Would-be Monsters: OBSESSION Review

Sometimes nice guys should go to Hell. That’s my takeaway from Obsession, the thrilling second horror feature from Curry Barker, a monkey’s paw movie about a young man named Bear (Michael Johnston) who is in unrequited love with his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). After bungling his last shot of professing his love, Bear pours his desire into an occult shop novelty—the delightfully branded One-Wish-Willow—wishing for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world. The resulting curse sees Nikki possessed by a spooky wish demon that proceeds to destroy Bear and the people he loves most. Equal parts terrifying, disturbing, funny, and sweet, Obsession is a morbid joy to watch with some satirical barbs aimed at toxic nice guys.

Barker’s confident sense of play colours Obsession as a fast paced, hyperstylized episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, with all the scary movie moves du jour. Saturated and dark, deep shadows maintain just enough detail to suck your gaze into the most terrifying parts of the images on screen, compelling you to focus on the scare-zone. The camera doesn’t cut away from gooey practical gore effects either, forcing you to behold the consequences of Bear’s wish. And there’s a cruel humour to the pain and suffering, evocative of gloomcore auteurs Oz Perkins and Damian McCarthy, which helps energize the more upsetting subject matter with a knowing smirk. But for all the bells and whistles and party favours, this film’s greatest strength is its characters.

(Image courtesy of Universal Pictures)

The core group of Bear, Nikki, and their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless), are so fully realized and acted with such vulnerability that the wickedness visited upon them feels visceral. I believe that these young adults love working together at Andy Richter’s music store, and that they love doing bar trivia together, and I feel their desperation to escape the slacker pull of post-highschool inertia. In a brighter world, they would have made a great coming of age story together. The fullness of these people establishes an abominable contrast through which we see the terrible hollowness of the One-Wish-Willow’d Nikki. A representation of Bear’s one-dimensional desire, she is a black hole of dread.

In the film’s rising action, we see a glimpse of what life could have been for these youths in the absence of all the chaos magick. That alternate reality seemed so fun and happy and hopeful that I found myself making my own wish: for Bear to listen to his friends instead of prioritizing his solipsism. Desire in horror is often punished—Jason machetes oversexed camp counselors, Pinhead flays enterprising perverts—but rarely do we see such a brutal demonstration of how a selfish wanting can hurt other people. It’s not a sin to love someone who doesn’t love you back. That’s just life. But Obsession shows us the knife edge between longing and objectification.

For all its squirmy scares and eerie darkness, the most disturbing part of Obsession is its imbalance of poetic justice. Bear’s wish extinguishes lives and brings him to repeatedly raping his friend under the pretense that the illusion of her love might be real. He experiences guilt as self-pity, but never truly repents. And this is reflective, in that black mirror way of horror, of all the people out there who conflate transactional kindness with moral fortitude. They are everywhere, these faithless and obsessed would-be monsters. And by depriving us of Bear’s just desserts, it feels like Obsession is asking us to be a little less forgiving of the wishful nice guys. Its message is simple but radical: forget what you want, appreciate what you have, and understand that’s exactly what you deserve.