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When Obsession played earlier this year it was one of my best times watching a horror film in the theater in quite a while. Oh, there have been enjoyable horror movies this year and in recent years but the simplicity and execution of Obsession places it far above not only other horror films but many other films in general and one of the key elements in that beauty is Curry Barker’s deft exposition.
All stories be they fantasy, horror, science fiction, drama, romance, comedy, whatever require some exposition, that element where things are explained to the audience. More fantastical stories have a different set of expositional goals to meet, to not only help us understand the character, their lives, and their story before the one we are experiencing unfolds before us but also how their entire world works but stories set in the here and now also have to explain the story before the story to us even if they are free from explaining the greater world because the character world is one we can accept as being like our own.
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Barker, quite wisely, actually doesn’t spend any exposition at all on the history of the fantastic and magical aspects of the world of Obsession. Where the ‘One Wish Willow’ items come from, who makes them and why are mysteries beyond the scope of the story of Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey and his fixation on Nikki Freeman. What we learn about these cursed items are the same things Bear learns about them as he struggles to fix the disintegrating situation to his own satisfaction. No, the brilliant exposition of this script is in subtle quick asides from the characters and that amazing monolog delivered straight down the barrel of the camera lens at the film opening.
With the exception of only a couple of reaction shots back to the young woman listening to Bear spill out his heart’s secrets we are fixed on Bear’s face as he practices the speech he will reveal to be too timid to actually say to Nikki. This one speech serves so many expositional masters and all while staying firmly within character. At the very surface level this informs the audience, directly and immediately about Bear’s depth of feeling for Nikki, how in his own words ‘she is in every song’ he hears. Secondly, it gives us vital backstory on Bear himself, but framed in relation to his history with Nikki. He moved to this town and Nikki was the only person ‘nice to him.’ Bear says that when his grandmother died Nikki was the only person who called. From these pieces of information, we can understand that Bear was displaced, never fit in, and was somewhat socially isolated. But there is an even deeper level of exposition that is vital to everything that follows for the rest of the film. Bear is confusing fascination and obsession with serious emotional investment.
This lengthy monolog, this spilling of his heart’s desires and secrets, has not one word about Nikki as a person. Bear speaks only about Nikki as the subject of Bear’s fixation. There is nothing about Nikki the writer, something we learn quickly about in the course of the first act, nothing about Nikki’s kindness to strangers, which we see her demonstrate to the unhoused person outside of the bar, nothing about Nikki’s own tough time in school when she was bullied. The entire monolog is about Bear and how Nikki was nice to him and how he sees her without anything about Nikki as a person. It is a subtle, and many people, myself included, missed this red flag that Bear is a terribly selfish person. But the effect is there and the seeds had been planted so that later, when Bear learns much of the truth of what he has called into being and that it isn’t Nikki that is obsessively in love with him, his thought isn’t to correct his deed, to free the real Nikki from her body’s enslavement and her soul’s torment, but to make it still all about him and getting what he wants. Bear is the ‘nice guy’ whose heart is truly black and whose thoughts right up until the end stay centered on himself, all of which was exposited in the film’s opening monolog.
