With his sophomore feature, Curry Barker takes a premise we’ve seen countless times before in sitcoms, teen comedies and science fiction for decades, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to The Twilight Zone and even Rick & Morty. What happens when you wish for your unrequited love to fall hopelessly in love with you? What makes Obsession so effective is the way it refuses to treat this ostensibly light-hearted premise as a joke. Instead, Barker simply follows the idea to its logical, grisly conclusion, transforming a familiar comic fantasy into one of the most deeply uncomfortable horror films of recent memory.
Bear (Michael Johnston) is a painfully shy assistant in a music store, quietly pining after his co-worker Nicky (Inde Navarrette). After yet another failed attempt to ask her out, he uses a mysterious “One Wish Willow” to wish for her to love him “more than anyone in the entire world.” Naturally, this being horror, the wish comes true. At first, Nicky’s sudden devotion seems like the fulfilment of every fantasy Bear has ever wished for. But it quickly becomes apparent that something is deeply wrong. Nicky becomes possessive, volatile, emotionally dependent, and increasingly unpredictable, while Bear slowly realises the horrifying implications of what he has done.
In the Q&A that accompanied the screening we attended, Barker stated he was less interested in jump scares than in making his audience uncomfortable, and in this respect, the film is an undeniable success. From the moment the wish is granted, there’s almost no sense of safety or release in the entire runtime. The atmosphere is oppressively, relentlessly tense, with Bear constantly trying to manage Nicky’s increasingly erratic behaviour while maintaining a rapidly crumbling facade that everything is fine. The horror comes less from sudden shocks than from the awful anticipation of where scenes are heading.
A high concept film like this lives or dies on the strength of the performances, and thankfully, the central cast all bring something interesting to their roles, offering neat variations on well-worn character tropes. Navarrette has the hardest role as Nicky, shifting abruptly from cool, independent co-worker to a needy, possessive, scarily unhinged girlfriend. She takes big swings with her performance, but the effect is genuinely disarming – there’s always something just slightly off in her behaviour before the film fully tips into horror, but once it does, she becomes genuinely terrifying.
As Bear, Johnston has a tricky needle to thread. The film depends on him being likeable enough at the start, to sympathise with his plight as a lovelorn but decent enough guy, but he takes on a more sinister edge as he continues in his relationship with Nicky, as she is stripped of all agency. Every moment of intimacy between Bear and Nicky becomes morally queasy because the film never lets us forget that her feelings are artificial. Every time he sleeps with her, the film quietly forces the audience to confront the fact that he is violating her autonomy. To Barker’s credit, the script never glosses over this. Johnston handles the transition extremely well, never turning Bear into an overt villain. However, there is an unsettling aspect to his performance that suggests that he is choosing to believe Nicky really loves him and ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary.
Even the supporting characters avoid feeling like stock archetypes. Bear’s best friend Ian (Cooper Anderson) initially appears to be the standard slacker comic relief, obsessed with sex and incapable of sincerity, but he quickly emerges as the film’s voice of reason. He’s the first character to recognise how disturbing the relationship between Bear and Nicky has become, and the first willing to explicitly call out Bear for his shady behaviour, and to his credit, he’s not wrong.
The whole film reads as a condemnation of apathy, of the passivity of young adulthood, about people too frightened to move on, grow up, or take responsibility for themselves. The two characters who show growth, the ones who actually attempt genuine emotional honesty or self-improvement, are punished brutally, while Bear’s refusal to confront reality has devastating consequences for everyone around him.
Stylistically, Barton draws from a range of horror influences without the film ever feeling derivative. Nicky’s janky, unnatural movements recall J-horror at times, and there is at least one moment that feels like an overt nod to that notorious scene from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse. Elsewhere, her piercing screams and backwards walking recall Sheryl Lee’s nightmarish walk towards the camera in Twin Peaks. Yet some of the film’s most disquieting moments are also its quietest: the whispered voice that emanates when “Nicky” is asleep, begging Bear to kill her, or the deeply unnerving phone call to the One Wish Willow helpline. The advisor’s repeated refrain of “We don’t really do that” is oddly hilarious, right up until he asks Bear, “Do you want to hear her?” before playing an unbearable recording of the real Nicky screaming in agony. It’s a moment that feels like a subtle, more understated version of the hellish visions of Talk To Me.
Barker has a canny sense of the absurd as well as the terrifying, with excellent comic turns from the blase assistants in the occult shop (the ill-timed joke one of them plays on Bear is a real laugh-out-loud moment) and the director’s cameo as the disinterested helpline advisor. However, the humour only serves to underline the horror and makes it all the more cruel.
Obsession is a genuinely discomfiting viewing experience, more likely to elicit nervous laughter than screams of terror. It’s the kind of horror that keeps you locked in a state of anxiety for the entire runtime, and Barker sustains the unease masterfully, never allowing either the audience or his characters a single moment’s reprieve. The premise could easily have collapsed into camp or self-parody, but Barker wrings every ounce of horror from the concept, becoming perhaps the most comprehensive and unsettling “be careful what you wish for” film of recent years.
★★★★
In UK cinemas on May 15th / Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless / Dir: Curry Barker / Focus Features, Universal Pictures UK / 18
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