(Thanks to Willow for letting me steal this title.)

Inde Navarette is a star.  

Though I’ve had a million different (often conflicting) thoughts about the critical and commercial darling that is Curry Barker’s Obsession, what has never once wavered is that it features one of the great horror performances. I expect that Navarette will not stop at “beloved Scream Queen” but will go fully mainstream in the way Anya Taylor-Joy did in the years after The VVitch.  

Which I know has colored every other part of my perception, because I loved this movie the first time I saw it: 5 stars on Letterboxd and all that, but that feeling had already cooled somewhat by my second watch three days later. I still loved it for sure (4.5 stars!)... but the bolding was gone.  

And certainly hasn't come back.

It’s been a great year for horror, but nothing hit the zeitgeist like Obsession, which opened #3 at the box office behind the Michael Jackson biopic (its own kind of horror movie) and The Devil Wears Prada 2  and reached #2 in its second weekend behind Baby Yoda. In a world where Amy Madigan won an Oscar for her bonkers performance in Weapons, I think there’s a very real chance The Academy awards another in her class. And with the year not even half over, I say with the utmost confidence: it would be well deserved.

But the Weapons comparison goes deeper. Writer/director Curry Barker (no relation to the horror legend (though his actual dad has one of the strangest websites I’ve seen this decade)) sits at an interesting intersection of two modern horror cohorts. Like Danny & Michael Philippou and Chris Stuckmann, he built his career on YouTube. Like Zach Cregger and Jordan Peele, he built that career with sketch comedy. The that’s a bad idea channel turns 10 this year, which, ya know: congrats!  

Though I’ll admit I’m not its biggest fan. Checking out bits from across the years, there were certainly some chuckles to be had, but Almost Friday TV they are not. When King Bach showed up in their parody of Talk to Me, I thought “Oh yeah these do feel like Vine/IG bits circa 2016,” which was a fun little bit of nostalgia but isn't a compliment…

Mixed in with the skits are a handful of short films and a debut feature proudly proclaiming to be “From The Mind of Curry Barker,” phrasing so obnoxious that even Blumhouse’s marketing department wouldn’t put it on Obsession’s press materials.

And tb-ing so h right now, I didn’t like any of them. There is some very effectively spooky imagery here and there (“Pose” in Warnings, “Of course we know Dead Man Franklin” in The Chair) but eventually each is crushed under the weight of its premise and promise.

Obsession avoids that fate in large part by being extremely simple. This is classic Monkey’s Paw: Sad boy Baron (interesting first name!) aka “Bear” (Michael Johnston) is in love with Navarette's Nikki Freeman (interesting last name!) and uses a $6.99 (nice?) toy called a One Wish Willow to make her love him “More than anyone in the fucking world.” And then she does. But in a bad way.  

It's not clear how quickly things devolve: I've had conversations with multiple friends who all disagree on the timeline, and it's unfortunate that that matters, but it really does.  

Barker has said his interest is in making “grounded” horror movies, trying to think through how people would really act and react in spooky situations. And that’s all well and good except for the fact that that’s a lot of horror movies and also none of the ones he’s ever made.  

In Obsession’s very first scene, Bear is bearing his soul re: Nikki to a woman who works at the local diner at the instruction of his friend Ian (played by that’s a bad idea co-creator Cooper Tomlinson). She thinks it’s adorable; he thinks it’s weird as fuck. They’re both right. But the important part comes when Bear says he wants to make his move during the trivia night the three of them do with other friend Sarah (Megan Lawless), and Ian says Absolutely The Fuck Not, because trivia is the only thing that he cares about and he will not let this man fuck up the vibes.

Bear makes his move then anyway, driving Nikki home after and then breaking the One Wish Willow in frustration after failing to profess his feelings even when directly asked. (Arguably the bleakest part of all this is that Nikki liked him at least a little bit for real. You can see it in Navarette’s performance (especially how she stammers out “G-Good” when Bear says No He Only Likes Her As A Friend) but also Barker has confirmed as much in interviews. So yeah: this whole thing could have been so easily avoided. Sad!)  

But here’s the thing: Trivia never comes up again. And that fact alone destabilizes the entire film, because it couldn’t have just happened offscreen and gone unremarked upon because something dramatic happens every time they leave the house and also most of the times they don’t… so either this whole thing takes place over the course of like 5 days (which is what I’m going with but creates its own problems), or it takes place over several weeks and no one actually cares that much about trivia (which means one of the only pieces of real information we have about a main character is wrong).  

Plus, Nikki gave notice at the shop they all work at before we even see her, and that's never brought up again? I dunno, man. There’s either internal logic to what’s happening or this is all metaphorical, and I think Barker wanted the former despite everyone giving him credit for the latter.

Though, like, the imagery is metaphorical – at least sometimes. No one actually thinks the clock in Bear’s room the first night he brings Nikki home actually reads 16:55. What does it mean that someone on TikTok pointed out to my girlfriend who pointed out to me that 1655 is the year that the court of Northampton County, Virginia ruled against the freedom of John Casor? Anything? Probably! But is it because that was one of the first times in the colonies that a civil suit forced an African into enslavement? Or was it because that was actually the first time such a ruling was made at the behest of a free African: Anthony Johnson?

The first one means something pretty straightforward: Nikki is no freeman. The court of One Wish Willow has deemed her property of a Baron… but there’s an additional horror to what Johnson did. He was himself an indentured servant who brought Casor over under those same terms, but while he was able to get out and become the first African landholder in the colonies, he refused Casor any such opportunities. That is a unique sort of cruelty. And one that I don’t think applies here at all. Enjoy your fun fact. Let’s talk about BPD.

I do not have Borderline Personality Disorder, but my Mixed Personality Disorder canonically includes Borderline features… and what Nikki is depicting maps onto many of the associated behaviors really. fucking. hard. Like, people with Borderline don't always feel things, but when they do they feel harder than most of us can imagine, and when you feel that strongly, “weird” behavior feels not so weird at all.  

It's objectively creepy when Bear wakes up to an empty bed and in the wide shot of his POV we see Nikki in the corner, still as a statue: “Watching you sleep. You're so cute when you sleep.” The imagery is much creepier than the actual act. I wouldn’t do that… but I’ve heard “watching the person you love sleep” is relatively common, and the sweatshirt Jake Gyllenhaal supposedly kept of Taylor Swift’s cuz it smells like her isn’t the weird part of “All Too Well.”  

When she sobs that she doesn’t think he loves her as much as she loves him, it straddles the line between spooky and silly… but it’s also a genuine emotion. No matter what, BPD’s #1 symptom is fear of abandonment… and all the extreme impulsivity and violent mood swings and “horror” that we see spiderwebs out from a frankly justified fear that Bear will realize what he got himself into and try to get the fuck out. He cannot handle her extremes: he wants desperately to go back to the cute little montage we get of them in those few days where things were going well. He begs her to not keep doing weird shit. But he doesn’t understand that her weird shit is her attempt at the same. Yeah it’s fucking crazy that she literally duct taped the door shut, but I don’t think it’s that hard to see where the impulse came from: she wanted them to have another nice day together, and this was all she could think of to keep him from going to work.

And I know she wasn't literally written to have BPD, but it's a useful framework through which to understand her because, quite frankly, the movie doesn't give us one. Her behaviors are just “Whatever would be the most unsettling thing in this moment.” Like, those dead eyes while he is on top of her make no fucking sense. You’re telling me he has to literally grab her face and point it at a movie because she won’t stop looking at him but in that most intimate of acts she’s not even present? Bullshit. She would be going for (way too much) eye contact.

But while (way too much) eye contact could be creepy too, the image we get is definitely worse. The script is happy to tell us that Bear is taking advantage of Nikki, but this is the only time we see it as the violence it is, and it's awful.  

But is it an actual condemnation of Bear? I'm less convinced.  

Like, it's painfully obvious that this movie was written by a man. Put aside the choice to put Bear at its center: Sarah is done so fucking dirty, dude. And not just in the obvious way! The idea that she wouldn't have called after Bear’s grandmother died is one of those absurdities you can only chalk up to bad writing.

But as a man with less-than-excellent communication skills who has been weird with enough women to fill two feature-length one-man shows, I’m willing to give some grace. Bear didn't know that the One Wish Willow would work: it wasn't even a premeditated use. He was just mad that he sucks and broke a $7 toy.  

There are plenty of people who make, like, voodoo dolls and love potions and shit in order to make people love them. Heck, Megan Lawless, done-dirty Sarah herself, cast a “Text Me Back” spell on a boy she hadn’t heard from in a week! On that scale, what Bear did barely registers. And so of course he fought the reality that was now facing him: checking fake Reddit to ask if the One Wish Willow is real; asking fake ChatGPT if being on molly could make someone act all bizarre.  

But I think Barker thinks Bear thinks that he’s a complicated guy in a complicated situation doing something that approximates his best. Like, the teaser that was the entirety of my knowledge about this movie before walking into the theater was a snippet of a conversation that he has with a bored-sounding customer service rep (played by Barker himself). The teaser ends with Bear asking “Is her love real?” and the rep responding “Just because you chose this for her doesn’t make it less real.”  

And I think someone should write a doctoral thesis about that.

But the line that most interests me comes shortly afterward. Bear says he wants to cancel the wish and is told that the only way to free Nikki from whatever living hell she’s in is to die –

(Barker’s weird ear for dialogue is really prominent here. Every one of his scripts has a line or few that just feels wrong, and Obsession’s worst offender is “Not as long as you live.” It’s such awkward phrasing and barely coherent as a response to “So there’s nothing I can do?” Like, “Unless you die” was right fucking there. Utterly baffling.)

– Otherwise: “Sounds like you have a moral responsibility to be there for her.”

If I were back in school, I’d write my thesis about that. Because I agree! He does! But what does that actually mean? Because none of the rules about how you’re supposed to co-exist with someone apply. How are you supposed to navigate someone’s eccentricities and issues when they are literally your fault? Maybe you can't and just have to accept them. Maybe Bear needs to overcompensate so Nikki can function in public. He probably should have refused to switch seats at the party he brings her to after she threatens to kill herself. (And anyway it's weird that that guy wants to sit next to Nikki in the first place!) Maybe even preemptively done what Nikki did with Sarah when faced with a dare to kiss the person to his left. I dunno, but while he keeps saying that a real relationship needs space… they don’t have a real relationship, and Bear is on the hook for committing to the fakeness of it.

Until it becomes too much, and then his moral responsibility is to die.

The end of Obsession is not the one that Barker wrote or that he wanted to film: under pressure, he allowed a single alternate take, and Navarette was so good that he just had to give in (her version of events makes it sound more intentional, so that’s weird). He wanted to end it the same way he ended his first feature: with everyone dead. Except it would be romantic, like Romeo & Juliet. And I get the “Fuck You” he was going for while also agreeing with his dad that the ending we got is the bleaker one.  

But either case was a missed opportunity for the audience to be truly brought into their world. When Nikki’s branch snapped off-screen for a matching wish and we get to see Michael Johnston become what Navarette has been, the film should have changed with him.  

Again, we have no real framework for what’s happening in her head. We know that the One Wish Willow traps people. We hear Nikki's screams on the other side of the customer service line. And it’s fine that we never switch to her POV… but here we could have gotten the best of both worlds: seen what Nikki has been seeing through Bear’s eyes for the brief few minutes before they glaze over for good. Be that The Sunken Place or, like, Harley Quinn's butterfly fantasy or who knows! Barker is good at creepy imagery: he could have come up with something that really tied it all together.  

Alas and alack.  

Still, Obsession looks excellent. Shot in a 3:2 aspect ratio with a mostly static camera, every frame could easily be put on a pretty fucked up IG timeline. Yet it's the movement within those frames that sticks with you. The first time Nikki does the homage to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The use of shadow and silhouette is similarly hair-raising… so it's not shocking that Silhouetted Women Moving Weird are staples of his shorts as well. It's his Thing.  

It's fine for directors to have Things. (I refuse to fact check my Film History professor saying that Francois Truffaut put freeze frames into his movies mostly because he wanted to be called an auteur (a term he helped popularize as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma); if it's not true, it's still true. Ya know?)

But I'm worried about what those Things mean for his future projects, because I walked out of Obsession a Barker Believer, and I sit before my computer and you (but not god cuz there isn't one) saying that belief is gone. The more I have, ahem, obsessed over this movie, the more of the credit for its impact I've given to the performers in general but mostly just to Inde Navarette. She is the beating/bleeding heart of this thing: it can be funny or scary or emotionally devastating, and which of those things it is nearly always comes down to her. Even when she's not onscreen, what you imagine she's doing and how she would be reacting to the events colors them. It's a towering achievement.  

And I hope that Curry Barker proves me wrong and that I can leave the theater a believer again: I want a good Texas Chainsaw so bad!

But regardless of his future, Obsession has given cinema at least one true breakout. And that alone is worth celebrating.  

Eight Point Two out of Ten