Careful What You Wish For: Review of Obsession
★★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
In past reviews, I’ve written a fair amount about the renaissance of the horror genre in today’s cinema and these modern filmmakers’ expansion of the traditional genre tropes to include issues of social and cultural importance. It’s not just about getting scared anymore—although they’re still pretty good at that. Films like Ex Machina, Companion, They Follow, The Witch, Poor Things, and The Bride especially focus on issues of gender identity and equality as well as, along with the remake of Frankenstein, the very nature of humanity itself.
In his groundbreaking films Get Out! and Us, Jordan Peele has also incorporated issues of racial inequity and oppression into the arena of the horror film, and filmmakers like Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jane Schoenbrun, Guillermo del Toro, and others have brought a new level of psychological depth and sophistication to their respective works. It’s not just about the chainsaw anymore.
Curry Barker’s surprise box-office sensation Obsession is the latest film to stretch the envelope of traditional horror tropes.
Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) is distraught after he returns home from his job at Cassell’s music store to discover his cat Sandy has died from ingesting oxycodone. We discover Bear has a major crush on childhood friend and co-worker Nikki (Indie Navarette) and goes to a crystal shop to buy her a gift and gets her a “One Wish Willow” which promises to grant the bearer one with when the willow twig is broken.
After hanging with Nikki and their friends and co-workers Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), Bear drives Nikki home. She asks whether he has feelings for her, and he denies it. Disgusted with himself, breaks the willow, wishing that Nikki would love him more than anything.
Nikki immediately returns to the car and starts behaving erratically, leaning forward to kiss him but then screaming and pulling back. She goes home with Bear, and they sleep together. The next morning, Bear awakes to find Nikki has created a shrine with Sandy’s remains. She tries to explain away her weird behavior by blaming it on taking MDMA.
Creeped out, Bear confides in Ian, who tells him Sarah said that Nikki told her she looks at Bear like a “little brother”. Bear shrugs it off and he and Nikki start dating heavily. He wakes up one night to discover Nikki watching him from a darkened corner of the bedroom. She accuses him of not loving her and becomes hysterical. The next he opens his lunch to find Nikki has made a sandwich from his dead cat’s remains. Freaked out, Bear calls the number on the One Wish Willow package to ask how he can reverse the wish. The disembodied laconic voice on the other end tells him only his or Nikki’s death can break the wish. The call ends with the sound of Nikki screaming.
Ian invites Bear to a party at his house, and Nikki tags along. At the party, she tells a horrifying and incestuous version of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale and continues obsessing over Bear to a horrifying point. Later that night, Sarah texts him, insisting they meet. As Bear tries to sneak away, the lucid Nikki—the non-obsessed one—begs Bear to kill her. Miffed that she would rather die than be with him, he leaves to see Sarah but is surprised when Nikki follows him. Things spiral rapidly downward from that point, as it becomes obvious that Nikki cannot escape the throes of the obsession forced upon her by the boy who supposedly loves her.
While Obsession joins the ranks of the new “elevated horror” genre with its splatterings of sadistic gore, unexpected needle drops, eerie“art-house” atmospherics, deliberate pacing, unexpected jarring comic moments, and psychological realism, this story is grounded in the most traditional of origins. The evil wish trope, most famously used in “The Monkey’s Paw” (everyone’s favorite high school assignment) as well as the all-too familiar perils of the evil fermentations of unrequited love—see Fatal Attraction—are well-worn narrative conceits. It is to Curry Barker’s credit that he transforms (elevates, if you will) these often cliched narratives into a powerful new social statement.
Bear’s need to control Nikki as the object of his desire coupled with his inability to communicate his feelings to her or acknowledging her feelings is evidence of a type of male emotional immaturity—a sort of passive toxic masculinity—as been newly defined under the umbrella term of “heteropessimism”, an ironic disillusionment with heterosexuality.
Fragments of Nikki’s past, specifically her prior relationship with Bear during their school years, especially her nickname of Freaky Nikki, and her protectiveness of Bear during that time provide just enough of her character’s background to foreshadow her reaction to the willow. This background information also underlines Nikki’s dual function as a villain and a victim in the story. Her “obsessive side” was most definitely elicited by Bear and the willow wand, but the question of how much of the sources of her erratic behavior is ingrained in her psyche is impossible to know.
The dichotomy of obsessed Nikki and normal Nikki is the source of both the film’s tension and, strangely enough, its humor. The viewer is never quite sure who’s going to show up, the cool Nikki who borrows a twenty to give to a homeless person or the Nikki who cooks up a cat for lunch, who hides in the dark corners of a bedroom, or does worse to preserve the object of her obsession.
The effectiveness of this film would have been impossible without the absolutely sterling performance of Inde Navarette as Nikki. Her performance ping-pongs seamlessly back and forth between the beautiful, funny, and intelligent Nikki to the startlingly emotionally unstable and unpredictably violent person Bear has turned her into.
A large part of Navarette’s acting brilliance is the seemingly effortless transformations between an absolute monster and a charming and sympathetic young woman. Her willow-induced outbursts are shocking, frightening, and funny. There is a scene in the restaurant when Bear confronts Nikki about a lie. She reacts by repeatedly saying no in a very loud voice, much like a child throwing a tantrum. In another instance, while playing Jenga at Ian’s party, Bear picks a block that tells him to kiss the person on his left—Sarah. The camera picks up Nikki with a disturbingly funny frown on her face, an expression a little girl might have when denied an ice cream.
This infantilization is a pattern in the film, perhaps a comment on what Bear’s—a man’s—domination and exploitation of a woman can do. Nikki’s lies, her outbursts, and facial expressions reflect a woman whose identity as an adult has been compromised, if not completely dominated.
Inde Navarette’s performance is pivotal to the film, but Obsession is a wonderfully crafted and conceived film. It is all the more remarkable for being shot on a shoestring budget. Jump scares, body horror, and the overwhelming dread of psychological horror is all part of this film’s offbeat charm, but, in the traditions of Ti West, Zach Creggers, and Ari Aster, Obsession dives deeply into the psychology of grief, dread, desire, and possession.
This is not the most polished film in the canon of modern horror, but it is definitely one of the most engaging and enjoyable I’ve seen. It is definitely worth the watch.
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