Obsession Asks: What If Your Demon Was Love?

The original horror short story “The Monkey’s Paw” dates back all the way to 1902, but it has proven rather resilient over the decades, perhaps because the modern world, with all its technological wonder and phony transparency, has been a hotbed of careful-what-you-wish-for cautionary tales. Changing our lives, it seems, has never been easier or more perilous. But the idea at the heart of Curry Barker’s new horror film, Obsession, has an endearingly adolescent, back-to-basics simplicity. A shy young man, Bear (Michael Johnston), has an unbearable crush on his lovely co-worker, Nikki (Inde Navarrette). So he makes a wish that she love him more than anyone in the world, and then he suffers the tortures of the damned when the wish comes true and Nikki becomes an obsessive, needy lunatic.

Bear is a bit of a dolt, which makes it hard to accept him as either a protagonist or a villain, but maybe that’s the idea: He’s one of those terrible “nice guys” you’ve heard about, the ones who inadvertently leave destruction in their wake. When given a real chance to tell Nikki how he feels, Bear chickens out. Instead, he casually makes a wish on a silly novelty item he’d bought as a gift, a “One-Wish Willow,” which is a little branchlike thing you break while speaking your heart’s desire. Next thing he knows, the once-headstrong, no-nonsense Nikki is falling all over him, telling lies and doggedly pursuing him, all in an effort to get him to be hers. Once upon a time, this probably would have been a romantic-comedy setup, but Curry recognizes that in this day and age, it’s a horror movie. 

There’s probably a smart, chilling film to be made about the terrors of smothering and relentless adoration — one imagines what Rod Serling would have done with something like this — but this isn’t really that film. No, this is the somewhat dumber one where Nikki’s obsession quickly morphs into familiar horror-movie-psycho stuff: slamming her face against things; creepily standing in the corner of a darkened bedroom; shrieking madly one minute, smiling eerily the next. There’s also some nutso business involving Bear’s recently deceased cat that will make one question just what exactly this movie’s vision of love actually looks like. 

In other words, this is basically a demonic-possession story, albeit one without any actual demons; at one point, Nikki briefly starts moving backward for no reason. Barker does nod a couple of times to the idea that the real Nikki might be trapped inside this obsessive version of Nikki, that her identity has been subsumed by a false, manufactured desire for Bear — but the director does little with that promising notion. In fact, the film does relatively little with desire in general. During their one brief sex scene, Nikki seems largely out of it. An intriguing concept — that desire and love are different things — but Barker doesn’t go anywhere with it. (Nobody tell Adrian Lyne; he’ll have an aneurysm.) Despite the literal-mindedness of Bear’s wish and Nikki’s curse, what she demonstrates isn’t really love at all but a toxic need to possess and consume. Again, a terrifying (and resonant) thought that the film largely reduces to a few genre clichés. 

Maybe the reason why so many intriguing ideas are left unexplored in Obsession comes from a fundamental conceptual conflict: Bear is a monster, but the movie is unwilling to go too far in that direction. He essentially enslaves Nikki, but because he regrets it immediately and tries to undo it, he still gets to act like something of a hero, albeit a dopey one, while she goes through the motions of a monster, albeit an occasionally tragic one. It would take a far more gifted and sensitive filmmaker to reconcile such competing impulses.

Still, Obsession carries us along, primarily because Navarrette so beautifully switches between sickly-sweet devotion and wailing, tormented lovesickness; she makes Nikki’s nightmarish unpredictability feel like it’s all genuinely emanating from the same character, quite a feat given how little the film bothers to explain. Barker has also wisely chosen to confine much of his action to the back-and-forth between Nikki and Bear, which creates a mood of inescapable claustrophobia. For a movie without much of a body count or conventional jump scares (save for one grisly, gory one late in the picture), Obsession still achieves that critical mass of helplessness that all effective horror requires: We wish we could leave the theater, but we feel we must see what happens next.

Barker is among the recent breed of viral YouTubers who’ve transitioned to horror auteurs. In this case, he’s one-half of the online sketch duo That’s a Bad Idea, whose work I’m unfamiliar with but whose comedy background enlivens Obsession with occasional bits of strange, even ridiculous humor. (The One-Wish Willow has a helpline, and there’s even a sleepy, vaguely annoyed guy on the other end of it.) The director made his feature debut with the found-footage horror flick Milk & Serial, and his next project will reportedly be a Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot. Sketch comedy, when you think about it, is not a bad way to get started with horror, at least nowadays, when coming up with a high concept seems to be half the battle. Obsession presents us with a clever premise and relatively little follow-through, but maybe the very idea at its center — that total, obsessive devotion from the person you think you love might actually be a curse — is captivating enough. “Bro, that was the scariest shit I’ve ever seen in my life,” said one youngish man at my screening as he was leaving. His pals seemed to agree.