Curry Barker‘s directorial breakout is making a splash with its opening weekend, and he’s already considering a followup.

The Obsession writer/director recently admitted to a “plot hole” that bothers him in his horror film, now in theaters, and how the rules of the One Wish Willow impacts a potential sequel or anthology series.

“I mean, it’s kind of a plot hole. It’s something I don’t like to think about too much, because it totally doesn’t make sense that there’s a world of people just making wishes,” he told Total Film after a recent screening. “It really doesn’t make any sense at all.”

In Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston) makes a wish on a mysterious novelty item called a One Wish Willow that his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) would love him more than anything in the world. Bloody consequences ensue before it’s casually revealed that everyone gets to make one wish on the One Wish Willow, which actually comes true.

Barker continued, “If the One Wish Willow actually works, which it does in this lore, and people are just making wishes left and right, there would be some crazy—like, dragons would exist. And none of that. The world is pretty normal from what we see in this movie. So, it doesn’t really make sense.

“Here’s my take; every time someone makes a wish, they enter into an alternate reality where their wish comes true, so you’re not experiencing everybody’s wish at the same time. And that’s why—but that doesn’t make sense because the money falls from the ceiling. Yeah, it’s broken,” he conceded, referencing a scene in which Bear’s friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) wishes for a large sum right in front of him.

With a full slate that includes Blumhouse’s Anything but Ghosts and A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Barker is still open to revisiting the world of Obsession and the One Wish Willow.

“I obviously have a couple more things that I’m excited about next, but I do see Obsession 2, maybe. Or even what really is exciting to me is maybe an anthology, like a one-hour episode,” said Barker. “Each episode is a different wish that goes completely off the rails. Maybe I’ll direct the pilot with the same DP, and you could invite other filmmakers to kind of give their spin at it. That would be really cool.”

When the playwright and now film director Aleshea Harris began writing the script for “Is God Is,” she was on food stamps; subletting an apartment in North Hollywood; and working multiple jobs, including teaching at California Institute of Arts where she’d gotten her MFA in 2014 and moonlighting as an associate at David’s Bridal. “I was so broke,” Harris, now 44, said in a recent video interview with IndieWire.

As a break from the drudgery of surviving a fraught postgraduate landscape, Harris sought refuge in her imagination. “I wondered what would happen if I were to write a play that was inspired by ancient Greek tragedy, but populated by people who look and speak like myself,” she recalls thinking at the time. Inspired by a former professor with whom she studied these Hellenic texts, Harris started writing a surrealist narrative about fraternal twin sisters seeking vengeance on behalf of their mother, from whom they have been estranged. “Is God Is” premiered at Soho Rep Theatre New York in 2018 and garnered Harris three Obie Awards. Now, she’s turned the play into a movie. 

Harris, who was born in Germany, raised in the U.S. South, and now lives in Pasadena, didn’t set out to be a film director until she linked with her producers — Riva Marker at Linden Entertainment, Tessa Thompson at Viva Maude, and Janicza Bravo at CYRK. “It was actually Jeremy O. Harris and Janicza, who are friends, who told me separately that they each thought that I should direct the movie,” Harris said. After Janicza offered her mentorship, the playwright agreed to take on the task. In many ways being a director made sense to Harris, for she had always felt protective of her plays and possessed, in her words, strong opinions about how they should be staged.

Still, a film set differs from a theater production, so Harris dove into studying how to most effectively translate her vision for the screen. The biggest lesson she learned was to “let the image breathe” and while that approach required her to rethink elements of “Is God Is,” it also invited new forms of engagement — particularly with the protagonists Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, respectively. Through writing the screenplay and collaborating with Young and Johnson, Harris was able to flesh out these characters in a way that heightened the tragic undertones of their story. 

“Is God Is” opens with a serene sepia snapshot of two little Black girls sitting on a bench, their backs facing the camera. After a young Black boy calls them ugly because of their badly burned skin, one of the girls beats him up with a bat. Harris spares audiences the bloody image, but the sound of the boy’s imploring shrieks is nevertheless haunting. Fast forward decades and those two girls are now young women who have been summoned by their mother, from whom they are estranged. God, as they call their matriarch, played by Vivica A. Fox, is dying, and before she takes her last breath, she wants her daughters to kill their father. Years ago, he lit God on fire and Racine and Anaia got burned too. A trial followed, the Man was set free, God was left badly wounded and the girls, permanently bearing the marks of this violence, were put in foster care. 

Rage and resentment percolate beneath the surface of “Is God Is,” a film inspired by spaghetti Westerns, Southern Gothic traditions and Greek tragedy. Racine (eagerly) and Anaia (more reluctant) agree to God’s demands and journey to find the Man who tried to kill them. The film lives in a mythic register and takes place in a heightened version of our world. During her research phase, Harris looked to Ethan and Joel Coen’s “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” a satirical drama loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey,” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” series. “I was trying to find a way to be absurd, and ridiculous,” Harris said, while maintaining the narrative’s “heart and actual stakes.” 

And Harris succeeds. “Is God Is” achieves a tonal ambiguity that enhances Racine and Anaia’s journey through the director’s conjured Southern landscape. After leaving God’s house, the twins head to the office of the lawyer who defended the Man, as their father comes to be known, at the trial. Their interaction is at once gruesome and farcical: The lawyer has no tongue because the Man cut it off, for fear the attorney might one day become a rat. This scene is succeeded by an even more absurdist moment in which Racine and Anaia visit a sanctified church led by a woman named Divine (a scene-stealing Erika Alexandra). The Man and Divine were once married; he eventually absconded but not before leaving an heir (Josiah Cross). Naturally, Divine does not believe that The Man would abandon her; nor does she believe that the twins are telling the truth about his cruelty. Their inevitable confrontation leads to a minor chase through a desert-like tract of land. 

Harris describes the texture and atmosphere of “Is God Is” as “three clicks to the left of center” — it’s her way of talking about the level of magic or nonrealist threads pulsing through the film. Researching the components that would form a coherent visual language was one of Harris’ favorite parts of the process. “I just got to nerd out,” she said. Her production designer Freyja Bardell and costume designer Angelina Vitto were her co-conspirators in figuring out how to make Racine and Anaia’s world feel uncanny. She returned to “O Brother, Where Art Thou” to better understand how the Coen brothers crafted their version of 1920s Mississippi Delta. She studied the color tone, costuming and music so she could crack the code. “I wasn’t doing exactly what they did,” she said, but “I was trying to take my cues from the ways they did it.” 

Although “Is God Is” is Harris’ debut film, it’s not her first time thinking in these terms. Her work has always dealt in the otherworldly. Harris also wrote “On Sugarland,” a meditation on grief and PTSD loosely inspired by “Antigone” and “Philoctetes,” as well as Southern Gothic traditions and surrealism. (It was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.) Similar to “Is God Is,” “On Sugarland” roots itself in the perspective of a young Black woman searching for answers. The playwright prefers the mythic register when telling stories about Black women coming-of-age or finding themselves because she finds she can be more honest and access a different kind of truth. There are times when reality, as a Black woman living in the U.S., can be “maddening,” Harris says, and its grammar almost “immovable.” It’s no wonder that in “Is God Is” when Racine and Anais have forged their own language, one that the people in their fictive world can’t hear but audiences can see through on-screen subtitles. Working with the title designer Teddy Blanks, Harris found a textural font — one that embodied decaying paint and burns — to do the job.

Harris’ approach to storytelling — methodical, exacting and surreal — places her within a storied tradition. Her North Stars are Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, two writers whose oeuvres forged new narrative possibilities. During our video call, Harris would frequently look just beyond the frame, where a poster of Butler hangs in her office. These women “set the standard of excellence,” she said, eyeing the poster. The rigor with which they approached their work is one Harris strives for in all of her projects. Not only does she feel empowered by their legacy, she also feels liberated by it. 

An Amazon MGM release, “Is God Is” is now playing in theaters.

Films about filmmaking often seem destined for film lovers only, to the detriment of everyone else. There are of course some great exceptions to that rule, such as Truffaut’s Day for Night, Fellini’s 8 ½ and Godard’s Contempt — or, this past year, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which was a hit in Cannes that wound up winning an Oscar.

Still, the genre is a tough nut to crack and tends to yield the same old tales of tyrannical directors, insecure actors, overtaxed crew members and corrupt producers. Some, but not all, of those tropes are present in Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s behind-the-scenes drama The Beloved (El Ser Querido), which manages to add a few welcome twists to the formula. It also dishes out a heavy dose of on-set malaise that can be so unbearable to watch that at times you want to yell out “Cut!’

Sorogoyen is something of a master of malaise, as evidenced by his taut 2023 thriller, The Beasts, about a French couple relocating to a Spanish town, where they’re so unwelcome they become pariahs and, eventually, prey. He also created and directed the well-praised TV series The New Years, which followed a couple through times both good and bad in episodes shifting from carnal passion to extreme discomfort.

The Beloved often consists of the latter, courtesy of its two-time Oscar-winning fictional filmmaker, Esteban Martínez (Bardem), who returns home after years of exile in New York to direct a period piece set in the Spanish Sahara — a contested territory in North Africa, now known as Western Sahara, that Spain occupied until the 1970s.

The catch, in what already seems like a risky project, is that Martínez has decided to cast his own estranged daughter, Emilia (Victoria Luengo), in the lead role, even if she’s only acted in a few forgettable TV shows. If the Trier movie immediately comes to mind here, well, it’s because both films mine similar material, focusing on an esteemed but volatile director trying to make amends with a child/actress he neglected for too long.

But Sorogoyen’s movie is a different beast in many ways, beginning with how he teases out the tension and withholds key pieces of information, stretching our unease to a breaking point. The first 15 minutes of The Beloved are a prime example of that, following Martínez as he shows up at a restaurant for an encounter with Emilia. We have no idea what their relationship is at first — are they former lovers? frenemies? partners in crime? — until we learn not only that Martínez abandoned Emila after birth, but that he’s returned to his homeland to ask her to star in his ambitious new movie.

The drama then shifts to the film shoot itself, which takes place on the deserts and shores of the Canary Islands, standing in for the Sahara circa 1932. At that point, Sorogoyen and DP Álex de Pablo start switching up techniques and film formats — from the intimate handheld close-ups of the opening sequence to epic vistas mixing color with black-and-white footage — capturing the wind-strewn landscapes where Martínez and his crew will be shooting for the coming weeks.  

The on-set conflict quickly ratchets up under the director’s domineering presence, which feels harmless at first, like he’s just another celebrated auteur with a big ego trying to make it through a tough production. But as the shoot progresses, he winds up turning into a total dictator, culminating in a standout scene during which his treatment of cast and crew becomes excruciatingly — and somewhat hilariously — abusive.

Bardem is terrific in the role of a hardened filmmaker with a shady past and shitty reputation who still has talent to burn, hoping to redeem his relationship with Emilia as they collaborate for the first time. Martínez initially turns on the charm with his daughter, encouraging her as an actress despite her lack of experience. But when that fails to win her over, he starts to lose his cool, chastizing everyone — including his longtime French producer, Marina (Marina Foïs, who co-starred in The Beasts) — and turning Emilia completely against him.

Why this happens is where The Beloved feels a little too familiar. In a nutshell, Emilia resents her dad for decades of poor behavior, including a drinking problem that Martínez, who’s been sober for several years now, seems incapable of acknowledging. We’ve seen it all before — the director with the dark past; the daughter who may never forgive him — and Sorogoyen doesn’t quite manage to make it emotional, even if Luengo (The Room Next Door) is powerful as a girl who can’t let go of a lifelong grudge.

Another issue involves the fictional movie being shot, which is called Desert and seems to be about the perils of Spanish colonialism, yet remains disconnected to all the shenanigans going on behind the scenes. The parallel stories are never tied together, to the point that we lose interest in the project Martínez seems to be risking his whole career on, not to mention his already tenuous relationship with Emilia.

Even if its elements don’t always gel, The Beloved offers another prime showcase for Sorogoyen’s art of unease, as well as for Bardem’s talent for playing men who can fly off the handle at any moment (Martínez is like Anton Chigurh strapped to a director’s chair). Godard, whose own on-set antics were on display last year in Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, famously wrote that “the cinema is truth 24 times a second.” This tense outing proves that the truth sometimes comes out once you stop rolling.