obsession's is bigger, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Here is what makes it interesting: the audience is not rejecting the movie the critics saw. They are split down the middle of it.

What the audience agrees with critics about

The acting scored 92 out of 100, one of the strongest marks in our catalog, and the praise has a name attached: Inde Navarrette, who plays the crush, Nikki. Her mentions run 86% positive, the warmest word of mouth for any person in the conversation. The film's humor lands too, at 88, and the premise gets real credit, with originality at 71. On craft, the crowd and the critics see the same movie.

Where the audience breaks away

Story is the single most discussed aspect of the film, 953 mentions, more than three times anything else. It scored 48. The most talked-about thing about Obsession is the thing the audience likes least: where the wish plot goes after the setup. Critics reviewed the execution. The audience is arguing about the destination, and that argument is the whole 42 point gap.

The Bear problem

The strangest number in the data. The most mentioned name in the entire conversation is not an actor. It is Bear, the lead character, named 235 times, and just 9% of those mentions are positive. Meanwhile Michael Johnston, the actor who plays him, splits evenly at 46%, and the cast as a whole scores 92. The audience is not confused about who to blame. They separate the performance from the person on the page, and their verdict is that Bear is written to be insufferable. Whether that was the point is half the argument.

The verdict locked in early

When we started tracking, from 441 reactions, the score was 64. By late July, from 2,798, it was 62. The sample grew six times over and the needle moved two points. Unsolicited conversation, weighted so sarcasm counts less and "I watched it last night" counts more than "I heard it was bad," settles fast and stays put. A 94 from critics tells you what a hundred professionals thought. A 62 from thousands of unprompted reactions tells you what the room actually feels like.

Obsession's full breakdown, updated nightly, is here: Obsession on Skip The Critics