Obsession, writer/director Curry Barker's runaway hit film, is one of my favorite things in horror: A simple premise executed with layered, calculated precision. At its core it's a Monkey's Paw story, a lesson in being careful what you wish for and what happens when one young man can't handle the dark core of his heart's desire. We understand this instinctively, because we've all encountered it in ways great and small, which is why that's not the most frightening element of this film.
No, Obsession's real core of terror is after something else, something slippier and harder to grasp but no less frightening for it. Watching the film as it arrived on home media this week, I was struck by the film's depiction of one of the great pillars of doomed romance, the one we talk about the least because it's the one hardest to accept.
This is a movie about emptiness.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR OBSESSION
Even if you haven't seen the film yet, you've probably absorbed the basic catalyst of its plot just from being out and around pop culture. Bear (Michael Johnston) is in love with his coworker and friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but he's too scared to ask her out. While endlessly planning his would-be romantic approach, he comes across a novelty toy in a magic shop, a willow branch meant to grant a single wish. When he blows his shot at asking Nikki out yet again, Bear breaks the branch in frustration, wishing Nikki loved him more than anything in the world. It works, she goes violently mad with love for him, and Bear's left with a woman who's a shell of the person with whom he fell in love, more appetite than human being.
The horror of this situation will hit differently depending on which character you most identify with, and I'll admit that it unsettled me because I feel like I've been Bear before. I went through high school desperately wanting a girlfriend, and going about getting one in all the wrong ways. I was pushy and needy and probably quite creepy, and his single-minded pursuit of Nikki reminds me of that time, and makes me squirm. Beyond that basic sense-memory response, though, I was struck by something else. For all his desire, all his planning, all his attempts to bounce ideas off his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) in an effort to get Nikki to notice him romantically, Bear is a ghost in his own world.
Barker's film spends very little time fleshing out Bear's humanity, and that's by design. We know he likes Nikki, we know he works in a music store, and we know he's romantically awkward, at the very least, despite being handsome and able to at least give the appearance of being a good listener. The one touch of genuine emotion we see from him comes when he discovers his beloved cat dead on his living room floor. He weeps over the body, then cleans up and tries to move on, but the cat's death only serves as a reminder — to the point that there is literally a cat-themed clock in the house; well done, Mr. Barker — that he needs to seize what he wants while he still can. Ian counsels him to be patient, but Bear nevertheless feels that he's running out of time.
These motivations aside, though? Bear's an empty shirt, or in his case more likely an empty sweater. He remembers, at one point in the film, that Nikki once referred to him as a "closed book," and even when she's fallen under his supernatural sway and hangs on his every word, he doesn't offer much. She asks him what he'd like to do with his life beyond his boring music store clerk gig and he impulsively answers that he'd like to be a food critic, despite no apparent aptitude or passion for that line of work. He pursues no interests beyond playing trivia at a bar with his music store friends, and seems oblivious to the wider world, particularly to co-worker Sarah (Megan Lawless), who clearly has a crush on him. He is empty, and like so many young men who view coupledom as the fulfillment of their lives, he is counting on Nikki to fill in the void lurking in his soul, not because she's the only thing that can, but because he's never bothered to look for anything else.
Which leads us to the great Monkey's Paw irony and horror of his impulsive decision to make a wish for Nikki's love: When the wish works, it only works because Nikki is no longer in charge. There is no changing her heart, because that's not how love works, so instead the wish hollows Nikki out, keeping her body and her eyes and her bright smile but pushing everything else deep down into a pit where her soul is only a passenger. Whatever is speaking to Bear, pleading with him to stay with her, taping the door of Bear's house shut so he can't leave, standing all day leaking piss and shit down her leg because she can't think of anything but Bear's return, is not Nikki.
We know this because of Navarrette's tour de force performance as a being clawing for the right thing to say for Bear at any given moment, and because Barker writes in moments of horrifying realization, when the Nikki-Thing is momentarily overtaken by the real Nikki, horrified and panicked and begging for release. When the Nikki-Thing is not directly interacting with Bear and the real Nikki is not pleading with him for help from the pit of her soul, Nikki's face disappears into shadow. She creeps in corners, moving unnaturally like she's not used to human limbs, her face distorted by the dark. The Nikki he wanted, who confided in him and who gave money to homeless people and who generally seemed to be a good, caring person? She's barely there.
What we are left with, then, is two empty people, one hollowed out by the other's demands, the other hollowed out by his own conviction that a relationship is all he needs to be a complete person. This is terrifying enough on its own, but Obsession goes further.
It doesn't take long for Bear to understand that something's very wrong with Nikki. Her moods swing wildly, she makes things up just to garner his sympathy and keep him close, and she reacts violently when he attempts to confront her about those lies. When he tries to leave their bed, she screams. When she blips back into consciousness as the real Nikki, she attempts moments of vicious self-harm. Bear dismisses all of these things, tries to live with them, explains them away on Nikki's behalf. He is so empty, so horribly hollow, that even a ruined shell of the woman he claims he once loved is preferable to him. In the film's most horrifying moment, Nikki calls out from her own sleeping body and begs Bear to kill her. She's trapped in her own body. Bear has raped her, even if he didn't know it. She is chained inside a form she can no longer control, we have no idea what tortures have been inflicted on her even beyond the physical, and she wants to die. Bear, his loneliness and emptiness only magnified by the isolation that Nikki's, well, obsession has placed on his life, turns from oblivious to contemptuous, taking her plea as a personal insult rather than a genuine cry for help.
Much has been made of Obsession's ties to Incel culture, to the kind of young man who believes he is owed a romantic partner and therefore views every denial as an affront to his very existence. That's certainly there, but the key to the film's success as a work of horror is not its commentary on this phenomenon, but its depiction of the kind of soullessness that usually follows in its wake. There is a world in which Bear could be a good guy, and it's right over there, just out of frame. He has a job, he inherited a house from his grandmother, he's good-looking and smart and kind when he wants to be, even lending Sarah a sympathetic ear right in the middle of his madness with Nikki. He could be many things, but all he really wants to be is a boyfriend, specifically Nikki's boyfriend. He does not offer anything in exchange for this, not out of malice necessarily but out of a simple indifference to the idea that a relationship is an exchange, a partnership. He does not want to be her boyfriend, he wants her to be his girlfriend. He wants her to fill him up, because he is empty, hollow, blank.
This is the horror of Obsession, a movie in which emptiness begets only more emptiness. In a culture that casts life as a series of achievements, there are a million Bears out there, all of them empty, all of them seeking distraction disguised as fulfillment, because the patriarchal psychosphere has sold them a bill of goods. There is no true fulfillment without introspection, and when Bear looks inward, he finds nothing. His only option, then, is to hollow out another person, who hollows out more people with her violence and her possession-fueled madness, leaving a trail of gore in their shared wake. That's why this is one of the year's most talked-about horror movies. We've all, at some point, felt empty, and this film reminds us that the void does not always come calling with sinister voices and dark rooms. Sometimes the void hides behind a big smile and a warm bed, whispering promises of devotion.
And it is so, so easy to fall in.
Obsession is now available to rent or own on digital now, and arrives on 4K and Blu-ray on July 14.
