I Just Saw

Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, is the best new film I’ve seen this year and possibly the best adaptation of the Monkey’s Paw tale that’s come my way. It might even be in my top 100 horror movies. Top 50, even. It’s more than a little surprising to be saying this about a Blumhouse joint with a generic title and about young people interacting with a hoary supernatural device, but here we are. Best film of the year so far. It rides the line between comedy and horror so perfectly that it crawls out on a razor’s edge of gore, threat, psychological terror, harrowing social awkwardness, and pure fear.

Bear, Nikki, Ian, and Sarah are friends who work in a music shop. Bear is in love with Nikki but can’t muster up the guts to ask her out. On a whim, he snaps a willow branch bought from a New Age store and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone else in the world. Instantly we see her framed in silhouette outside her door, before she approaches Bear and begins a long descent into obsession that’s unlikely to inspire a Valentine’s Day greeting card.

It’s hard to overestimate how perfect the execution of this simple variation on an age-old theme is. The film is shot in soft focus, which gives it a dreamlike quality, and that’s just right. It feels both real in the sense of conveying real characters, while foregrounding the unreal quality of its plot.

The Nikki character is, in a word, terrifying. There are references to other “psycho girlfriend” movies, such as what she does with a pet and the lies she tells about her father, both of which recall Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction. But Close was Miss Honey compared to Nikki. The actress, Inde Navarrette, is phenomenal, using her face and body movements to portray a demonic persona so well that it gets under the skin. For example, in a scene where a variation on spin-the-bottle occurs, and we get a reaction shot of her when Bear is directed to kiss Sarah. The downturned expression she pulls is both funny and uniquely, intimately terrifying. I was reminded of the much lesser Smile franchise, where people’s possession by the entity is marked by their “scary” smiles. Those expressions were only funny; Nikki’s is on that aforementioned razor’s edge between painful awkwardness, humour, and something so wrong that you cringe in fear.

Much will be made of the film’s themes around toxic male desire; what’s interesting there is that Obsession is much subtler about presenting them than most. Despite the film’s moments of extreme violence (technically perfect, by the way, just more of Barker’s absolute control of this material), the most haunting scene for me is a quiet, simple one where a small voice comes out of a sleeping Nikki, and Bear’s unutterably selfish response.

Few films come along that take such a generic concept – young people, supernatural device, gore, rinse, repeat – and fashion it into a masterpiece. Obsession is in that club.

Rating: 3.5/4