Went to see Obsession this weekend, and it was a dark, heavy horror film that seemed to come out of nowhere. The director and writer Curry Barker is a twenty-six-year-old YouTuber who got his chops doing comedy bits with his friend Cooper Tomlinson on their channel that’s a bad idea. Then in 2024, he released a sixty-two-minute found footage horror movie Milk & Serial online that was enormously popular and got the attention of producers. He made Milk & Serial with an $800 budget, but Tea Shop Productions producer James Harris was able to secure about a million dollars to shoot Obsession. I’ve got a soft spot for DIY artists, and learning the background of Barker just makes me like the movie even more.
The Obsession actors were wonderful and really elevated the material, particularly Inde Navarrette, who played Nikki, the object of desire in Obsession. The story rests on “The Monkey’s Paw” premise: Be careful what you wish for. Bear is the male lead (played by Michael Johnston), a young man in his twenties who’s living in his dead grandmother’s house with a cat and appears to be suffering from failure to launch. He hangs out with a group of three friends at the music store where he works, a fantasy dead-end job if I ever heard of one. Can you imagine a music store staffed by an owner and four employees in their twenties surviving in this economy? You’d think there would be a deep passion for music suffusing the dialogue, but that never really happens. Odd but perhaps effective since the scope is narrow in this movie, giving it a suffocating, claustrophobic feel once the film gets rolling along.
Bear carries an unrequited love for Nikki, one of his coworkers at the music store and part of his core friend group. Everybody seems to be aware of the torch he carries, even Nikki, but as far as Bear knows, only his coworker Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) has the details about the situation. Ian’s great piece of advice to Bear is to neg Nikki and tease her about how she used to be called “Freaky Nikki.”
The four coworkers have a regular standing date for trivia night at a bar, where Bear intended to reveal his feelings for Nikki, but before that happens, he finds his beloved cat dead. This ends up being a troubling part of the movie for me, because it comes back to the cat carcass again and again, and I’m firmly in the corner of no animal abuse. I just don’t like it. I’ll forgive it in this movie because it is innovative, and I can see how the obsession moves from soul to soul.
Bear decides not to go to trivia night so he can mourn his cat, but as he looks at pictures of Nikki on his phone, she calls him, cajoling him into joining the group. She mentions that she dropped her crystal necklace down a sink drain and that she’s putting in her two weeks at the store because she needs to do something different with her life. Nikki is an aspiring novelist and working on a love story but says she needs to feel love first.
This establishes a deadline for Bear; he only has so much time to act before he no longer sees his crush on a regular basis. Bear pops into a magic shop, intending to buy a replacement crystal necklace for Nikki, and Barker really nails the aesthetics of this store, which appears in two scenes, where all the witchy goods are displayed: crystals, tarot, herbs, and a bewitching red-and-white box called One Wish Willow that costs $6.99. (Apparently, these scenes were shot in the magic shop the Green Man in Burbank, California.) I can practically smell the incense as a bored witch talks to someone on her headset while giving Bear a desultory rundown of what different types of crystals mean. Bear’s attracted by the One Wish Willow, even after the witch tells him people have come back with lots of complaints about that product. He ends up purchasing it and joins his friends for trivia night, where Sarah and Nikki talk about their books in progress and whether it’s appropriate to write at work. Bear gets several chances at the bar to confess his feelings to Nikki but suffers a bout of nerves each time and backs down.
After trivia night, half the group wants to continue partying while Nikki just wants to go home, so Bear offers her a ride home. Bear is given the perfect opportunity to declare his feelings after several stop-start conversations inside his car outside her doorstep. But he does not. No, once Nikki leaves for good, he opens up his One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would love only him out of everybody else in the world.
And then she does, and the horror starts. She reappears in a stalkerish move right outside his driver’s side window, and in a flash, it’s apparent that Nikki’s whole personality has changed. Gone is the independent young woman with her own agency, making a major life decision to support her art. Now everything is centered around how she can be with Bear always, and Inde Navarrette excels at putting the creep into Nikki. Her wardrobe changes to pick-me girl fashions, and her face crumples at any perceived rejection from Bear. She obsessively watches him, and Bear enjoys this for a while as they go through their honeymoon phase, exclusively spending time with each other, but there are telltale glitches showing that the real Nikki is not on board with these changes: the aforementioned cat scenes and moments where she pops out of her adoring haze to say, “What the fuck?” There’s also a party scene where she reads some of her writing after her body’s been taken over, launching into an incestuous Hansel and Gretel monologue: “’Hansel, come lay with me like the old women taught us when we were children,’” I said. …Hansel is my soul. Love only the branch of a willow tree could conjure. Brother, you will be inside of me tonight.
I found a feminist subtext to Obsession, and I think that’s why the movie is sticking with me. In the friend group at the music store, it’s the two young women Nikki and Sarah (played by Megan Lawless) who have grand plans for their lives and are taking steps toward making that happen, while the guys, Bear and Ian, seem content to remain at status quo. These are some lazy-ass guys who want the cool girl by their side for drinking games and their hobbies, yet completely lose their shit when their woman’s so devoted she can’t even pee or poop without her man around.
The crazy wears thin after a while, and we get to see a subverted version of the Alison Bechdel test. Sarah and Nikki were originally friends, but the new Nikki now sees Sarah as a threat and won’t allow her to have any interaction with Bear. This woman exists exclusively for Bear and nobody else can interfere. The grisliest scene provoked an intense response from the audience in the theater, many uttering, “Oh my God,” over and over again, and I found myself doing the same.
That’s the horror of a perfect woman built by man. Be careful what you wish for.
