By David Dent
Director Curry Barker showed his ability to generate edginess and tension with little more than a phone camera in his 2024 mini feature Milk & Serial (available to watch on YouTube). Obsession is Curry’s first full movie; it emerges fully formed, packed with the small town horrors hinted at in his debut.
Michael Johnson plays a young guy named Bear who, when we meet him, is stuck in one of those awkward situations experienced by many of us at one time or another; does Nikki (Inde Navarrette) the drop dead gorgeous girl he fancies, feel the same way? His friends think so but he can’t summon the courage to show his feelings.
And so he ends up in one of those candles/curio shops, asking the disinterested staff member whether a toy they sell, called ‘One Wish Willow’ (which, as its name suggests, grants one wish with a snap of its stick) actually works? “We’ve had complaints,” she replies enigmatically.
But this is no monkey’s paw. The wisher only gets one bite of the cherry; unsurprisingly, Bear wishes for the undying love of Nikki, and before you know it, he has it. And she just won’t give in.
As others have mentioned, Barker takes a pretty slim premise and milks it for all it’s worth. The fatal attraction of Nikki is offset with the reactions of his friendship group, who find her sudden interest in Bear weird and, as the title suggests, obsessive. Barker keeps it all believable even after the relationship explodes in bloody violence; a series of set pieces which are shocking both for their suddenness as well as their rather banal setting.
Watching the movie I kept thinking of the Lara Flynn Boyle crazy jilted stalker character Stacy in 1992’s Wayne’s World, or the ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ episode of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one in which Xander can’t keep Cordelia away from him after dropping a love spell. Both of those examples used comedy for their rendition of the ‘psycho girlfriend’ trope; here Barker plays a more difficult game of shifting sympathies. Yes Nikki is the ‘girlfriend from hell’ but, as we see, is also ‘real’ Nikki is trapped inside her obsessive self, and it’s Bear who is the real monster of the piece. Impressive and nasty, I liked this more than was good for me.
Obsession is showing now in UK cinemas.
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