Obsession is a viciously funny romantic horror that plants itself firmly in the monkey’s paw tradition of “be careful what you wish for,” pushing that logic to its most uncomfortable conclusion. Powered by a star-making performance from Inde Navarrette, it turns on a simple, devastating idea: love without agency is indistinguishable from possession.
★★★★★
Curry Barker’s Obsession centres on the “One Wish Willow,” a cheap novelty trinket that grants a wish when snapped in half. Bear (Michael Johnstown), a shy music store employee unable to confess his feelings to his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), treats it as exactly that – a throwaway toy that he uses in lieu of risking a real conversation. Unable to articulate his crush and fearing rejection, he snaps the Willow and wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone else in the world.
The film grants his wish immediately – in the background, Nikki stops dead in her tracks. Her previous friendly familiarity snaps into an insistent romantic and physical closeness, and for a brief stretch Barker almost lets it play like a fantasy aligning with expectation. Bear gets a version of Nikki that’s close to his dreams – she’s attentive, affectionate, inseparable.
But immediately there’s something dead behind the eyes, and a crazed mania lurking in her voice. This isn’t the Nikki he knew. She does love Bear more than anyone else. In fact, her world narrows until he is the only fixed point. Her affection becomes constant, then invasive, then threatening. Meanwhile, her ability to choose, to pull back, to exist independently is has been eliminated.
Obsession’s real strength is how it approaches those two angles at once. Anyone who has dealt with a “nice guy” who does not perceive himself as sexually or romantically coercive – but absolutely is – will recognise Bear. Johnstown plays him with a careful softness that masks something harder, a willful blindness to the implications of his own desire.
At the same time, anyone who has watched a relationship tilt from excitable affection into overwhelming emotional need, and romantic monomania, will feel the dread as Nikki begins to slip. Inde Navarrette’s transformation, her ability to switch registers and turn on a dime, and her mid-conversation mood swings capture the terror of watching a loved one switch personas in real time, increasingly demonic while still carrying a hidden wisp of humanity. Her meltdown at a house party game of Jenga is the film’s high point – Nikki bouncing between childlike excitement, sexual intensity, and sudden rage while everyone else looks away awkwardly, frozen in horror.
Bear is haplessly torn between trying to help, itching to get out, and, more darkly, wanting to keep his captured dream girl exactly where he has her, if only she were less disturbing. The film refuses to separate those impulses. It is, in effect, a perfect blend of ‘nice guy creep’ horror and ‘bunny boiler’ horror, a pairing that gives the film its uneasy universality.
And yet, the film is genuinely hilarious. Much of that comes from Bear’s attempts to “correct” the wish. He scrambles to wrangle the logic of the Willow, searching for answers from the point of purchase to online dead ends, hoping for an easy out that never arrives – looking for a helping hand from a helpline, a shopkeeper, a friend, even Reddit. Bear continues to frame the situation as something happening to him, rather than the direct consequence of his own actions.
Morally unsparing, often uproariously funny, and devastating in where it lands, Obsession excels on all fronts. Superbly written, performed, shot, scored, and edited, it is a strong contender for horror film of the year, and Indee Navarrette sets the benchmark for the female horror performance to beat. More than that, it confirms Curry Barker as the real deal – the emerging king of American indie horror. See this movie if you dare!
Obsession played at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans
Whitlock&Pope 