In Obsession, a young man is so obsessed with a friend of his that he’s afraid to admit his feelings for her.  Since I was in this position years ago, I sympathized with his plight.  If only there were a shortcut to get her to love me, like a magic potion, spell, wishing well or enchanted totem, life would have been grand.  But as the movies often tell us, using magic to get what you  want goes directly against the natural order of things, and horrific consequences soon follow.  That is this movie in a nutshell, be careful what you wish for, because not only will you get it, it’ll scare the crap out of you as well.

The sad-sack in Obsession is referred to by everyone in the movie as Bear (Michael Johnston), which I assumed was an ironic nickname.  (It’s actually short for Baron.)  He’s timid, paralyzed by low self-esteem and fear of rejection.  He lives at his dead grandmother’s house and works at a music store because that’s where his high school friends work.  Bear is drifting through life and wants for nothing, except Nikki.

Bear is obsessed with Nikki (Inde Navarrette), hence the movie’s title.  In a brilliant opening scene, Bear play-acts revealing his soul to a third party, and she’s touched by his raw vulnerability.  Bear’s best friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) calls his performance “cringe”.  I thought Bear was a bit scary and figured Nikki would run for the hills upon hearing Bear say that she’s in his every waking thought.  Clearly, what works in songs (“I can’t live without you!” “You are the woman that I’ve always dreamed of!”) doesn’t in real life.

Upon returning home, Bear finds his cat Sandy dead from eating his grandmother’s oxycodone.  After seeing Bear sobs heavily over Sandy’s death, it’s obvious that Bear’s very emotional, which is why he can’t play things cool with Nikki.  He’s been pining away for her for years and can’t simply ask her out on a date.

Later that night, Nikki calls Bear to be sure he comes to trivia night.  When she accidentally drops her necklace down the drain, Bear gets an idea.  He’ll buy a replacement, because nothing says I love you like a surprise gift.  However, Bear settles on a novelty gift named “One Wish Willow”, because it’s cheap and won’t come with serious connotations.  (Bear is such a coward.)

Bear wants to tell Nikki that he has feelings for her during trivia night, but Ian is dead-set against it.  Trivia night is Ian’s favorite night of the week, and he doesn’t want Bear to ruin it with romantic overtures and cock-blocks him.  Bear gets another opportunity when Nikki asks him to drive her home.  During the ride, Nikki says that he’s the only one she can really talk to.  Is that because she thinks of Bear as a friend, or as a friend who could provide “benefits”?  Despite having several opportunities to say he loves her, Bear chickens out.

Things go sideways when Bear arrives at Nikki’s house.  She asks him straight up if he has feelings for her, which he denies.  He uses some bad advice from Ian, calling her a hated nickname, which fails spectacularly.  Even worse, Bear forgets to give Nikki her gift.

Frustrated with himself, Bear uses the One Wish Willow to wish that Nikki loves him more than anyone else in the world.  He then sees Nikki standing outside her house like a specter.  She returns to Bear’s car and makes nice, asking if he wants to come inside, then insisting that he she take him to his place because she’s wasted.  Why? Because her dad’s dying.  Hmm.

Things get heated at Bear’s place.  She removes her shirt and kisses Bear, then panics.  Bear is freaked out and insists on sleeping on the floor.  The next morning, Bear is horrified that Nikki made a memorial shrine for Sandy.

At work the next day, Bear tells Ian about his weird night with Nikki.  Bear thinks that Nikki was having a mental breakdown, while Ian believes she was on molly.  That night, Nikki comes to Bear’s house and confesses that she was on MDMA yesterday, then asks him if he has feelings for her.  Bear says “yes” and we see the two falling in love via a rom-com montage.  Both Ian and fellow best friend Sarah (Megan Lawless) are puzzled by the sudden turn of events.

But all isn’t perfect in Bear’s love nest.  Nikki loves Bear, but is very clingy.  She stares at him while they watch TV and is jealous when he takes a call from Ian while they’re out to dinner.  Ian reports to Bear that Nikki’s story about her dying dad doesn’t hold water, which makes Bear suspicious.  Did his wish actually come true?

When Bear confronts Nikki about her lie, she makes a scene.  He calms her down, and the two have sex back at home, but things proceed to go off the rails afterwards.  Nikki becomes possessive of Bear and exhibits extremely codependent behavior.  Even still, Bear stays in the relationship.  But it’s clear that Nikki is not herself and is becoming unhinged.  As things spiral out of control, Bear is forced to decide whether his wish outweighs his partner’s anguish.

Recommendation

The movies have long told us that wishing for anything is a bad idea, because when it comes true, it won’t be what you wanted, and undoing it may be impossible due to gotchas and loopholes.  Obsession follows this formula to the letter, where a guy’s wish to have the girl of his dreams love him back goes terribly wrong.  By the end of the movie, you’ll want nothing to do with a One Wish Willow if you see one.

Obsession uses the bad karma associated with wishing to zero-in on the unhealthy dynamics of unbalanced relationships.  Have you ever been with someone who was too clingy, controlling or made emotional outbursts in public?  Then you may sympathize with Bear.  Or maybe you’ve contorted yourself into a pretzel to please someone?  Nikki’s behavior will definitely make you laugh uneasily.  The movie is a boon to lovers of cringe comedy, with plenty of incredibly uncomfortable moments.

Aesthetically, the movie symbolizes Nikki’s ongoing mental anguish using horror movie visual tropes.  Sometimes she moves around with herky-jerky motions like a J-horror movie.  Other times she acts like she’s possessed or schizophrenic.  Often Nikki appears back-lit so that she’s  a threatening black shape.  There’s a scene directly cribbed from The Exorcist, and others inspired by Get Out and Hereditary.  The movie wants us to understand that Bear’s desperation wish turned his dream girl into a literal monster and succeeds by any measure.

While Obsession’s scenes of violence and mayhem are shocking and scary in an Evil Dead sort of way, they come at the expense of the film building to a conclusion befitting its psychologically troubling premise.  The movie settles for splatter when it should have focused on delivering something nuanced.  The movie’s ending fits, but ignores what made the first hour so compelling.

Michael Johnston is very good in the Jack Quaid role, the reasonably cute guy who exudes fear and insecurity with every word and gesture.  Johnston admirably pulls off the difficult job of making Bear relatable but unlikable, a bad guy with understandable motives that make him more than a clear-cut villain.  The way Johnston makes us initially sympathetic for Bear and then progressively hate him is a remarkable bit of acting, especially considering how much his co-star steals the spotlight from him at every turn.

As Nikki, Inde Navarrette is incredible.  Her character’s transformation from the beautiful and gregarious young woman in the beginning to the violent psychopath in the end is a sight to behold.  This will sound strange, but Navarrette plays Nikki like a classic Jim Carrey performance: physical, expressive, sympathetic, funny and completely unpredictable.  Her performance here is a lightning bolt that should open every door for her.

This is my first encounter with writer-director Curry Barker, and what he’s accomplished with a paltry budget is impressive.  Behind the camera, he expertly utilizes lighting and camera angles to make the film’s physical locations look creepy and foreboding.  His background in sketch comedy produces clever dialog with plenty of awkward twists and turns.  His movie does have an episodic feel to it, where scenes work perfectly individually but don’t produce a more satisfying ending.  That said, Barker’s daring more than makes up for his film’s minor narrative deficiencies.

Getting your wish is the worst thing imaginable in Obsession, a twisted take on love and romance that horrifies before going full-on horror.  I appreciated the movie’s darkly comedic take on desire and relationships more than its gruesome endgame, but it’s a wild ride either way.  Recommended.

Analysis

I initially struggled to understand what message Obsession was trying to convey.  Given how much of the third act is focused on violence, the simple answer is the old adage applied to getting wishes from genies, which is to be careful what you wish for.  Bear wanted Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world, and he got more than he bargained for.  In other words, wishes have unforeseen consequences.  While this is an accurate interpretation of what happens, it’s too pat.

Another take is that all men are creeps, which is true of both Ian and Bear.  Ian may act like Nikki’s friend, but he keeps their personal relationship private and casual.  He sees Nikki as a hookup, which likely contributes to her decision to leave town and focus on her writing.  When Ian learns that Bear and Nikki are together, Ian repeatedly tries to push Bear away from her, not out of concern for Bear or Nikki, but because Bear is in a relationship with “his woman”.  (More on that below.)

Bear’s personality may be the polar opposite of Ian’s, but he also wants Nikki for himself.  His wish is his last-ditch effort to prevent her from leaving.  Then, when he realizes that his wish is responsible for her change of heart, he keeps things going because the outcome is still what he wanted.  While Bear may come off as sensitive and thoughtful, he also wants to control Nikki just like Ian.

Bear and Ian are certainly guilty of awful “controlling guy” behavior, which in turn invites a feminist interpretation of events.  Nikki and Sarah certainly would have been much better off without those two dudes in their lives.  But the movie wants to accomplish more than showing us how badly some men can act towards women and how women end up paying the price.

The key to Obsession is in Nikki’s almost-forgotten plans.  She has quit her dead-end job at the music store to make something of her life, only for Ian and Bear to get in her way.  Neither cares about Nikki’s aspirations, which become an afterthought in the ensuing carnage.  All that matters to those guys is who’s sleeping with her.

The subtext of the movie is how a woman’s mind and body can become subservient to a man’s needs, and the toll it takes on her.  The problem I have with Obsession is that it takes its eye off this theme in favor of awkward sketch comedy episodes and shocking violence.  And while all of that stuff is done well, it’s not as compelling as the central question at its core, which is how far will Bear let things go before he realizes that he’s destroyed Nikki’s life to satisfy his own desires?

This is why Sarah becomes part of the plot late in the game.  The movie shifted its focus to Nikki’s erratic behavior for a long time, and Sarah’s trying to get into art school is a way of reminding Bear (and the audience) what the central premise of the movie is.  When Nikki kills Sarah, the action symbolizes how Bear has effectively killed Nikki’s plans.

The movie doesn’t show Bear having an epiphany, however.  Instead, he becomes increasingly scared by Nikki’s actions, but not scared enough to take serious action.  Bear calls the One Wish Willow support line and asks for his wish to be adjusted and then cancelled, to no avail.  He then asks Ian to undo his wish, which goes comically wrong.  

As to whether he feels guilty about taking over Nikki’s life and the consequences of his actions, the movie is inconclusive.  Bear interest in adjusting his wish implies that he still wants Nikki to love him, just not be a danger to himself or others.  As such, his actions are based in self-interest, then self-preservation, not in helping Nikki.

In the end, Bear’s tasked with destroying a monster of his own making (ala Frankenstein), and in doing so misses an opportunity to show him coming to terms with his insecurities and selfishness.  The movie was on a trajectory where I assumed Bear would have that reckoning, but it never arrives.  Instead we get an ending that is clever but not satisfying.

This may have been intentional on Barker’s behalf, his way of signaling that men like Bear lack the self-awareness necessary to come to that conclusion on their own.  Considering how little time he devotes to Nikki’s internal plight, I think it’s a limitation within the story itself.  Maybe Barker didn’t know how to “get there” and chose to amplify the horror as an alternative.  Regardless of the reason, I like how Obsession challenged me.  But I can’t deny feeling there was more that it could and should have said.

Some other observations of Obsession…

Ian is not your friend, Bear

While Bear considers Ian his best friend, Ian is anything but.  In fact, everything Ian does is in his own self-interest in Nikki.  Consider that Ian:

• dissuades Bear from confessing his feelings to Nikki because he doesn’t want anything to disrupt weekly trivia night.
• prevents Bear from doing so at the bar.
• suggests that Nikki’s odd behavior was due to drugs.
• takes it upon himself to investigate Nikki’s father and her claim that he’s dying of cancer.
• drops the following truth-bombs on Bear: 1) Nikki’s father is completely healthy and the hospital that he supposedly was being treated at never heard of him.  (He could never have confirmed that since he isn’t a family member.) 2) Nikki thinks of Bear as her little brother and a friend. 3) suggests that Nikki has ill intentions towards Bear.
• doesn’t invite Bear and Nikki to his party.
• doesn’t Bear’s insistence that the One Wish Willow is real and wishes for a billion dollars.

Evil Dead meets rom-com

Obsession reminded me of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies in several ways.  Both movies are about a cute, mild-mannered man whose girlfriend becomes possessed.  The girlfriend then proceeds to torment her boyfriend both physically and emotionally to break him.  In the last act, Michael Johnston’s Bear looked exactly like Bruce Campbell’s Ash, with his sweat-drenched hair and covered in blood.

Love stinks

A wise man once said, “We don’t choose who we love.”  That is painfully true for Bear.  If only he’d noticed that Rachel was into him, things would have turned out so much better.  Bear, unfortunately, fell for someone who didn’t feel the same way.  (Cue the J. Giles.)

The revelation that Ian slept with Nikki must have been particularly galling to Bear.  Ian is a schlub and a doofus, what could Nikki possibly see in him?  Ian may not have much, but he doesn’t take anything seriously (besides trivia night) and only wants to have fun.  For Nikki, that was preferable to someone as needy as Bear.

How pathetic is Bear?

At several points in the latter part of the movie, Bear defends his relationship with Nikki to Ian and Rachel.  He does this because after pining away for Nikki for years, he’d rather be in a bad relationship with her than none at all.

The many faces of Nikki

Once she’s under a magic spell, Nikki tries to become the person she thinks Bear will love.  By turns she’s: seductive, adoring, petulant, attentive, alluring, and so on.  However, none of them are what Bear fell in love with, which frustrates possessed Nikki and triggers her outbursts.  Nikki Nikki desperately wants Bear to love her, but the harder she tries, the more frightened he becomes.  Their relationship is highly unbalanced, which in turn causes her to act more forcefully and violently.  It’s a vicious circle that can only end when either of them die.

Wish as curse

The most ingenious aspect of Obsession is how it turns Bear’s wish into a horror movie curse.  Similar to The Ring, Drag Me to Hell, Smile and others, the movie is about how a person’s life becomes controlled by the supernatural and will result in their death by the end of the movie.

Aggressive women are funny

I’ve read some people online state that there’s nothing funny about Obsession.  Nonsense.  The movie uses the classic comedy bit where a man has to fight off a woman making overtures to him.  Think of Marty in Back to the Future and his mother, Jeannie and Major Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie, Al and Peg Bundy in Married with Children, and so on.  Obsession follows a long tradition and is funny for it.

Static on the TV

If you’re interested in watching a more genteel version of Obsession, check out Twilight Zone episode “The Chaser” from 1960.  I saw it on Pluto about a month before seeing this movie and the similarities are undeniable.