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Saturday was a rare two-trip to the local multiplex. In the morning with my sweetie-wife we saw the light action film In The Grey, a quick observation, is a fun film and worth the trip. This review is for my evening feature at the theater, the new horror film Obsession.
Focus Features
From writer/director Curry Barker Obsession focuses on Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey (Michael Johnston) and his seven-year crush on Nikki Freemen (Inde Navarrette.) Though he has known Nikki since high school and is socially a friend, a teammate with her on a trivia team, and a co-worker at a local musical instrument store, Bear had never confessed his feelings or attraction to her, unable to conquer his own crushing insecurities and doubt. While seeking a gift for her at the local crystal and mysticism store, he purchases a ‘One Wish Willow Branch’ and after yet another bout of frustration where he again fails to tell her his feelings, Bear snaps the branch as instructed and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone and anything in the world. Now the object of her obsession, Bear discovers, as Spock warned Stonn, that having a thing is not as pleasing as wanting, and by the third act the discomfort turns to outright horror.
The true horror in Obsession is not the maniacal jealousy that the mystically enslaved Nikki presents whenever anything or anyone frustrates her unquenchable need to be with Bear but that enslavement itself. Nikki’s will and her ability to make any choices for herself have been ripped away by Bear’s selfish and childish wish. Here and there throughout the film flashes of the person trapped by the spell peek through the facade of the Nikki that is supposedly ‘in love’ with Bear. By the third act it is clear that the real Nikki is unable to avail herself of any action as her body is puppeteered by forces beyond her control. She is not possessed by an evil entity but has been rendered a ragdoll forced to live out a distorted fantasy of desire and affection. While many recent horror films have been meditations on grief and loss Obsession is about consent and the evil of an entitled mindset.
Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons made excellent use of silhouettes, often presenting the ensorcelled Nikki as a figure that could only been seen in outline, with all of her features lost in impenetrable darkness, making her both a terrifying figure to behold and one that reflected the nature of her own entrapment. Inde Navarrette is the stand-out performer of this film, first giving us a Nikki of depth and complexity that we get to know before Bear enslaved her and then a Nikki driven only by her obsession that switches in the blink of an eye from loving to frightening when frustrated in her ‘desires.’ The film’s final resolution comes as both inevitable and a terribly tragic with Inde giving perhaps one of cinema’s best screams that transmutes into heart-wrenching cries.
While this may not satisfy the horror fans form whom ‘body counts’ and ‘kills’ are the metrics of a successful horror movie it worked quite well for me. It is not in the zone of a film where it might be possible to read everything as only suggesting the supernatural, such as last week’s film Hokum, the filmmakers leave no doubt that the mystical nature of the ‘One Wish Willow’ is, in the world of the film, real, placing this clearly more in line with Hereditary than The Wicker Man and that should be enough to let you know if Obsession a film I thoroughly enjoyed is rigth for you.
