By 
This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.
Finding love ain’t easy. But what if it was? What if you didn’t have to go through the agony of meeting someone you have chemistry with, only to go on two dates and realize you have nothing in common, or end up on a third just to get ghosted? What if you could avoid the low-grade anxiety of constantly wondering whether your partner might get bored with you and leave? Curry Barker’s Obsession is here to answer all those doubts and fears, and it’s probably going to make you feel a lot better about the warts of modern dating.
The film centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a private, secretly miserable homebody who has it bad for his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Bear is sweet, unassuming, and quiet, making his infatuation with Nikki more cute than creepy. He’s the kind of protagonist that you feel for, especially after his cat unexpectedly dies due to helping itself to Bear’s medicine cabinet. He’s just a boy trying to impress a girl, and losing his cat in the middle of it all! That is, until a joke purchase ruins everything.
Meanwhile, Nikki is as cool as they come. She’s collected and self-assured, and has no time to do things that aren’t fulfilling her soul. Her friends are deeply important to her, and you can tell that she’s the exact kind of person who actually listens. It’s immediately evident why Bear has a crush on her. What isn’t evident is whether or not she feels the same way. This is where the seemingly innocent novelty toy “One Wish Willow” comes in, and where everything starts to get… sinister.
Rather than risk telling her how he feels, Bear wishes that Nikki loved him more than anything else in the world and then snaps the toy in half as instructed. Things immediately start to get weird, but there’s nothing that can prepare you for how twisted their “it’s complicated” dynamic becomes.
The concept of “be careful what you wish for” or the proverbial monkey’s paw fable is not new. So much, in fact, that Obsession director Curry Barker got the idea for his script from The Simpsons’ “The Monkey’s Paw” segment in “Treehouse of Horror II.” Still, his movie offers an unsettling wrinkle about human nature and desire when the wish in question is used by a man, intentionally or otherwise, to oppress and subjugate the will and identity of a woman he claims to adore.
Obsession’s themes are heavily rooted in consent: who is able to give it and who is not. When we meet Bear, we find someone who we believe is a good guy. You want that little fella to win. The second he makes his wish, though, everything gets dangerously complicated. Playing with such difficult subject matters appealed to Barker, but he had a clear line in the sand regarding Nikki’s autonomy after the wish.
“Nikki can’t even give consent to hold hands,” Barker explains. “She’s not there. So nothing is real. That was really a dark and interesting concept to play with.”
Things also get a little bit more complex for Johnston, who has to play Bear as a good guy while also seeing the very gray area as a performer.
“The way I approach the character is very—I think he’s a good guy, but it’s sort of like he has this willful blindness. He knows there’s a monster under the bed, but is it really there?”
The monster is very much there. The beauty of Obsession, however, is that you don’t know that monster’s going to eat you until it’s fully in view. Of course, blurred lines are central to the success of the slow-burning terror, and their fuzziness played a major role in the way Navarrette both viewed and portrayed Nikki.
“It always gets tricky when we want to talk about consent, a very important issue and conversation,” Navarrette considers. “I think that the film does a really good job explaining how those lines can get blurred, and how one person’s story and experience may not be what other people perceive it to be. It’s very specific to that, and I think with Nikki, you really get it into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like.”
Going into Obsession, one expects to be confronted with thematic horror, with the trauma of what Nikki is going through playing a central role in the viewer’s discomfort and fear. That is, of course, prevalent throughout the film. Full disclosure, though: this bad boy is gonna make you jump in your seat more than once. Seasoned horror fans let out full-on hollers in early festival screenings of Obsession, and those screams were earned.
For Barker, it is about playing with a metaphor for the “modern toxic relationship.” Still, the tangible scares were as important as the thematic ones: “You want to incorporate those scares, and then you want to weave it with all the psychological stuff,” he says.
Meanwhile, Navarrette was excited to, in her words, act nuts and get paid.
“I think it’s one of the best parts of my job,” she says with a laugh. “At least to me, there’s no better shoe to put my foot in.” Humor aside, there’s never a moment that Navarrette lost sight of what her character was going through. “Nikki had a beautiful life. She had wonderful friends; she had trivia night; I mean, what an absolute gift to have all of those things! And then for all of it to be taken away completely out of your control.”
What made that lack of control extra horrific for Navarrette is that everything that happens on-screen, and every depraved action that eventually unfolds in Obsession, is technically caused by Nikki’s own hand. Yet she fundamentally is unable to say “stop.”
Practical effects are also essential when it comes to meaningful scares, and it’s something that Barker and his team took very seriously when crafting the layered horrors of Obsession. Navarrette enjoyed all the work she was able to do on the film, but one stunt and set piece stood out. The scene in question involves Nikki running out of nowhere and bludgeoning someone to death.
“[The victim’s actor] gets replaced by a wonderful little dummy that our special effects woman had to do; the dummy’s face is caved in, and I have a foam brick, and then they wired tubes through the face and the eyes [of the prop],” Navarrette explains with delight. “That blood was coming out at the same time as I’m smashing, and that doll’s head probably weighed… 15 pounds? So as I’m smashing, my hand’s getting tired, and my hits are getting slower and slower, and Curry never calls cut.”
Barker remembers the scene fondly as well, and the lack of a cut call was entirely intentional. For him, it was just as much about getting Bear’s reaction as the audience stand-in as it was about playing with the practical goo of it all. “I wanted it to be grotesque, and if Bear has to look at it, you have to look at it too.”
Grotesque isn’t an exaggeration either. “I actually had a lot of trouble with [the scene] because we had to cut it down,” Barker reveals. “The version you saw won’t make it into theaters. Don’t worry, though. It’s still crazy.”
The MPA might be out here ruining everyone’s fun, but given the rest of Obsession’s overall vibe, you should feel comfortable taking Barker at his word when it comes to the final cut being just as, well… sticky.
Obsession premieres at SXSW on March 14 and opens in theaters nationwide on May 15.
The post Obsession: Inside the Most Disturbing Indie Horror of the Year appeared first on Den of Geek.
