Obsession

Horror films rarely unsettle me. In fact, the last time I felt genuinely unsettled was watching Halloween IV with my grandmother when I was eleven years old. Jump scares, torture porn, paranormal stories, none of it has kept me up at night. 

Obsession unsettled me. The plot is simple: boy likes girl. Girl friend-zones boy. Boy wishes girl would love him more than anything in the world. The wish comes true. Girl goes crazy. Boy regrets wish.

It is the level of obsession that makes the film creepy. Imagine having the most loyal dog in the world. A dog that shadows your every step. A dog that sits by the door crying until you come home. A dog that needs your total attention at all times. The wish here unleashes an obsession so overwhelming that it becomes uncomfortable to watch. Without the horror elements, we would be in cringe land.

Inde Navarrette makes this film. She moves from normal to nuts and back with alarming ease. She delivers pathetic infatuation and psychotic obsession in line with what you would expect from the genre, but she gives us more than that too. Most of us have met people like this. Not this demented, but close enough that you probably think of a couple you know, or maybe an ex, while watching Obsession. The hyperbole makes this film real for us.

Michael Johnston is just as good as the awkward friend turned lover. What really cuts through is the way his character balances the terror of obsession against his desire to pass the whole thing off as a normal relationship to his sceptical friends. Even when it’s clearly bad, he wants to pretend it’s good. Here too, you think of people you know, those who stayed in dead or abusive relationships far too long.

It blows my mind that director Curry Barker is only 26 years old. This is his second feature film. I would not compare his skill or the quality of his films to Paul Thomas Anderson or Quentin Tarantino, but on some level it does put him in that rare category of directors who made striking early work: Anderson directed Boogie Nights at 27, Tarantino directed Reservoir Dogs at 28. Both shook up the scene. Maybe Curry Barker will go on to do something similar for horror.