Summary
Frightening, nasty, and current, bolstered by a breakout turn from Inde Navarrette, Obsession is a real treat for horror fans.
There’s a do-it-yourself quality to Curry Barker’s horror hit Obsession that feels to me like it might represent the short-term future of the genre (especially with Kane Parsons’s Backrooms releasing around the same time). Granted, Barker’s skill set as a YouTuber – including a facility for editing and an eye for visual composition – could theoretically be applied to anything, but it seems particularly suited to low-budget, intimate video nasties that are more interested in being genuinely uncomfortable and shocking than intermittently jumpy, which is all that contemporary studio horror seems to ever manage.
It feels very of the moment, too, which is surprising since it also has a notably analogue vibe to it. But the knowing dynamics and gender politics feel distinctly contemporary. It’s a movie about the bookish “nice” guy who gets his way and is too selfish and cowardly to let go of being who he imagined himself to be, even at the cost of the woman he claims to love. There’s a mean-spirited cynicism to it all that girds the entire movie. It feels fundamentally angry about all kinds of stuff in a very twenty-something way.
The “nice guy” is Bear (Michael Johnston), a bit of a socially and sexually repressed shut-in who lives alone with his cat and works at a family-owned music store with his long-time friend and crush, Nikki (Inde Navarrette, 13 Reasons Why). Bear kind of imagines himself as the guy in a rom-com who the female lead ends up with after being wounded by some buff macho type. He’s trying to pluck up the courage to confess his feelings for Nikki, even though their mutual friends, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, Dutton Ranch) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), think it might mess up the group dynamic. And they’re right, though not entirely in the way they expected.
This is because Bear employs the assistance of a One Wish Willow, a silly novelty toy he picks up in a gift shop. He wishes for Nikki to “love him more than anyone else in the world”. He doesn’t expect the wish to come true; it’s a moment of weakness, really, an open confession that he’s running out of ideas. But thanks to some vague magical mechanics that Barker – rightly – never bothers to explain, the wish thing works, and Nikki is immediately replaced by a nutcase doppelganger who reminded me of that Overly Attached Girlfriend meme. She suddenly loves Bear to a degree that is wildly volatile and eventually actively dangerous, both for herself and everyone around her.
Bear should run a mile. Obsession requires him not to, though, and the horror starts to live in how long he’ll keep all this going just to keep hold of Nikki. Barker delights in being utterly cruel to these characters, for whom he feels obvious contempt, and the movie becomes a feature-length exercise in torment as they’re put in increasingly awful social and personal predicaments. The allure is in how Nikki’s madness will manifest, and in the excuses Bear will concoct to explain it, even though it becomes obvious to Ian and Sarah from Nikki’s glazed eyes and wildly unpredictable behaviour that something’s amiss.
Eventually, Bear’s refusal to accept what’s happening in front of his eyes becomes funny, but every time it does, Barker steps things up a gear to shock the audience again. You’re repeatedly thinking, “That’s got to be the last straw”, and each time it isn’t, so Nikki ends up going to new lengths. The payoff is an explosion of violence so manic and vicious that it plays like gangbusters, at least once you’ve gotten over the messiness of it. Obsession isn’t an especially violent movie for most of the runtime, so this scene – you’ll know the one I’m talking about when you see it – is an enjoyably absurd escalation.
The cruellest detail, though, is that the real version of Nikki occasionally peeps through the façade, her old, horrified personality briefly wresting control of her body back to beg Bear to put her out of her misery. This, combined with the movie’s odd, off-kilter rhythm, combines to create a story about consent and violation that is much more horrifying than any jump scare. As it becomes more exaggerated, the story also becomes darker and meaner, and repeatedly denies any of the characters an easy out.
Inde Navarrette carries the whole thing with a remarkable performance, and she deserves all the credit she’s getting for it. But it’s Barker with a finger on the pulse of the moment, pulling all the right strings. The transition from a self-released YouTube feature to this is a logical and deserved one. It just remains to be seen whether he can retain the same oddball creative spark while caught in the machinery of the studio system (his next project is a Blumhouse one). If he has peaked early, though, Obsession is some peak.
