Flasz On Film

Bear (Michael Johnston) is hopelessly, irretrievably, pathetically in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). She, however, sees him only as a friend and somehow remains completely blind to Bear’s neurotic moping, sudden onset stuttering and other clear signs that he has a massive crush on her combined with a serious case of male-pattern inter-sexual cowardice. He just can’t get himself to tell Nikki how he feels about her.

Seeing no possible way out of his predicament—desperate times call for desperate measures—Bear finds a novelty toy in what looks like his local New Age mystic shop. A “One Wish Willow” that grants its purchaser exactly one wish when they break it. As you may imagine, Bear breaks the willow while wishing for Nikki to love him more than anything in the world.

You can fill in the blanks yourself. In agreement with the genre-agnostic tradition of “be careful what you wish for” movies spanning a literal myriad titles from Big and Death Becomes Her to Thinner, Drag Me to Hell, Wishmaster and many others, things get predictably weird almost immediately. Nikki changes from an easy-going young woman with a blind spot big enough to fit Bear’s entire emotional turmoil into a progressively creepy stalker who consumes his life like a demonic infestation gorging on a possessed soul. What begins with a sappy rom-com foundation turns into a violent dark fairy tale injected strategically with elements of modern supernatural horror and aesthetic nods to the likes of David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and Ari Aster (Hereditary).

And it works. In contrast to the growing number of recent high-concept fairy tales like The Watchers by Ishana Night Shyamalan or Alexandre Aja’s Never Let Go, Obsession finds the right balance between taking its central gimmick seriously (something that last year’s Together executed on quite well too, despite falling apart in other places) and making sure that the viewer would have fun watching it. Curry Barker, who wrote and directed the movie, seems to have the right kinds of ideas about hybridizing horror elements with comedic fundamentals that turn this movie into a fun singularity that’s as funny and featherlight as it is creepy and unsettling.

And the key seems to be the ease with which the film flips between these two modes. In one moment we are with Bear in his car as he’s trying to squeeze a confession of love out of his romantically constipated brain. And then we move to bromantic fraternizing with his buddy Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), only to begin seeding nuggets of psychological horror as Barker obscures Nikki’s face in the darkness, holds on her weirdly creepy smile or keeps her out of focus while Bear is in the foreground speaking to someone, but we somehow always know that Nikki is still observing him like a hawk. And then we move to spikes of totally enveloping horror when Bear wakes up at night to find Nikki hovering in the shadows, watching him sleep and moving around the room like Pennywise the Clown. We escalate with small elements of upsetting horror (the cat sandwich moment or taping the front door shut) and immediately defuse the tension by switching to familiar hangout vibes. However, as we flip-flop effortlessly between these micro-modalities, Barker slowly pressurizes the narrative to ensure that the final twenty minutes would unravel in a flurry of aptly violent catharsis.

Thus, the best way I can succinctly describe how Obsession plays out it to compare it to a piece of sketch comedy that slowly but irreversibly goes off the rails. You could honestly imagine Bear and Nikki playing leads in an SNL skit where Bear makes a wish for Nikki to love him and where immediately things escalate beyond the ridiculous… but nobody pulls them off the stage and they stay in character while taking their obsession improv to such extremes that violence and gore ensue and the audience remains completely spellbound, totally incapable of telling if what they are seeing is still a play or if things got off the rails so much that the actors started hurting each other for real out of method acting inertia.

It takes an intricate and subtle approach to directing, writing and performance to find the kind of balance that Obsession managed to strike and it might just be that Curry Barker was simply perfectly positioned to execute on this mission. Coming from the world of YouTube comedy and carrying a lifelong passion for horror movies, he managed not to over-egg the pudding by indulging in repulsive gore and injury detail and nor did he seek long-term sanctuary in the embrace of comedic beats aiming to undermine the persistently escalating tension.

In contrast to Together that leaned much more heavily into those Sam Raimi-inspired extended sequences of body horror, Obsession disarms with its comedic beats, crawls under your skin and then cranks up the heat. It’s honestly a laudable effort that stands out from the crowd of clearly tired high-concept dark fairy tales enmeshed with supernatural horror.

It might be too early to make any sweeping statements, but Curry Barker might be on his way to establishing himself as one of the more interesting voices on the scene alongside the likes of the Philippou Brothers, Zach Cregger, Oz Perkins and Radio Silence guys. Obsession cooks on all burners and its only noticeable detractor is the acting prowess of the leads, which reveals its ceiling during the film’s climax where in place of raw exhilaration we can see exactly where the cast’s emotive limitations are. But it has to be said that Curry Barker has the chops and the right ideas to bring some much needed freshness into the genre that requires it more than any other at this point.