Michael Johnston as Bear, Megan Lawless as Sarah and Cooper Tomlinson as Ian in Obsession.Focus Features/Supplied
Obsession
Written and directed by Curry Barker
Starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette and Megan Lawless
Classification 14A; 108 minutes
Opens in theatres May 15
Critic’s Pick
Curry Barker’s excellent and highly disturbing new thriller Obsession is the very worst first-date movie ever concocted, a movie destined to make countless young women take a hard second look at their suitors and wonder just what in god’s name their intentions might be.
A supersized Twilight Zone episode beamed straight from the ninth circle of Hell, the film initially plays like a cutesy coming-of-age rom com. Bear (Michael Johnston) is an aimless twentysomething music-store clerk who is hopelessly pining for the affections of his cool-girl co-worker, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), despite the real love of his life, Sarah (Megan Lawless), standing right in front of him. Typically, this is where the filmmakers might dive headfirst into cliché, with Bear making all the best kinds of chuckle-headed mistakes until realizing that he was the primary obstacle to his own happiness. Cue the Sixpence None the Richer.
Yet writer-director Curry Barker has something far more enjoyably despicable in mind, creating the cinematic equivalent to a classic Onion headline: “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-life Man Arrested.” Except the consequences for Bear and his friends are far worse.
Bear is a music-store clerk who finds a trinket that promises to make a wish come true.Focus Features/Supplied
After browsing a new age-y shop, Bear stumbles upon a “One Wish Willow” gag gift – a novelty trinket that promises to grant its owner one wish upon snapping the toy in half. In other words, an updated version of the monkey’s paw famously introduced in a turn-of-the-century short story by W.W. Jacobs (or, for someone of Barker’s Gen Z vintage, the device at the heart of The Simpsons’ classic Treehouse of Horror II episode). Make your wish, but beware the irreversible consequences. And boy, does Bear’s supposedly harmless wish – for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world – deliver some intensely dire repercussions.
Balancing the kind of viral-sicko humour that keeps the worst corners of Reddit alive with an unflinching eye for the grime and desperation of Middle America youth, Barker delivers a gloriously nasty ride that quickens the heart and chills the spine. The young filmmaker – making his feature directorial debut at just 26 – also offers strong evidence that the current YouTuber-to-Hollywood pipeline isn’t some freakish fluke of trend and circumstance.
After gaining industry notice with his online shorts – including 2023’s The Chair (which will turn you off sitting down) and the nearly feature-length 2024 found-footage shocker Milk & Serial (which will put you off the very concept of friendship) – Barker feels like, as with his contemporaries the Philippou Brothers (Talk to Me) and Dan Trachtenberg (Prey), someone who is able to break the rules of genre filmmaking precisely because he respects them so much. This isn’t a movie of easy cynicism or a snide middle finger to horror-movie tradition – it is a finely calibrated shock to a system that Barker obviously grew up worshipping.
Inde Navarrette plays Nikki, Bear’s co-worker and crush.Focus Features/Supplied
As Bear and Nikki’s faux-relationship deepens and intensifies – its supernatural origin story giving a new kind of extremity to the current catch-all accusation of “gaslighting” – Barker delivers a series of increasingly unforgettable images, nightmarish in their implications. Eventually, the action culminates with such an eye-popping act of violence that even the toughest seen-it-all horror fiends will yelp in surprise (even if the moment in question has been slightly sanitized since the movie’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere).
The best trick that Barker pulls off, though, is ensuring that each perverse escalation in the scenario escapes any sense of sitcom-y silliness. There is a version of this movie in which Bear’s plan is shrugged off as one well-intentioned guy getting in over his head. Whaddya gonna do, amirite? But the pitch-black darkness that Barker clouds over every awful decision from his ostensible hero keeps the film in a more interesting, queasy territory. And each of Bear’s moves are rendered with deep care by Johnston, who is matched every step and scream by Navarrette.
Obsession might be marketed as a thrill-packed cautionary tale – “Be careful who you wish for” – but Barker isn’t letting anyone off the hook here, including himself. Like Bear, the director realizes that he’s unleashed something uniquely awful here. Buyers, and would-be lovers, beware.