I watch a whole lot of horror movies, which tends to mean even the most entertaining ones either don’t scare me at all or, if they do, don’t stick with me for very long. They’re a bit of spooky fun. Occasionally we’ll get one that really gets under my skin and unsettles me to the point where I’m not sure I’ll get to sleep. This year’s winner of the “Creep Kyle Out Royally” award goes to Curry Barker’s feature debut, Obsession. While comedic at times and heartfelt at others, the movie’s expert deployment of dread, the uncanny valley, and nerve-shredding awkwardness infected my brain and stayed there for weeks. Easily the scariest movie I’ve seen so far this year.
Barker got his start making comedy shorts on YouTube which steadily veered into strange and upsetting horror. Riding the thin line between absurdist humor and deeply disturbing scares, his work has a fascinating mix of surreal and mundane. With Obsession, Barker pulled together the best parts of his out-there shorts along with a very simple and relatable premise which allows the characters and increasingly effed up scenarios to breathe. And you’ll be happy the do because the scare moments feel like a gut punch.
The movie stars Michael Johnston as Bear, the supremely typical “nice guy” who is desperately in love with Nikki (Inde Navarrette), a friend from work. Despite their mutual friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) telling him to just ask her out for a drink, Bear believes he needs some kind of huge romantic gesture. He can’t get out of his own way and while looking for a gift for Nikki from a new agey-type shop, he ends up buying a novelty “One Wish Willow,” which purports to grant one wish and one wish only. So be careful.
Well, Bear isn’t careful. He wishes Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the world,” and very quickly, the girl of his dreams is behaving very strangely. In a good way, though, right? Well, maybe at first. Nikki’s professions of love turn to staring at Bear while he sleeps, making scenes in public, and eventually threatening to do things to herself and others. Why would this wish willow do this? Maybe it’s the demonic forces that grant the wish.
We’ve maybe seen similar set-ups to this, with wishes and romances, etc., but Barker makes sure to show us the most horrific version of it. It’s not just that Nikki becomes a clingy girlfriend from hell, it’s that Bear didn’t take anything else into account when making the wish. You can argue he never expected it to really work, but he made it about Nikki changing for him. One of the funnier and more disturbing scenes has Bear call the help line for the One Wish Willow. He asks if the wish can be modified rather than reversed. He quickly learns not only are all sales final, but what’s really going on in Nikki’s brain. It’s not pretty.
Barker’s most effective horror comes from the edges of the frame, the shadows in a dim room, and the sudden, piercing moments of violence. He’s an astoundingly self-assured filmmaker for someone so young making his first theatrical feature. He makes Nikki both monster and victim, often in alternating beats. A director has to have supreme confidence in the audience and his actors for something like that to work.
Speaking of actors, while Johnston’s Bear is the protagonist, the movie lives and dies on Navarrette’s performance. She is an absolute showstopping powerhouse. It really takes a performer of tremendous skill to play a terrifying character who still elicits sympathy. Navarrette’s movements at times are purposely inhuman while she looks dead behind the eyes. She’s playing unstable and unhinged to the point where we’re never sure what she’s going to do. If you’ve ever spent any time with people with severe mental health issues, this will ring true. Emotional manipulation and violent outbursts. Again, the bravery on display. Amy Madigan just won an Oscar for playing a horror villain. A just world would have Navarrette receive a nomination at least.
Obsession is a movie I had a hard time watching in the moment. It’s an uncomfortable sit at times with some absolute face-tearing awkwardness. It’s like the cringiest moments from The Office but if Dunder-Mifflin kept waiting for Michael Scott to kill someone. But once I slept on it (yes, I did end up going to sleep), all I could do was marvel at how effective and how weirdly funny this movie is. It’s terrifying, it’s messed up, it’s strange and wonderful. If this is what Curry Barker does with a rom-com, I’m terrified to see his take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.