The debut feature of longtime short film director Curry Barker, Obsession takes a well-established premise and gives it a genuinely fresh spin. In many ways, this film feels like a spiritual successor to David Robert Mitchell’s brilliant It Follows, which was one of the founding films of this longstanding horror renaissance starting in the mid-2010s. Where It Follows was about teenage fear of sex and aging, Obsession is more subtly about what is sometimes referred to as the “male loneliness epidemic.” I don’t know that I would classify the current cultural problems surrounding dating as an epidemic, but I do think Obsession makes quite a statement in the age of “incels” and the “manosphere.”
Twenty-something Bear (short for Baron; Michael Johnston) hopelessly longs for Nikki (Inde Navarrette) but is far too shy and awkward to let her know. Along with their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), they work at a music shop while they are all trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. Bear is living in his recently-deceased grandmother’s house and seems haunted by that grief and the prospect of moving on from it. While conflicted as to whether or not to buy Nikki a grand gesture of a gift, he stumbles across a toy called One Wish Willow, which, when broken, promises to grant the user one wish and nothing more. I’m sure you’re able to see where this premise is going.
Just as painful as any of the physical horror and gore later in the film is the conversation which prompts Bear to use his one wish. Bear is so close to divulging his true feelings to Nikki, but so realistically written when he holds back. The fantastical element of this surprisingly very grounded film (for what it is) is Nikki’s behavior once Bear’s wish for her to love him is granted. As the title suggests, it’s a very obsessive, possessive kind of love, but it also belies Nikki’s soul and the fact that this was not really her choice, which starts to become more and more obvious as time goes on. Her violent switches between amorous Nikki and alarming Nikki are our first clues into the line the film blurs between the self and the possessed. Navarrette’s performance is undeniable; a star-making turn on the level of Florence Pugh in Midsommar or Mia Goth in Pearl.
Some viewers may take issue with the fact that Obsession is one of many movies across multiple genres in which the initial conflict could be solved by a single conversation. From my vantage point, the film is using that angle to make a broader point about men in modern dating culture. Bear is crucially not written as a manosphere dweeb who blames all his problems on women, but his logic in making the wish he makes comes from a comparable place. He is so afraid of being “friend-zoned” (a weak-minded term for weak-minded people) by Nikki that he would rather use this magic as a crutch than have an honest, adult conversation. Although these characters are college-aged, Obsession understands how so much of the dating pool these days is taken up by people who are emotionally still in high school, and it punishes those characters relentlessly. I don’t know that it quite lives up to the “best horror movie of the year” hype, but it’s still a wild, terrifying ride with a lot to say, and a central performance you won’t soon forget. | George Napper
