How Obsession Gives Me Some Faith in Audiences

Curry Barker pleased crowds, and me, by eschewing some "crowd-pleasing" cliches.

NOTE: Obsession has been out a little while now. I will be discussing plot points

Much like I was with Sinners and Project Hail Mary, I might just be the last person in my field to see Obsession, but it happily allows me a different perspective on it. I’d love to say that reviews are given completely separate from context, assessing the work of art purely on its own stand-alone terms, but that isn’t necessarily true. When a low-budget horror movie becomes such a phenomenon that it grosses close to $300 million domestically, it’s handing me, the reviewer, a massive clue that something in it is striking a particular chord, and I’d best be looking for it.

What most surprised me about the movie, though, is that for a crowd-pleaser, it eschews many of the kinds of things that movie studios THINK make a crowd-pleaser. It does get the hook right: What if Fatal Attraction, but supernatural? In a horror movie where the awkward protagonist uses a magic “One Wish Willow” to make his platonic friend love him, and she does so psychotically, we know the broad strokes. Either he will die, or she will, or maybe the movie will swerve and off them both, but there is a limited number of likely options. So it’s the journey, the HOW of it all, that matters most.

And here’s where audiences are surprising me: they’re embracing a film that slowly builds its characters before going anywhere scary. A (fake-looking) dead cat for grossness’ sake is thrown in there, but most other horror movies, at any level, would insist on beginning with a scare. Either the violent results of a previous One Wish Willow, or a flash-forward to a later gory moment in the current story, followed by a “Two Days Earlier...” title would be the norm here. Clearly, though, audiences don’t need that, if you can instead use someone relatable as your hook.

It’s amazing how conditioned we’ve become, via fairy tales and the like, to believe that magically granted wishes can never be used to change someone’s heart and make them love you. By simply breaking that rule we didn’t consciously realize was semi-sacrosanct in our stories, writer-director Curry Barker has an instant high concept, yet he doesn’t hand it to you right off the bat.

Barker knows, and knows that you know, that when the movie opens with Bear (Micheal Johnston) directly addressing the camera, confessing his love to someone, that we fully expect a comic reveal of him talking to the mirror, or nobody, so he throws us off by having a female voice respond. Then, when Bear’s done talking, comes the reverse-reversal – the woman is a waitress whom best friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) has roped in to helping Bear practice his romance game.

The script takes time to set things up – nothing supernatural happens before Bear makes his fateful wish, and even the store he buys it in isn’t some stereotypical spooooooky occult boutique, but a run-of-the-mill new age store with a distracted and annoying clerk who doesn’t seem like she’d know Victoria’s secret, let alone those of the universe. The wish is made hastily and casually, and once it’s done, Nikki (Inde Navarrette) escalates things slowly, and convincingly.

But this isn’t simply a story about a woman who gets homicidally crazy. Sometimes she moves in what looks like weird stop-motion; others, she does unsettling things no normally functioning human would do, even an obsessed one. Barker drops breadcrumbs for us – there’s an inkling that Nikki’s actual soul may be trapped elsewhere as an evil force controls her. The story, never comes out and says this, though – it drops a few clues, and lets us imagine what might be really going on. This is an act of trust in the audience, and it also gives you somewhere new to go in the now-inevitable sequel.

The movie’s biggest act of trust, though, is with the ending, which I am going to dance around the specifics of. Merely with visual cues and acting choices, it perfectly conveys what must have happened, even as we didn’t actually see all of it happen on camera. A lesser movie would have had someone verbally explain it, or even force the two main characters to describe their own actions out loud. I followed perfectly without any of that – the box office results suggest that either many others did too, or they came back again and again to figure it out. Either way, Barker made good choices.

As for themes that may be striking a nerve, I previously wrote about why Art the Clown is the slasher villain for today, because cruelty is the point for him. I’d dare suggest that the same national mood may make modern audiences particularly relate to loved ones who seem to have suddenly become lost to madness. Or, perhaps, very stupid men who think they want a certain person in a certain prominent position in their lives, only to have that person use that position to behave like a power-mad psychopath, and shit their pants in moments of catatonia, to boot.

If I named a name, which I surely don’t need to, Obsession might have been slammed in some quarters with the woke label. The fact that misogynists cam also enjoy this as a more surface-level “Wimmin be crazy, amirite?” cautionary tale presumably provides immunity. The key corollary, where wimmin be crazy because YOU, might get missed in that calculus.

Watching Obsession made me wonder if my friend Lucky’s movie May would have been a big sleeper hit had Lionsgate not buried it in all of three theaters for a week way back when. It’s a movie that found it’s audience, and one of the editors on it – I think his name is “Ruin Mah Johnson,” or something like that – went on to be a pretty huge deal. Could it be that the new generation is ready, en masse, for May? It’s not exactly the same story; May is more like Obsession from the obsessed woman’s point of view, and Inde Navarrette is as magnificent in her wide-ranging, star-making performance as Angela Bettis was in what should have been her rocket to the A-list. Navarrette may actually see some awards love from it.

But they deserve at least a double feature at the New Beverly together...in fact, May should stalk Obsession until it happens. (Figure of speech, don’cha know. I wish I trusted general readerships as much as Curry Barker trusts his audience.)

Obsession ultimately delivers the gore and scares casuals pay to see – maybe not the nudity so much, which is limited to thrusting male butt cheeks. What gives me more joy than those, however, is the realization that young moviegoers can pick up on visual cues, can invest in characters, and can be trusted to watch a movie that starts very slowly if it’s relatable. Studio executives, of course, are going to miss all that and say, “Write me a new WIMMIN BE CRAZY franchise yesterday!”

Which could, I imagine, be the opening scene of Obsession 2.

Images: Universal Focus

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