Obsession: The Horror Movie Everyone's Talking About

Obsession is the trendy horror movie, which has pleasantly surprised everyone. With a budget of less than a million dollars, this film has already grossed more than 30 million worldwide. Released on May 15, this story does not stop adding fans.

Be careful what you wish for because it can become reality. The quote, attributed to Oscar Wilde, warns that behind every longing is often hidden an illusion impossible to handle. The second film by the young talented filmmaker and YouTuber Curry Barker uses this phrase as a basis and takes it to a place where horror mixes with comedy and love gradually turns into an unhealthy terrain that is marked by paranoia, manipulation and a total lack of logic.

This madness will be experienced by Bear (Michael Johnston), who, in the first scene, rehearses a very romantic declaration of love for his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), who seems to want him, hopefully, only as a friend. In reality, Bear continually delays clarifying his situation, until one night he acquires an object that promises to fulfill a wish by breaking it. Without much to lose, after taking Nikki home by car, he asks her to love him more than anyone in this world, not realizing that, as soon as he finishes talking, she will stop her walk and ask him to please come into her home with her.

Scary surprises

This romance only lasts for a short sequence of images. Soon after, Nikki will begin to behave somewhat peculiarly, with observations at night, constant messages, an incessant need for attention and jealousy difficult to explain. It's just the beginning of an escalation in both intensity and violence that will turn her into an intrusive, suffocating and increasingly threatening figure.

A youthful romantic fantasy that turns into a real possessive horror, Obsession seems to go against what one might expect from a YouTuber director. If everything on your platform is high speed and stimuli, here there is a more focused interest in creating an environment of increasing discomfort, a continuous feeling that something is not right, even in the most everyday scenes, instead of relying on the easiest scares.

The film transitions from awkward comedy to psychological horror and then to violent thriller without the transitions feeling forced. Even in his most intense moments, he never completely loses the tone of satire about certain contemporary relationships influenced by romantic idealization, which makes Barker a director to keep very much in mind.

Contemporary desire

Bear is less of a sociopath than the average man who feels deserving of affection he doesn't know how to cultivate. He is part of a very familiar inheritance of modern cinema: tender, sensitive, emotionally awkward men, who believe that their fragility makes them morally innocent. Raised between virtual therapy and online solitude, he never considers himself a threat. That's the downside: Bear looks like an ordinary individual.

Nikki operates on two planes at the same time: the authentic woman trapped by the desire of others and the emotional figure created by Bear's imagination. Barker captures that physical duality with palpable perversity. She alters her face in the course of a sentence, moves with animal instincts and smiles as if she has just fractured inside: a body inflated by feelings too intense to remain human.

The film presents somber scenes where shadows seem to inhale, slight movements that create a palpable tension and a sound design that works the silences as if they were an apocalypse that is not seen. Nikki's metamorphosis never rests on visual saturation: small physical maladjustments, aspects that make it impossible to trust reality again.

Obsession uses framing to separate its characters, even when they are physically close. Bear longs for a love without danger, without rejection and without alien autonomy. What he gets is a relationship in which there is also no freedom. The more ideal the romantic illusion seems, the closer it is to absolute horror.

Barker is part of the new generation of horror directors who grew up watching extreme French cinema and popular videos at the same time. Violence is presented in a dry, cruel and unexpected way. A steering wheel, a closed door, a body disintegrating before another being who no longer knows how to flee. The gore here acts as a physical consequence of an emotional idea: loving someone to the point of eliminating his will always ends up looking like mutilation.