The new horror film “Obsession” is the runaway hit of the season. Curry Barker, a 26-year old YouTuber, wrote and directed the movie with a mere $750,000 budget — and in less than two weeks it has earned over $68 million at the box office. The word-of-mouth buzz is roaring: the movie broke records with its “unheard of” second week improvement over its first. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie have a jump like this in weekend two,” Comscore’s head of marketplace trends, Paul Dergarabedian, told Variety. “It’s indicative of audiences embracing the film.”
Why are people obsessed with “Obsession”? Well, it’s fun as hell and genuinely unsettling. It’s also inventive: Mostly shunning jump scares, it instead relies on dark lighting, clever blocking, minimalistic visual effects and the atmospherics of unpredictability to build suspense and surprise. And it features solid acting, including a bravura performance by a smoothly shape-shifting Inde Navarrette, who will undoubtedly land more high-profile roles in the future.
Just as it avoids visual cliche, it also avoids well-worn horror tropes in the story it tells.
But to my mind, the film’s genius (and a lot of what’s driving social media commentary about it) lies in its ability to take a deceptively simple premise — “be careful what you wish for” — and wring a ton of meaning from it, sprinkled with some sly social commentary. The movie is about dysfunctional romance, and the monster of this movie is less a specific character or entity, and more about how acute desire can breed suffering and evolve into a pretext for exploitation.
Bear, played by Michael Johnston, is hopelessly in love with his friend, Nikki, played by Navarette. Unable to work up the courage to ask her on a date, he resorts to snapping a “One Wish Willow” toy he picks up in an occult store. Moments after he breaks the toy, her behavior changes radically: Nikki goes from treating him as a normal friend to fixating on being with him as much as she possibly can. She seems inexplicably obsessed. What follows is an unconventional play on parables about the dangers of having one’s wishes granted.
Nikki’s infatuation with Bear is an odd mix of manic, distraught and creepy. She seems to make up stories to make her desire to be with him seem more plausible, but it’s clear that there is something off about how she cannot stand to be away from him for even a moment, is frenziedly searching for ways to endear him to her and intensely surveils him. This being a horror film, the ways she attempts to do this are at turns eerie and repulsive, including watching him while he sleeps and using his recently deceased pet for some ghastly home projects.
But Nikki’s apparent spell doesn’t push her entirely out the realm of relatability. A lot of the power and humor of the movie — and it definitely got laughs in the theater — derives from something universally recognizable about Nikki: Almost everybody has been driven a bit crazy by infatuation. Nikki’s desire to remold herself to be pleasing to Bear, her jealousy, her degrading self-effacement, her attempts at control, her dishonesty — these are traits of (unhealthy) infatuation. She’s cursed, but her possession seems a bit familiar, even human.
Yet as the movie progresses, another strand of obsession emerges. Even as Bear runs out of excuses for Nikki’s increasingly strange behavior, he continually refuses to admit how bad things are or openly reckon with what he accidentally did to her. The initial reason for that is because he is, himself, entirely consumed by the desperate hope that her new feelings toward him may on some level be real. He willfully denies the obvious conclusion that her feelings could not be authentic if they’ve been conjured up by his accidental spell, and he attempts over and over again to try to figure out how to make the disastrous dynamic work in hopes of fulfilling a fantasy. Bear is so pathetically fixated on validation that he buries his hand in the sand about what’s going on.
From a distance, the most benign version of this relationship resembles toxic codependency, such as when Bear’s friend chides him for being unable to attend a party on his own without Nikki. But over time (SPOILER ALERT) Bear is forced to confront that Nikki is haunted by some kind of demonic entity, is still trapped in her body but not in control of it, and wants to be killed to be released from her possession. Bear declines to do so. He is not just engaged in delusion and hoping to be the beneficiary of a twisted accident, but exploiting someone else’s vulnerability. Bear’s immaturity and cowardice has become an excuse for abuse and transgressing consent.
Bear does eventually feel cornered into taking action and attempts to end the mess he’s made, but it all transpires in surprising ways. That’s the great thing about “Obsession” — just as it avoids visual cliche, it also avoids well-worn horror tropes in the story it tells. And it explores all these ideas without engaging in finger-wagging didacticism. That hasn’t stopped plenty of people from offering some simplistic appraisals of the movie online, but all the better if it inspires more people to see something so fresh and layered.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.