‘Obsession’ Review

With ‘Obsession’, writer director Curry Barker firmly establishes himself as the latest filmmaker to make the jump from a comedy background into shocking, powerful horror. While there is nothing groundbreaking in its subject matter, this is a film that will keep you tense and on edge throughout, thanks to Barker’s sly ingenuity and an instant horror-hall-of-fame performance from Inde Navarrette.

Bear (Michael Johnston) is a music store employee who has a desperate crush on his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) but is too shy, too scared to ever express how he feels as he is undermined in different ways by his other coworkers, Ian and Sarah (Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless). After hearing Nikki had lost her crystal necklace, Bear goes into an occult shop where he finds a “One Wish Willow”, a cheap looking toy that claims to grant its user one wish once they break the stick in half. Later that night, frustrated with his own inability to be honest about his feelings, Bear snaps the stick and wishes that Nikki would love him more than any person in the world. The wish, as you might expect, comes true and Bear finds himself dealing with the unforeseen, horrific consequences of forcing somebody into love against their will.

While it’s monkey’s paw story has been done numerous times before, ‘Obsession’ excels as a horror deconstruction of the nice guy persona, with a protagonist who feels he is entitled to another person’s affection simply because he wants it. Bear idealizes Nikki and is unprepared for the slightest imperfections, resulting in a shallow, one-sided expectation for romance that resonates in our increasingly isolated and incel-ified world, even if the results here are a little more violent and deranged. Even as he begins to regret his wish, Bear fixates on how the bizarre relationship is affecting him, not on how he stole agency from Nikki in order to satisfy his own desires.

As Nikki, Inde Navarrette is simply revelatory. Once Bear makes his wish, Nikki’s persona fractures, careening from one emotion to another as her Nikki consciousness battles with an unspeakable urge to love Bear. As the wish fully takes over her personality, Nikki still dashes from sweet and loving to insecure, sad, furious, murderous. The performance does more than anything else to leave the viewer uneasy, unsettled even in crowded rooms, in otherwise “safe” spaces as we wait with suspenseful anticipation for what Nikki will do or say next.

Gaining attention from his sketch comedy duo with Cooper Tomlinson, “that’s a bad idea”, Curry Barker continues a horror-comedy lineage that goes through the recent films of Zach Cregger and Jordan Peele, all the way back to ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘An American Werewolf in London’. Each scene in this film is a coin flip as to whether it will deliver pulse-pounding dread and tension or awkward, laugh out loud cringe comedy, or sometimes both in the same sequence. While Barker shows himself to be sometimes too reliant on LOUD NOISES to illicit jumps, his craft for horror and comedy is undeniably effective throughout.

‘Obsession’ is a strange and challenging balancing act, handling real issues about traumatic relationships while landing scare after scare, laugh after laugh. A tone like this is tremendously difficult to pull off, but when it works, as it does here, the result is an absolutely manic, exhilarating roller coaster of an experience.

Obsession
Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language, and brief graphic nudity.
Running Time: 1 hour and 48 minutes

Director Curry Barker
Writers Curry Barker
Stars Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter
Rating R
Running Time 108 Minutes
Genres Horror, Thriller