‘Obsession’ Review: Clever, Creepy Indie Horror Applies an Old-School Monkey’s Paw Device to Modern Relationships

We generally hear the words “careful what you wish for” enough times in life that you’d think, if you ever were to be granted your heart’s desire by supernatural means, you’d at least be really particular about the wording. But an impetuous request to an invisible genie-like entity has ruinous consequences for multiple people in “Obsession,” a nifty, unnerving little horror film from internet comedian and viral-video auteur Curry Barker that begins like the premise of a joke — and ends with a far sicker punchline than you might expect. Like the novelty gift that causes all the trouble, “Obsession” initially seems simplistic, and even a bit silly, in its rehash of the age-old monkey’s paw trope. Like the consequences of that ill-considered wish, however, it proves eerily hard to shake.

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Focus Features spent a cool $14 million on acquiring “Obsession” following its buzzy Midnight Madness premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival — a pricetag at least 14 times the size of the film’s budget, which itself was an unimaginably vast step up from the $800 that Barker spent on his eye-catching, hour-long and finally YouTube-released debut “Milk & Serial” less than two years ago. Shooting has already wrapped on his Blumhouse-produced, Focus-acquired third feature “Anything but Ghosts”; a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” reworking with A24 is now in the offing.

All of which is to say that the 26-year-old filmmaker is moving through the ranks at a speed that would suggest maybe he got lucky in the wish-granting department — if his combination of genre savvy, lo-fi production smarts and on-point GenZ commentary didn’t plainly speak for itself. Heavily dialogue-driven and mostly confined to modest domestic interiors, “Obsession’s” story of a limerent crush flipped by magic into a nightmarishly clingy relationship already works as a kind of warped, extreme romantic comedy, perceptively keyed into modern codependency theory, before it takes a hard turn into slasher territory. But Barker handles that swerve, too, with such brutal proficiency — the jump scares leap, the kills kill — it’s not hard to see why Jason Blum was sufficiently impressed to attach himself as executive producer.

“Obsession” isn’t just a coming-out party for its director, however, but for its young star Inde Navarrette — hitherto best known for TV work in “13 Reasons Why” and “Superman & Lois,” and here acing one of the more physically and emotionally taxing horror leads to come down the pike in a while. She plays Nikki, longtime pal, colleague and mooned-over dream girl of protagonist Bear (a winningly neurotic Michael Johnston), a music-store worker with a lot going for him — handsome, sensitive, generally put-together — but a chronic inability to speak his feelings. As a friend, Nikki is forever cheery and supportive, but her demeanor is so generally nice that it’s hard to tell if he’s getting special treatment from her or not.

Along comes the One Wish Willow to eliminate all doubt. Found in a new-age store, it’s a cheap, flimsy rod that promises to grant a wish when broken in half. No more credible than a fortune cookie, then, but Bear is down so bad he’s willing to give it a try. He snaps the willow, wishing for Nikki to love him “more than anything in the fucking world.” Bad idea, dude.

There would be no movie here if it didn’t work, and it does, immediately and alarmingly: All of a sudden, Nikki is barely able to be apart from him, between bouts of vigorous sex and mawkish couple talk. It doesn’t take long for Bear to realize that this alternately docile and aggressively dependent Nikki is not the woman he wanted to fall in love with him, and for their mutual friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) — a cool alt-girl who’s hot for Bear but ironically can’t make him see that — to clock that something is very, very off. Who or what is this simulated girlfriend experience that has seemingly overridden Nikki, and where is the genuine article?

Both versions glitch and flicker and fight each other within Navarrette’s extraordinarily expressive performance, emerging sometimes as a grinningly perfect, Zoomer-era Stepford facsimile, sometimes as a screamingly volatile banshee, and sometimes as a depleted, scooped-out shell of a woman, stripped of agency and bodily control. It’s her desolate, all-body sadness in this final mode that lends “Obsession” an emotional weight beyond its neat payoff as a supremely nasty dating-culture allegory — and even as an interrogation of misogynistic manosphere-era ideals. Not to mention the fact that Nikki’s cosmically forced devotion to Bear feels about as genuine, and therefore as rewarding, as a relationship with an AI chatbot, only a whole lot messier.

None of that, however, impedes the queasy fun of “Obsession’s” increasingly grisly fallout. The film is working on too small a scale for mass carnage, but Barker chooses his shocks as carefully as his yocks, timing them so that they count, and wasting no energy on needless explanations and background lore. The One Wish Willow works because it works, and we need no further knowledge than that: The unresolved senselessness of the premise lends the film a lasting, quivery chill to match the dim, minty tones of Taylor Clemens’ lensing and the unsettled, inhuman rumble of Rock Burwell’s score. There’s filmmaking polish here beyond what Barker promised when he was working online with triple-figure budgets, but “Obsession” isn’t afraid to leave the odd blank space.