“‘Obsessions” by Sergio Delgado

“Obsessions” is a fascinating work with a strong emotional impact and has the particular merit of being able to question the viewer, arousing more questions than answers, like any great film.
A very short film, yet full of meanings, thanks to the visionary staging of Delgado, who constructs this story with the use of powerful visual metaphors, with an immediate emotional impact. The hallucinatory suggestions of the story coincide with the perspective of the protagonist, suffering from OCD with a debilitating germophobia. Delgado places this delicate and intimate psychological portrait in the latest dramatic events of the contemporary world. The protagonist lives his silent and painful battle in the context of the covid-19 pandemic and so his illness seems to become unmanageable.

While narrating such a peculiar story, Delgado is gifted with the sensitivity to dwell on the deeper meanings of suffering, and the film therefore opens up to wider meanings, of universal scope. In its humanity, “Obsessions” asks each of us to deal with our own phobias and frailties, especially in a period like this, in which it is very easy to sink even more into emotional loss. Although sometimes the technical limits of a youth experiment become evident, the film manages to express its poetics also thanks to Delgado’s excellent sense of narration. The black and white, in addition to hiding some small defects of the staging, casts on the images those shadows and that pallor that are well suited to the creeping sensation of a disease.

A praise to the leading actor.