‘Obsession’ REVIEW: A Twisted Love Story, Not a Romance
‘Obsession’ REVIEW: A Twisted Love Story, Not a Romance
Curry Barker transposes those anxieties in a way that’s palpably terrifying, angry, and pained, one that takes down the facade of well-meaning myopia and takes it to its absolute distressing endpoints. This is far from a romance, but a story about love, its different shades, and how it can be mistaken for something appalling.
I’m pretty sure some people know this type of story archetype: a person wishes for someone to love them, the recipient eventually does, and later the person finds out the consequences and realizes that it is not what they have wanted. The concept of love as a sort of uncontrollable, inescapable force in the shape of a relentless pursuit manifested through magical means is not a wholly novel concept, done numerous times before in various media (for Filipino cinephiles: does anyone remember that Cinco segment with Pokwang and Zanjoe Marudo?), oftentimes as a sort of “be careful what you wish for” type of fable. Another narrative to coronate thrown into the longstanding canon, Obsession represents a more modern iteration of this type of narrative, and not just in the time period it is set in, for it reveals more than a few off-putting facets that are equally disturbing as the big moments it builds towards.
Operating on an initially straightforward premise, where young man Bear (Michael Johnston) unknowingly wishes through the ostensibly real novelty item, the “One Wish Willow,” for the friend he has a crush on, Nikki (Inde Navarette) to fall in love with him “more than anything in the fucking world” and the consequences that come after that escalate into disaster, Obsession functions more as a sharply observed dramedy following Bear and his friend group — which also include confident Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and discerning Sarah (Megan Lawless) — traversing the complexities of coming of age in the 2020s and falling in love before being suddenly, awkwardly, and later violently being invaded by the third-party supernatural shenanigans, and sophomore director Curry Barker navigates the plot progression as such to the film’s strength.
Bear, Sarah, and Ian (L-R: Michael Johnston, Megan Lawless, and Cooper Tomlinson) looking concerned for their friend | Still courtesy of Focus Features
As one half of an online sketch comedy group, that’s a bad idea, alongside Tomlinson, Barker had already directed several past shorts and a feature-length film, Milk and Serial, that mixed in the channel’s brand of delirious, nervy, off-kilter humor with dire unease befitting of the horror genre. In the midst of the film’s notable darker atmosphere, he can garnish the intensity with effective grace notes from the several small script beats that serve as fascinating in-betweens for character building, to the more outright attempts at humor that underline or escalate the intensity of any scene well. You really get the sense of the normalcy that’s intruded upon here, and it hits extra hard when the horror elements kick in.
And man does it kick in, to multiple extents. Barker captures the feeling of something that is “off” or “otherworldly” about Bear’s wish for Nikki through twisted and imaginative visualization via lighting (the way Inde Navarette’s eyes and face are often kept within and outside comprehension as a way of unnerving provides some of the film’s most memorably nightmarish visuals), cinematographical scope, and other sharp visual choices, including one which may be a nicely executed Kiyoshi Kurosawa riff from a scene in Pulse. The specifics of these scares also work as punchlines in of themselves, setting up the premise before unleashing a nasty little detail that will stick with you in your mind (Inside joke, anyone?). It also helps when a film has a performer as game as Navarette, who can launch herself in her character’s extremities with aplomb as things get weirder and grodier, a star-making turn that walks an incredible tightrope with her character’s arc of unnerving terror and empathetic pitiability. Later revelations soon recontextualize her performance into something especially impressive with her juggling of numerous registers.
But what truly elevates Obsession is not what merely lies at its surface, but the way it unfolds its dimensions into something more real and terrifying, and Barker hammers the point home that the scenario Bear and Nikki are going through is less a sudden intrusion by unexpected forces and more of a manifestation of misaligned ideals and selfish mindsets. The specificities of the wish Bear soon reveal themselves to be more horrifying than it already is, an acknowledgement of the inhumanity of taking away women’s agency to fulfill the selfish need for appreciation of lonely men.
Nikki (Inde Navarette) conversing with Bear in the dark, her eyes glistening by the lighting | Still courtesy of Focus Features
Through this, the film gradually reveals itself to be less about the difficulties of a twisted one-track love, but how the expectation of a “one-track love” in the first place is an unobtainable, otherworldly ideal in the first place, a pathway to dehumanization and abuse in which the film does not shy away at all from its implications (which to me, was sizeably more disturbing than the outright supernatural). Bear’s character progression wholly reflects this turn as the central point-of-view character in the film, as several of his character choices from even the earliest stages of the plot turn audience expectation of a shy, insecure, affection-starved surrogate on its head into something morally confrontational of the “nice guy” mindset he embodies. His and Nikki’s close dynamics (hell, you can throw their dynamics with Sarah and Ian into this point, the character writing is just that incisive here) ultimately mutate into twisted shades that cut further on who they are as people, hand-in-hand with the genre elements that peak with a momentum-filled third act that sends off everything the script has in mind to an effectively earned stunner of a bleak final image.
It’s clear why Obsession has received rapturous reception from the genre movie-going public and has become one of the horror movies of the current moment (alongside fellow twentysomething YouTuber-directed Backrooms), because it truly does feel like a movie that is burrowed deep within the zeitgeist of the current moment. Beyond its objective qualities of well-crafted characterization, a well-balanced mix of intense scares and deadpan humor, and an audio-visual atmosphere of dread, what really stuck with me is its tapping into an active pulse of what it means to fall in love in the age where alienation from other people, and the growing influence of patriarchal thinking, is seeping into our day-to-day interaction and incentivizes destructive selfishness. Barker transposes those anxieties in a way that’s palpably terrifying, angry, and pained, one that takes down the facade of well-meaning myopia and takes it to its absolute distressing endpoints. This is far from a romance, but a story about love, its different shades, and how it can be mistaken for something appalling.
‘Obsession’ is now showing in Philippine cinemas through Universal Studios Philippines.
