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A Twisted Curse of Selfish Obsession

It’s a bit amusing that Curry Barker, a director in his mid-twenties who has just made one of the relatively few good Monkey’s Paw movies in recent years came to the idea not from the classic horror story of that name by W.W. Jacobs but from the Simpsons segment in “Treehouse of Horror II”. At this stage most people of my generation and younger probably do know the reference more from The Simpsons than literature, but he might be the only one open about it.
But honestly it’s fitting that the impetus for Barker’s Obsession would come from a comedy show given his movie is very aware of the twisted humour inherent to the premise. It is after all perhaps the quintessential variant of horror irony -you wish for something you think will be good, but because you haven’t considered all the angles and implications it winds up turning out horrifying. Every fantasy has a terrible dark side it posits, and there is something creepily funny to that. And Barker also has fun with the other absurdities related to his chosen specific context, paired with the kind of violence and well-crafted scariness that makes for a shocking though effective and entertaining cocktail.
The movie is centred on a young adult called Bear (Michael Johnston) who has long nursed a crush on his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but has been too scared and anxious to admit his feelings to her before she is poised to leave the job they mutually work at. This deadline coinciding with the death of his cat, he is in a particularly sad and desperate place when after failing to come out with the truth at a critical juncture he makes a wish on a novelty toy called a One Wish Willow that she would love him. To his surprise, it appears to work as she begins to show an unusual interest in him, but that interest quickly grows possessive and all-consuming in deeply deranged ways -eventually with horrifying implications.
While other Monkey’s Paw narratives may choose to approach the ironic curse as a tangible twist, Barker makes no such allusions right from the start. The moment that Bear makes the wish, he sets a haunting mood that signals the horror to come with precise creepy imagery. It’s that image of her silhouette obscured in the background through Bear’s car window standing still staring in at him from a distance that sends a chill up the spine, and it is hardly the only effective use of such a device in this movie. Barker is in fact quite good at concentrating horror in the backgrounds or vague corners of a shot. Consider the conversation Bear has at work with his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) after his first night with Nikki in which every reverse shot of Bear sees her out-of-focus several feet away merely staring at him. Or a few shots in which she talks to him while her face is unnaturally obscured in shadow, a beat where she watches him sleep from the dark corner of his bedroom. Each of these has quite a freaky effect.
And it is as much down to Navarrette's performance as it is Barker's direction. With a vacant stillness behind her eyes and a memorably unsettling smile, Navarrette delivers a masterstroke of whiplash acting as Nikki's moderate behaviour gives way on a dime to madness. Outbursts are inevitable with this kind of a horror movie, but she still manages to make it deeply disturbing when she reacts to being caught in a lie at a restaurant or when Bear makes a comment about going to a guy's night. Further, she gracefully walks the line of humour and horror in beats where she angrily keeps him from leaving their bed and one horrifyingly hilarious scene at a party where she tells a vividly inappropriate story and then intrudes herself on a social game whereby someone is supposed to kiss Bear, the deepest frown in the world on her face in the lead up to it. Amidst all this exuberant insanity that is all the more effective in moments of shocking disgust and sharp violence, Navarrette clearly plays the presence of a trapped and tortured Nikki behind the automaton that Bear's wish has created -an emphasis on the human being suffering for his selfish if unknowingly consequential impulse.
That said, Barker and Johnston imbue Bear with a degree of sympathy, especially in the early-goings. One gets the sense that Barker understands the crippling loneliness and pain of pining for someone, especially when there's the complication of an existing platonic relationship there, and in Bear's earnest feelings and difficult awkwardness he conveys an appropriately considerate humanity while still critiquing his handling of the situation -such as a frozen response when Nikki broaches the conversation and his disinterest in the prospect of there being another nice, cute woman in his life (Sarah, played by Megan Lawless) who is interested in him. As the film goes along though, his willfully naive responses to Nikki's behaviour speak to the overwhelming power of his self-centred desire at the expense of all real consideration for Nikki. There are many red flags and terrifying acts he ignores for the sake of an extremely shaky and superficial image of a romance with his crush, but the moment of truth comes when the buried consciousness of Nikki manages to get through to him and his reaction is utterly abhorrent. Still, Johnston is enjoyable, retaining a necessary relatability -as pitiable and frustrating as it may be, while playing the intersection of humour and horror to Bear's suffering quite well.
That balance is critical. Often the movie’s tone lands in a comfortably uncomfortable place of horror coloured or punctuated by humour. Sometimes the shock value circles around to being ridiculous, as in the case of a character death that goes from horrible and gruesome to wickedly absurd. The One Wish Willow is a great source of twisted comedy -what might have been an air of mysterious authoritative power surrounding it, perhaps in the vein of The Substance, actually carries the weight of a cheap carnival knock-off. Bear’s call to its customer support line is particularly funny. And the mystic shop where he gets it is likewise a caricature, making the scene where a bloodied Bear comes in asking for another one (once he belatedly has decided the fantasy is actually a horrific curse) all the more ridiculous. Constantly too, the point is made either implicitly or directly, of how this was all his choice, and that even the aspects of Nikki’s image that appear to ascribe to his ideal -the doting on him, the sweet talk, the sex- are bizarre exaggerations distinct from how any real woman, or any real person behaves. And he just can’t help but dig himself deeper at the cost of everything else in his life.
The movie makes a near fatal flaw in its ending that would have been quite unfair and muddied the central theme; it was fortunately avoided though by the advice of Barker’s father who suggested the alternative which still manages to capture a fair degree of trauma while providing a grain of catharsis. Obsession works partly because it does ingrain in its audience a desire for that catharsis. In a time where there is still a lot of talk around incels, casual misogyny, and young male loneliness, it’s a surprise this movie only now got made. It does the best job it could with this premise, this thematic tightrope. It mocks and it sympathizes, while to both ends taking seriously the callous patriarchal insinuations at play. It is funny, gross, and ghastly, and it is honestly spellbinding in the horror that encompasses all of those. Like the original story, an excellent cautionary tale.

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