Did Obsession Just Redefine a Genre? 

My full-time hobby as a trend observer has caught wind of something recently: toxic relationship horror has become its own mini subgenre. It seems like every other dark-comedy-thriller lately is about a scary-clingy girlfriend and a emotionally-stunted boyfriend with a dark side, all tied together with a shallow metaphor for codependency.

To name a few: Together, Keeper, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Oh, Hi!, Companion, Strange Darling, The Roses, and that's just from the last year. The other factor that binds these movies together is that none of them are good. None of them nail the message they're straining so hard to sneak in as subtext.

I didn’t realize how badly I wanted this burgeoning subgenre to go all the way until I saw Obsession.

I went into my screening of the movie totally blind. No trailers watched, no synopses read, no idea who any of the cast and crew were. Before the lights went down, a bleach-blonde man in sunglasses came out to introduce the film. It was writer/director Curry Barker, there as an agent of chaos, to announce to the audience that "This movie fucking sucks.” Everyone laughed, we love a self-deprecating king. The tone was set, but no one—including me—knew they were about to spend 108 minutes audibly recoiling in their seats.

The setup of Obsession couldn’t be simpler: be careful what you wish for, one of the oldest cautionary tales in the book. And there may be no one more doomed to test that lesson than our protagonist Bear (Michael Johnston), a painfully meek “nice guy” whose entire existence orbits around his crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette). He's quietly pining, terrified of rejection, and stuck in the purgatory of either confessing his love or letting it die. Nikki, on the other hand, is not oblivious. Girls rarely are. She can smell Bear's crush from a mile away, already rehearsing her polite-but-firm “you’re like a brother to me” response.

Before their trivia night hangout, Bear ducks into a little metaphysical shop to get a gift for Nikki that will certainly seal the deal. He finds the “One Wish Willow,” a novelty trinket that promises exactly what it sounds like. It's backlit and glowing on a dusty shelf, like an evil Cupid planted it there just for him.

When Bear finally gets the opening he’s been waiting for, he fumbles it completely. Looking at Nikki makes him utterly tongue tied. He doesn't even give her the gift. Just a total flop. When she leaves, Bear’s simmering fugue of frustration and desperation leads him to snap the Willow himself. "I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

The air in the theatre shifted. I literally heard someone 10 rows back gulp.

I have deep respect for how much Barker trusts the audience to recognize a Monkey’s Paw when they see one, that alone sets Obsession apart from its peers. He doesn't need to over-engineer a bloated metaphor, he just needs a universally-known fairy-tale device so he can get to the good shit and start ruining everyone's lives.

You know, maybe it's just me, but Nikki’s cursed descent into an obsessed gf starts off pretty normal. Double texting, clinging to his arm, little outbursts when he tries to go to boy’s night. We’ve all been there, right? But it's not long before stage-five clinger becomes unrestrained possession. Bear has to beg Nikki to just be normal.

Everyone wants a girlfriend until they start "acting crazy.”

“No more weird shit,” Bear pleads, then Nikki proceeds to do some really fucking weird shit. This is where all the other aforementioned movies would be labouring to seem clever, but Barker does the opposite; he goes balls to the wall. I'm talking blood, shit, sweat, broken glass, piss—all smeared together in the name of love. I'm not even going to mention the cement block.

The viewing experience became a routine of hands covering eyes, sharp inhales, knees curling up into chest. I usually hate when people make a spectacle of themselves in a theatre, but this time I was right there with them.

The visceral reactions that I and everyone else had are compliments to Navarrette’s performance as Nikki. She’s a scream queen revelation. I look at her and go, “kid, you're gonna be huge.” Every flicker of her eyes, every body twitch, every slow smile that grows sinister, chilled me to the bone. Isabelle Adjani must have been pregnant with her during Possession.

Navarrette was not afraid to let Nikki get ugly. Like realllly ugly (and I can't say the same for the other female leads in this subgenre). She seemed to make an active decision to avoid performing to the ‘crazy girl’ trope, which made this wretched, devilish character still feel utterly human. Curses aside, Nikki is just a girl trying to prove her devotion to Bear by any means necessary.

And then there’s Bear. He simped too close to the sun. Johnston could’ve played him as a hapless punchline, or a brick wall for his counterpart to shine. Instead, his performance tells the most tragic tale. Though his idealistic infatuation was sometimes infuriating, it was never caricature; Bear is just like some dude we all know. And as Nikki escalates, you really start to feel for him. The guy you were rolling your eyes at becomes the one you ache for. Johnston plays him with this hollowed-out sadness, tortured by the very thing he once thought would save him. :'(

Johnston and Navarette together are the perfect counterweights. She’s expansive, manic, feral; he’s inward, bruised, defenceless. Dynamics like theirs are what actually elevate an “elevated horror,” because they turn it into tragedy.

Maybe on the surface Obsession looks like your run-of-the-mill Blumhouse-now-streaming-on-Shudder-toxic-relationship ass movie (the poster and trailer don't help). But that's kind of what makes it such a nasty surprise.

Because other than the actual gimmick, it doesn't need any gimmicks. It lets the relationship unravel in ways that feel humiliatingly real, then pushes that reality so far it becomes grotesque. The dark humour never undercuts the horror, the horror never overshadows the humanity, and the performances ground what could’ve easily been ridiculous. Where those other films flirt with the idea of obsession, this one shows us what it feels like to be consumed by it.