Crew
Director/Screenplay – Curry Barker, Producers – James Harris, Haley Nicole Johnson, Christian Mercuri & Roman Viaris, Photography – Taylor Clemons, Music – Rock Burwell, Visual Effects – Queen (Supervisor – Peter Timberlake), Production Design – Vivian Gray. Production Company – Capstone Studios/Tea Shop Productions/Under the Shell.
Cast
Michael Johnston (Bear), Inde Navarrette (Nikki), Cooper Tomlinson (Ian), Megan Lawless (Sarah Harper), Andy Richter (Carter), Haley Fitzgerald (Viola), Darin Toonder (Harry), Chloe Breen (Ruthie)
Plot
Bear has had a long-time crush on Nikki ever since they went to school, while the two now work together in the same music store. His best friend/co-worker Ian urges him to step up and say something to her. Bear enters a store that sells One Wish Willows – novelty items that claim to allow you to make a wish when broken. Bear drops Nikki off at home one evening but misses his chance to say something to her. He then breaks the One Wish Willow and wishes that she could love him more than anything in the world. Immediately after doing so, she comes back to his car and insists they go to his place. Bear finds the way she is now acting disturbing but falls into a relationship with her. However, Nikki’s obsessive behaviour and attachment to Bear starts to become increasingly more unhinged.
Obsession was the second film for Curry Barker. Barker started out making comedy shorts for YouTube in the late 2010s, gradually moving over into horror shorts. He made the $800 Found Footage horror film Milk & Serial (2024), which he uploaded free to YouTube after failing to obtain distribution. Obsession became a phenomenon after premiering at the Toronto Film Festival where its distribution rights were the recipient of a bidding war that was eventually won by Blumhouse. The film became a runaway box-office phenomenon, earning some $400 million worldwide.
With only these two low-budget films under his belt, Curry Barker has next been announced as the director of a new Texas Chainsaw film. The hope is that we are seeing a new genre talent blossoming. The disappointment will be if Barker is just absorbed into the studio system and either loses his distinctiveness or turns out something generic where what he did that was unique ends up being quickly forgotten like so many others before him.
There have been films about Wishes before. The closest of these to Obsession might be the comedy Bedazzled (1967) where Dudley Moore makes a deal with The Devil for seven wishes to further his love with Raquel Welch only for the wording of each to be twisted around on him, and its lesser remake Bedazzled (2000) starring Brendan Fraser. Another horror variant might be the Russian Dark Spell (2021).
I was very impressed with what Curry Barker does. Obsession is a film that actually makes desaturated lighting work in its favour. The film is shot in 1.50:1 aspect ratio, which creates a screen that feels claustrophobically confined with the action pinned in by bands on either side of it. Barker also does a fantastic job of making the soundtrack do a lot of the work – the score has a brooding ominousness while love scenes come accompanied by thunderous music that usually accompanies epic events in a film. Particularly good is the scene in the bathroom where Michael Johnston announces he wants to go out for the boy’s night where all of Inde Navarette’s swings of mood are shown by the sound of the shower, a loud slam and her cries, not her being present on screen in the scene.
There are some genuinely deranged scenes like where Michael Johnston finds out what is in his lunch. And especially the boy’s night with Inde Navarrette’s reading out a piece of fiction she has written and then agonisingly dragging away the chair that contains Megan Lawless, all before smashing a bottle into her face. Or the abrupt shock of the attack in the car.
Inde Navarrette gives a performance that becomes quite chilling. She starts with a modern everyday girl vibe, but the performance gradually pushes over into the intensely disturbed and then will flip back on a dime. Curry Barker creates disturbing scenes with her standing in the shadows at the end of the bed “I don’t like my dreams” and hiding her face behind a vase of flowers.
There is some version of Obsession that could take place as regular romance/relationship film. Strip the brooding score and turn up the lighting/colour processing levels and the film simply becomes one about a guy trying to deal with a girl with borderline personality disorder who can fly into screaming rages and has a neediness/attachment/jealousy that is off the charts – not unakin to something like Mad Love (1995). If you’ve been around internet dating long enough, none of this is too surprising. I’ve been in some relationships that were far more extreme (well, admittedly, no cooked cats – although I did have one who killed my cat after leaving her).
Obsession has readily been read into the modern gender wars debate. The scenes of Inde Navarrette trapped in her own body come with all manner of associations to issues of a woman’s bodily autonomy and women forced into trad marriages. On the other side of the fence, screen captures of the deranged Inde Navarrette have been appropriated and circulated by the online misogyny faction. I take neither side in this debate. Bear has been labeled an incel – a term I have objections to in the sense that it has morphed from meaning someone who lacks the social ability to attract into someone who has absorbed toxic Red Pill ideology to the point of being borderline psychopathic. I think much of the labelling of Bear as an incel and seeing the film in that frame comes from a certain sector that is unable to draw any kind of distinction between people with social awkwardness and the Elliot Rodgers of this world.
So here’s a different perspective on Obsession, something I’d like to think of it as the average guy perspective. Bear begins the film from the point that most straight guys do at some point – the frustration of trying to express feelings to a girl, of having been pushed into a friendzone but desiring more and wanting to try anything that will break the internal paralysis. But I don’t see Bear as an inherently evil character or the villain of the story so much as one who takes an unwitting step over a line that is only morally dubious in retrospect. And that he does so without any idea of the cost and then has to increasingly make sense of the consequences. For all that he is called the villain of the show, we also see Bear as much a prisoner of the situation and making repeated attempts to find ways to turn it back and being told the only way he can do so is by dying.
This was one of some twenty films that come with the title Obsession, the most famous other one covered here being Brian De Palma’s reincarnation thriller Obsession (1976).
Trailer here