Obsession, which just screened at Fantastic Fest is Curry Barker’s follow up to the viral found footage phenomenon Milk & Serial, an impressive one hour indie horror film that the director offered up for free on Youtube — where it spread like wildfire. I still remember coming across a review on TikTok one fateful Friday night, when it was first making the rounds and was just floored. The film is essentially about a YouTube prank video that goes horribly off the rails and into some pretty dark spaces. But what hooked me is while it had the scares you’d expect, there was an intentionality with the film and its delivery, thanks to an impressively honed script, obviously written by a genre fan who knew his way around. It wasn’t just a clever five minute premise, followed by an hour of filler, this was someone who understood found footage horror and painstakingly crafted an entry understanding the assignment.
Watch Milk & Serial Below:
Needless to say after that whatever he did next I was in the bag for, and I feel like we might have our next great horror auteur. Like Milk & Serial’s take on serial killers, Obsession explores another of my favorite horror tropes – The Monkey’s Paw take on unrequited love, but it’s probably one of the most nuanced and loaded takes I’ve witnessed.
Obsession follows “Bear” (Michael Johnston), he’s your typical shy, band nerd, who has spent the last 7 years crushing on his out of his league best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). The film transpires in that weird purgatory between high school and college, with Nikki and “Bear” still working their same high school jobs at the local music store. One fateful night Nikki calls “Bear” to let him know she’s putting in her two weeks notice and moving on to new things. Looking to get Nikki a gift to prime her up before he finally confesses his love, “Bear” visits a small new age store, where he picks up a novelty wishing willow. It’s a small branch in a colorful packaging that once broken promises to grant one wish for the breaker. Of course “Bear” chickens out on telling Nikki how he really feels, and giving her the gift – instead in an act of desperation and sadness snaps the willow and wishes that Nikki “would love him more than anything, or anyone in the world.”
What could go wrong?
While the wish for unrequited love is nothing new in the Monkey’s Paw sub-genre, it’s how Obsession decides to deliver on that wish and its layered take that makes the film work as well as it does. Not only do we have this lethal obsession, which is kind of par for the course, thanks to Inde Navarrette’s take, that’s nothing short of fucking terrifying. With her bottomless pit of neediness and for constant need for reassurance, but compounding that with a bone chilling physical component. The way Nikki moves when in her more frantic states could best be compared to a J-horror apparition. These moments are used sparingly, but really amplify the supernatural aspects and the unnaturality of this state Nikki forced into.
This brings us to the next layer and the one that’s probably the most impressive, it’s how the film deals with the actual morality of such a wish being imparted on someone who doesn’t feel the same way. While sometimes Nikki is everything “Bear” wants, we as an audience are made very aware this is just the wish controlling her, and Nikki’s real consciousness is still trapped in there, forced to watch in the background. Her battle with this THING manifests itself into some pretty gnarly instances of self harm as she’s literally fighting for control of her own body – which on its own could be read as a metaphor for the patriarchy in itself. Curry Barker’s forethought of putting this layer in there really flipped the trope’s male wish fulfillment of it all on its head – finally. It also puts complicity on “Bear” plain and simple in this situation that we rarely see in these kinds of films. thanks to Michael Johnston’s gut wrenching performance as he slowly understands what he did to his friend.
Obsession is easily going to be horror fans’ next obsession. It’s got not only an air tight script with some amazing lore embedded within its narrative, but it’s got some truly nuanced performances bringing it to life. Also, the way the film starts off with pacing that works to disarm the audience with what you’d almost expect from a quirkier more light-hearted take on this premise, that slowly ramps up once the film’s fangs are bared. Obsession is nothing short of a new horror masterwork and the new blood-soaked bar going forward for films that explore unrequited love and the lengths some will go to attain it. This is thanks to finally illuminating both sides of the twisted bargain with a bite that will leave definitely leave marks.
