[HorrorScience] Obsession: turning the classic "be careful what you wish for" into a nightmare

Every now and then a horror film appears that is born practically out of nowhere, without the support of a well-known franchise or an established director behind it, and ends up becoming the phenomenon of the season. It happened withBackroomsthis year and also with Obsession. Filmed on a budget approaching a million dollars by a 26-year-old who until recently was uploading sketches to YouTube (again, like with Backrooms), it ended up grossing several hundred million worldwide and generating the kind of conversation that very few horror films achieve today.

A debutant who comes from YouTube

Curry Barker is not a name that is heard much in traditional Hollywood circles, and that is precisely part of the appeal of his story. Before Obsession, he had made a name for himself on the internet alongside Cooper Tomlinson with the comedy duo That's a Bad Idea, and then with Milk & Serial, a horror mockumentary filmed for just $800 that he uploaded directly to YouTube after failing to get distribution. That film went viral and got him representation, which in turn led to a proposal to adapt another of his shorts, The Chair, into a feature film. Barker, however, preferred to propose a different idea that he already had in mind: Obsession, partially inspired by an episode of the saga"Treehouse of Horror" from The Simpsonsin which the family stumbles upon a monkey hand that grants wishes, the same premise that originally popularized the story The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs.

What is striking is that the film never hides that digital origin. There is something of the spirit of the uncomfortable internet sketch embedded in its DNA: scenes constructed almost like small experiments in social anxiety, characters who smile too long or speak too close, as if certain gestures had lost their natural meaning by dint of being repeated on screen. Barker takes that sensitivity, so typical of a generation that was trained filming with cell phones, and transfers it to a horror story with a precision that surprises in a real debut in movie theaters.

A love postponed for too long

The story begins by showing Baron "Bear" Bailey (Michael Johnston), an employee at a musical instrument store, rehearsing with his best friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) how he is finally going to confess to Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) that he is in love with her. Bear and Nikki have known each other since high school, they work together in the same store along with another mutual friend, Sarah (Megan Lawless), daughter of the owner of the store, and they are part of a group of four that meets every week for trivia night at a neighborhood bar. Ian, who deep down wants to protect the group dynamic, asks Bear not to ruin trivia night by confessing right there, and suggests waiting for a better time.

That “best moment” never comes, of course. Between the constant trivia interruptions and Bear's nerves, the confession doesn't come out, and Ian and Sarah end up going off together to sing karaoke afterwards, leaving Bear the opportunity to take Nikki back to her house in the car. That trip is one of genuine intimacy: they talk about everything a little, Nikki even asks him directly if he likes someone, giving Bear the perfect opportunity to tell the truth. But he, again, can't. Only when Nikki has gotten out of the car and entered her house does Bear remember that he had bought her a belated birthday gift: a curious object called "One Wish Willow," a decorative branch that promises to grant a wish to anyone who breaks it in half. Before giving it to her, without thinking too much, he breaks it himself and asks, almost as a desperate joke, that Nikki love him more than anyone in the entire world. Seconds later, she reappears next to the car, inviting him in.

When desire begins to show its dark side

At first, everything seems like a dream come true. Nikki and Bear begin a relationship overnight, and she is attentive, affectionate, and completely dedicated. But there is something about that dedication that makes her uncomfortable from the first moment: there is an excessive intensity in every gesture, a constant need to be close to him, moments in which Nikki seems to interrupt herself, as if something beneath that loving façade was screaming to come out. Sarah, their mutual friend, soon notices that the relationship has a strange, almost artificial air, and begins to ask uncomfortable questions about what changed so suddenly between the two of them.

The film measures very well the moment in which the mask begins to completely crack. There's a particularly disturbing scene in which Bear discovers, through a note, that the food Nikki made him for lunch contained his own cat, who had died a few days earlier. It's the first truly undeniable indication that something broke in Nikki, or that something outside of her took control of her actions. Ian, meanwhile, begins to suspect that the situation is not healthy for either Nikki or his friend, and points out to Bear how strange it is that such a recent relationship already seems so unbalanced; He even suggests that he attend a party he is organizing alone, as a way to see how Nikki reacts to being separated from him even for one night.

It is in the section of that party where the film shows for the first time, without any type of ambiguity, how far this version of Nikki is capable of going. In a scene that became one of the most talked about of the premiere, Nikki even shouts "it's not me!" while repeatedly punching his face, as if the real person beneath the spell was desperately trying to regain control of his own body. Shortly after, Sarah, who had begun to grow closer to Bear and harbored feelings of her own toward him, ends up being seen by Nikki as a direct threat to their bond. What follows is one of the film's starkest scenes, filmed with a sudden violence that contrasts brutally with the everyday tone that preceded it, and which leaves Bear forced to help cover up what happened if he wants to maintain some control over the situation.

Desperate, Bear returns to the esoteric store where he bought the original item, searching for some way to reverse what he unleashed. There, a different employee named Harry explains a key rule of how the One Wish Willow works: each person can only use it once, so if Bear wants to undo his own wish, he needs to convince someone else to break off a new branch and make exactly that on his behalf. That revelation completely changes the course of the story, because suddenly Bear not only has to deal with the consequences of what he did, but also find someone willing to take a risk with an object that has already proven to be much more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. From there, the tension between Nikki's manufactured love, Bear's growing guilt and the increasingly real possibility that things will end much worse begins to accelerate towards a final stretch that we prefer not to advance here.

A post shared by The Introverted Attorney (@theintrovertedattorney)

Horror with a sense of humor, and with something else to say

One of the things I liked about Obsession is how well it balances humor and horror without one taking away from the other. There are funny scenes, like some absurdly incompetent customer service at a time when lives are already at stake, which coexist frictionlessly with stretches of pretty raw tension and violence. That restrained tone, which never veers entirely into comedy or gratuitous gore, is probably Barker's greatest achievement as a debut director, and something quite difficult to sustain for an hour and a half of film.

I also found the background reading that the story proposes about toxic dynamics in relationships to be very intelligent. Under the excuse of a fantastic premise taken from the classic "be careful what you wish for" stories, Obsession ends up talking about something much more earthly: control, the idealization of the other and the discomfort of discovering that the love one dreamed of can become a cage for both those who receive it and those who asked for it. Inde Navarrette, in the role of Nikki, sustains this arc of transformation with enormous versatility, going from everyday shyness to something genuinely disturbing without ever losing the human and tragic side of the character, something that critics in general highlighted as the great acting discovery of the film.

If I have to give it a but, it is that the magical mechanism of desire could be better explained in some sections, and there is a fairly prolonged scene of violence that feels more cartoonish than really disturbing. But that does not detract from what Obsession achieves as a whole: one of the freshest and most talked-about horror proposals of this year, especially considering the modest budget compared to the ambitious nature of its execution.

Curiosities

• The original idea for the film came from a gathering with friends where Curry Barker ended up watching an episode of a television comedy that triggered the script's central premise.
• The magical object in the film, the "One Wish Willow", was inspired by a joke pen that Barker used to play with as a boy; the art team even took apart a real one and incorporated part of its mechanism into the final accessory.
• The film was shot in just twenty days, with a budget of less than a million dollars, and yet Focus Features paid more than 15 million for its distribution rights after intense bidding with other studios.
• Several scenes were literally shot in reverse, with the actors performing inverted movements that were later reversed in editing to achieve an unnatural gesture in Nikki's character.
• To achieve Nikki's haunting look in her most extreme moments, the makeup team deliberately avoided an overly demonic look, wanting her to still look human but "not quite."
• Curiously, Inde Navarrette, the actress who stars in this horror story, has publicly acknowledged that she is not too much of a fan of the genre and that she could not even finish watching another recent horror film in the cinema.