Obsession Review: The horrors of unearned love
The last couple of years has seen the explosion of a niche category of Youtubers making indie horror films: with the success of Weapons, Together, Talk to Me and now Obsession; something seems to have broken through the market.
It seems like Youtubers have a more acute sense of what is going on in the culture than big budget studios whose executives and staff could not be more alienated from the common folk. This reveals a lot of things – people are getting tired of seeing the same stars reenacting the same roles in front of what they know is a green screen, people are sick of superheroes and there is an overwhelming sense of superhero fatigue settling in on all of us, youtubers seem to have an advantage in terms of what the current audience wants.
This could be the dawn of something new and exciting, big studios could either hand over their trust to these young and upcoming filmmakers (Curry Barker, Michael Shanks, Kane Parsons) or they could keep going down this self-destructive path of not changing anything at all.
This phenomenon has all of a sudden injected some life into modern filmmaking which it needed desperately. Out of this phenomenon has also emerged the incredibly slock and often terrifying – Obsession, made by 26 year old Curry Barker, best known as one half of the YouTube comedy duo “that’s a bad idea” with Cooper Tomilson.
What struck me the most about Obsession was its freshness and its attempt to bring in something original to a world that is becoming increasingly stale. The visual language is strong and indicates that Barker has confidence in his vision of what the film should look like, there are lots of scenes where the lighting has been intentionally dimmed and repurposed for the sake of mood and world building – one of the many examples of confident choices that may not have happened in a film funded by the big studios.
The film centers around Baron “Bear” Bailey who is this quintessentially nice guy, the archetype of the sensitive young man – someone who does not have a lot of experience flirting with women. The first scene is revealing – Bear is trying to practice confessing to Nikki Freeman, his longtime crush, by making a waitress sit in front of him.
Bear gets over his introversion and makes his practice confession, when Ian stops him immediately and tells him that Bear is doing too much. And Nikki, who is a chill girl won’t like it. The initial portions of the film are very sympathetic to Bear and understandably so, he is a sensitive young man who does not have the machismo to tell Nikki upfront that he likes her, and in the one attempt of his practising his confession, his best friend tells him that he was doing too much.
Bear is a believable character because we as a generation have become increasingly hostile towards any form of sincerity, any showcasing of vulnerability and it is immediately deemed as cringe. Hence, we see Bear trying multiple times to confess to Nikki but failing to do so.
Marred by his inner hesitancy, Bear becomes frustrated and purchases a monkey’s paw-esque wish granting toy called the One-wish willow where you have the opportunity to ask for one wish. With the news of Nikki’s imminent leaving, and Bear’s inability to muster up the courage to confront her about his feelings, he finally breaks and wishes through the one wish willow – that Nikki loves him more than anyone in the world.
The wish comes true but not in the way that Bear would have liked it, Nikki becomes absolutely consumed by Bear. She instantly becomes murderously obsessed with him, trying to go home with him, trying to sleep with him, trying to invade every inch of personal space that Bear possesses.
Nikki becomes absolutely erratic and it is clear that Bear’s wish has worked, and something supernatural has taken control of her. Herein lies the magic of the film – Nikki’s obsessive and demonic behaviour makes her seem like a completely villainous character on the outset – but the film makes it apparent that it is not Nikki herself that is doing these creepy acts. She is not in control of herself, she has no agency.
Anyone who has no agency cannot be responsible for what they do – this idea is reflected in the film through the mini-breaks that Nikki experiences being possessed by the spirit of the one wish-willow. Whenever Nikki breaks from her possession she has no idea what is going on, and is often gripped by panic in such situations.
Bear, even though he is creeped out by Nikki’s supernatural possession, does not try his hardest to stop whatever is happening to Nikki. He lets the curse continue for some time and Barker shows us that Bear is constantly trying to make it work.
Barker is, of course, concerned about Nikki and her self-destructive acts, but not to the point of sacrificing his own fantasies. They go through their honeymoon phase, not able to keep their hands off of each other and Bear enjoys all of it. Without bothering to wait and ponder over the nature of her love. When all is going well, Bear does not bother.
“This is all I ever wanted,” he tells her. On the outset one would not blame Bear for his behaviour, after all, the woman that he loves the most loves him obsessively, to the point of saturation – how can one reject such a reality? How can one purposefully deny the one thing they have wanted all their life?
Here we see Bear’s narcissism unravel: if he had truly loved Nikki, he would have been concerned from the beginning, trying to free from the curse that he had accidentally placed on her. But we see that it is in fact when things are not going as he would have desired, and when she starts behaving in a way that is destructive to him that he starts evaluating all of this as a potential problem.
In the most revealing scene of the film – Nikki is fast asleep and the non-possessed parts of herself, her true self, wakes up and whispers to bear instructing him to kill her, presumably because the pain of not being in control of her body is painful and frightening. Bear does not kill her but not for the right reasons, he tells her “what is so bad about being with me?” – offended by the fact that Nikki would rather be dead than spending time with him and trying to work it out with him.
Despite Bear knowing that Nikki is going through tremendous physical and mental strain, the first thing that he thinks about is himself, jumping to the conclusion that her wanting to kill herself is a result of her finding him unbearable.
Bear enjoys the obsession that Nikki has with him but hates the destructive aspects that come along with this, he shouts frustratingly –
“Why don’t you act like Nikki?”
Bear wants to have his cake and eat it too, by the time that he realizes that unearned love invites different kinds of horrors it is too late. His realization comes when things are inconvenient for him.
The film’s visual language is haunting and confident, Nikki’s eyes and face are obscured in a lot of the scenes to create a terrifying sense of the unknown, her body movements are directed in a way that is incredibly unsettling, she moves unnaturally in a way that has to be seen to be understood. This creates a sense of the uncanny in the viewer.
Obsession ultimately is a clever horror film that has injected new life into the scene and is carrying on the flame of YouTubers making extremely relevant horror films blowing big studios out of the water.
