1 Hour 48 Minutes, rated R for cat sandwiches and faces getting bashed in with bricks.
Warning: yeah, there’s graphic violence in this film. There’s also food contamination horror, poop, vomit, and everything else. You might want to skip the snack stand if you go to see this one.
Fair Value of Obsession: $16.00. Comparable to Reiner’s Misery or Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, Obsession is a grueling, deeply intimate work of over the top psychological horror.
Who Will Enjoy Obsession? People who want to see a powerhouse debut will get quite the tour in Inde Navarette’s physicality and whiplash tonal switches (technically, this is her second film, but it is her first lead role). As the supernaturally unhinged Nikki, she acts to every corner of the emotional spectrum. Lead actor Michael Johnston manages to keep pace with her, but it’s Navarette’s show.
Who Will Hate Obsession? This is absolutely not a date movie. My first remark upon seeing this was “well, that’s going to put me off of heterosexuality for a few weeks.”. People who have actually survived stalking or abusive and psychotic romantic relationships will want to give this film a wide, wide, wide, wide distance. If you really want to make sure that somebody doesn’t hit it off, suggest to them that Obsession is a good first date movie.
Summary of Obsession: Dead simple extended episode of The Twilight Zone: a man gets his wish and suffers for it.
Nice Guys are the Last to Die: after lots of suffering, including the unwitting consumption of pets. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a barely legible pile of Gen Z anxiety and awkwardness, a completely uncommunicative simp who’s latched on to the one female friend (Nikki, played by Inde Navarette) who’s even bothered with a smidgeon of congeniality. In many ways, this film is both a deconstruction of and an inversion of indie romance films like Garden State: the male lead is punished extensively for his non-committal, cowardly ways. Bear was never really interested in the authentic being of who Nicole might have been; he was only interested in the token, the seeming, his own imagination.
And does that imagination ever take a turn after Bear makes a use of a wish found in a gimmicky new age store.
A woman possessed, Nikki becomes the maniac pixie dream girl; cartoonish, erratic, possessive and homicidally jealous. And what’s the most incredulous thing about this film is the sheer looming mountain of red flags that Bear chooses to overlook before the film reaches it’s fluid-saturated denouement.
Director Curry Barker has honed in on the one thing that will terrify most adults: emotional intimacy. This film is close-up after close-up, a densely shot and claustrophobic film with little in the way of exterior shots. If there’s one fault in his cinematography, it’s the lighting, or the absence thereof: this is an incredibly murky film, partly deliberate, but at times it also feels like Barker just doesn’t know how to light a scene. Other than that visual demerit, it’s a psychological demolition derby of a film, with Bear being subjected to a steadily escalating ramp of awkward and disturbing behaviors from his new dream girl.
If anything, this movie might be the tombstone for a certain variety of romantic comedy. Nobody’s laughing at the ineptitude of stubbled record store clerks anymore. It is salutary and admirable that a $750,000 budget film has eclipsed the success of the latest Star Wars drivel. If Obsession is also the death knell for the hipster romantic protagonist and the trope of the manic pixie dream girl, then it is also exemplary.
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