Review: 'Obsession' Ain't Half the Horror Movie It Thinks It Is

Sometimes the instinct to just scribble down the words “Straight Nonsense” as an entire movie review and leave it at that runs extremely deep, and Curry Barker’s much ballyhooed horror hit-to-be Obsession, out in theaters this weekend, left exactly that flavor on the tips of my typing fingers. An update of the “Monkey’s Paw” story for the Incel Age, there are several things worth recommending here—mainly Inde Navarrette’s hysterically unhinged performance, but Barker himself does show a real gift for zhuzhing out an unsettling rhythm to his shocks. He’s great at misleading your attentions and digging up scares from unexpected places. But when it comes down to it… Straight Nonsense. Too much damned Straight Nonsense!

Navarrette plays Nikki, the “cool girl” who has unfortunately (for her, turns out) friend-zoned her record store co-worker Bear (Michael Johnston), a “nice guy” loser who’s emphatically obsessed with her. Turns out that Bear’s been holed up with his sick grandmother for an extended period of time taking care of her during her final days, and she’s just passed when this, the story of our woe woe whoaaaaaaaa, opens. We meet him in mourning, surrounded by the detritus of the old woman’s suffering, swallowed up in the funk of it.

He’s not in a great place in other words, emotionally or otherwise, and when his last connection to his grandmother, her beloved cat, chokes to death on some spilled medication, it’s Bear’s last straw. He’s got a yawning chasm at the center of him and he decides that only Nikki, sweet but clearly distracted and indifferent Nikki, can fill it. So he begins telling everyone within earshot—mainly his best friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), who also both work at the record store—that he’s finally gonna force his way outta said friend-zone by declaring his infatuation, come what may. (Sarah, who’s crushing on Bear and feeling friend-zoned herself, feigns support as best she can, the poor dear red-shirt.)

So when Nikki loses her beloved crystal necklace Bear sees his opening, and runs off to the local apothecary slash woo-woo dispensary to replace it—a little something to make his pleading neediness go down that much sweeter.

But it’s something else at this Giles’ Magic-Box-esque franchise outlet (hardly the only Buffy reference in this movie, which is in some ways an elaboration of that show’s second season “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” episode where Xander’s love-spell sends all the women of Sunnydale into a horned-up tizzy) that catches Bear’s eye. Instead it’s a little Toblerone-shaped container carrying a twisted black twig inside, poppily branded the “One Wish Willow.” Instructions maintain you just snap the sucker in half and whisper your want and voila, heart’s desire unlocked. (Better to just pay no attention to the list of side-effects which includes “self-mutilation” right?)

In theory Bear buys this stick that’d make Aunt Gladys’ toes curl for his beloved Nikki, who is going through some vague shit of her own supposedly. (Much like Bear the movie feigns brief interest and immediately moves on.) But of course it takes exactly zero prodding for Bear to use the stick for himself so he can make Nikki “love me more than anyone in the fucking world.” To their credit, Barker and his movie clearly sees Bear for the little shit he is. Because as you might have already gleaned, the little shit’s bullshit goes sideways real fast. Nikki’s thrust-upon love is less like teddy bears and more like grizzlies. Grizzlies spilled into a hornet’s nest.

The thing is, as clear as I can generously read Curry’s intentions to be-the man means well, aww, just like Bear!—the film itself stays too many degrees removed from those intentions because Nikki’s always kept at arm’s length. Before she loses her brains to Bear’s botched valentine she’s sweet but distant, and we’re always very much seeing her from Bear’s perspective. Obsession plays far too coy with Nikki’s actual wants so that we, like Bear, are forced into being unsure for a bit if this might actually be less dark magic than it is meaningful.

Admittedly an uncomfortable spot to be forced into. But it’s not one that ever felt exceptionally unique, an undiscovered country—to be honest I feel as if I’ve spent my entire life being forced into the shoes of shitty men so I can sympathize with them. And just because Obsession knows the game and that Bear is indeed shitty, that doesn’t make this experience any more insightful for anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention for, uhh, several millennia.

So all that leaves is Obsession’s willingness to push its outrageousness and brutality up to eleven, and it certainly does that. One might even say twelve! Navarrette is riveting, scary, and very very funny, swinging between every “crazy girlfriend” trope in the book in the course of her every ten seconds on-screen. Heck it’d be an even neater and more meaningful trick if we had any handle on Nikki as a human being, but Obsession’s too obsessed with Bear’s perspective to ever really take us there. It’s hard not to long for this movie told entirely from Nikki’s POV, where she finds her sanity snuffed out in a millisecond, replaced by a foreign actor’s self-interested machinations, but that’d be a far trickier movie to make. And Obsession, for all its operatic and smash-faced hooey, is in actuality regressive as get out.