Early on in Curry Barker’s new horror film “Obsession,” Nikki (Inde Navarrette) stands outside the passenger door to her coworker and friend Bear’s (Michael Johnston) car. She leans down into the vehicle, making intentional eye contact with Bear as she asks: “Do you like me?”
It’s very clear to the audience that the answer to this question is a resounding yes. Bear has known Nikki for years, and harbored a not-so-subtle secret crush on her the whole time – afraid of voicing these feelings in case she doesn’t like him back. And she might not. When Bear tries to pay for her shots at the bar, she’s gracious, but she doesn’t let him. When mutual friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) jokingly calls Nikki “Bear’s girl” when he offers to give her a ride home from the bar, she shudders in good-natured, sibling-like disgust.
But, there is a twinkling in Nikki’s eye, an intensity to the way she phrases this question (“Now is the time to tell me,” she says seriously), that hints to the audience that she cares about Bear enough to give the matter some thought. But Bear – despite his shyness, his ostensible sweetness – is a coward. He chickens out. Typical.
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“Obsession” takes its name when, after Bear is unable to tell Nikki how he feels, he makes a half-hearted wish on a kitschy toy that he got from a novelty shop, wishing that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. After that wish comes true – perhaps a little too true – we’re off to the races, Barker proving himself a gifted horror filmmaker with a surprisingly smart, subversive take on a well-worn genre. “Obsession” cleverly uproots the idea of who we should be rooting for in a horror movie on its head, and delivers a star-making horror performance from Navarrette in the process.
The above early moment between Nikki and Bear is a poignant one, setting up the underlying commentary of “Obsession” in a matter of seconds. For Bear, it’s far easier to bear the weight of unrequited love – to play the sad, mopey boy, to play victim – than to deal with Nikki as a real person with agency. This might not be explicitly running through his head, and the film never explicitly addresses it, but what makes Barker’s film so smart is that it’s all there under the surface. There’s a statement to be made, but it never feels ham-fisted or like it’s overtaking the story.
In a lot of ways, “Obsession” feels very much like something a 26-year-old male director would make – a story of a boy who likes a girl so much, and just wishes she would like him back! But Barker is unafraid to interrogate the mild insidiousness of that mindset. Bear is your quintessential “nice guy,” and Johnston plays him with a laughably over-the-top “deer in the headlights” type of aura. Bear’s cute, and he seems nice enough, but you also get the sense that he is so debilitatingly nervous that he’s barely ever touched a girl (the first time he kisses Nikki, he reacts a little bit like he’s going to … you know).
But Bear’s pure devotion to Nikki is not something to be praised. Instead of having a conversation with her about their respective feelings – one she openly initiates – he would rather continue to see her as the ideal he’s come up with in his head. The wish is a shortcut, and a relatable one at that. Who wouldn’t want to skip past the hard part? The part where you start to see the person in front of you as real, and not the idealized version that you’ve fallen in love with on your own? The part where you have to decide if you love this new person too?
As Bear deals with the consequences of his shortcut, “Obsession” turns horror film logic on its head. In horror movies, we’re taught to be scared of the stalker – in this case, the crazy girlfriend, if you will. At my screening, the PR team even passed out little red flags that the audience could wave around whenever Nikki did anything particularly nuts as her magic-enforced obsession with Bear grew.
Navarrette smartly plays into the silliness of the crazy girlfriend trope – her reaction to Bear wanting to go to a boys’ night is particularly, horrifyingly funny. Her face feels like a rubber band, exaggerating typical cutesy frowns and grins that we see on the faces of lovebirds into inhuman expressions of terror. The camera captures the chilling nature of her performance and emphasizes it. In one scene, she stands in the corner of the bedroom and watches Bear sleep, her face and form just visible enough that you’re squinting, trying to figure out whether what you’re seeing is real or not.
It’s one of the more unsettling performances of the year, Navarrette seamlessly switching between hysterical, vengeful, pitiful, and terrifying. But the movie (and Nikki, in her harrowing moments of lucidity) are aware that she is not the villain. She is trapped in the body of a broken toy, designated to the trash bin by a boy more interested in the idea of her than in a real relationship. And in “Obsession,” that route has deadly consequences.
