Overlook Film Festival Review: Obsessed with OBSESSION

Curry Barker’s $800 psychokiller chiller Milk and Serial found wide success on YouTube for its ability to subvert viewers’ expectations, breathing fresh life into several genre staples (the serial killer mindbender and the found footage slasher) with affability and ease. It’s a pleasure, then, to see that same lowkey sensibility flow so well through his first studio feature, Obsession, a slyly well-structured and blackly comic monkey’s paw romp that draws you in and keeps you hooked from start to finish. 

Like his first no-budg feature, Obsession begins as an eminently familiar story–– though this time, he claims, he was inspired by an episode of The Simpsons. Bear (Michael Johnston, Slash) is an awkward, deeply anxious guy who fritters away his days working at a music store and crushing endlessly on his coworker and sandbox buddy, Nikki (Inde Navarrette). When he wanders into a mystical shop to buy her a present on the day he plans to finally ask her out, he snags a One Wish Willow–– this film’s kitschy-cute version of the old embalmed simian mitt–– on a whim. After fumbling his romantic confession and finding himself thoroughly friendzoned, he makes the kind of poorly phrased, sweatily lovelorn wish that only a lunatic would. Maybe he missed that episode of The Simpsons. Demonic possession, desperation, and cringe-comedy ensue, to the audible delight of the Overlook Film Festival crowd on opening night. 

Barker’s greatest strength is his writing, and while it’s immediately obvious where this romance is headed, each beat of Obsession twists your assumptions as well as your nerves. An opening declaration of love is revealed to be a practice round with people who seem to be his friends. “That was awful bro,” his best pal Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, Milk and Serial, Mank) tells him. “Get her flowers,” the woman Bear is rehearsing with suggests–– before getting up, adjusting her previously hidden apron, and going back to bussing tables. It’s a funny movie, and Barker’s deftness with small narrative zaps like these keep it refreshingly light on its feet. 

There’s also a surprising amount of nuance to Barker’s characters that significantly elevates the premise, making Obsession one of the better versions of this kind of cautionary tale in recent horror cinema memory. “Incel monkey’s paw” would’ve been a good idea on its own terms, of course, but there’s more to this tale of woe than just Bear’s chronic case of nice-guy-ism. Johnston’s panicky performance curdles slowly, waffling from lonely and wildly misguided but seemingly decent(ish) to defensive and nervously pugnacious to flat-out flummoxed at his new girlfriend’s Exorcist routine. The latter is one of his best modes, and his bland, dead-eyed, denialist clinging to the mess he’s made as things spiral out of control is endlessly entertaining. Once your paramour’s box lunch starts smelling suspiciously of rot, “she’s fine” doesn’t really cut the mustard anymore. 

Of course, this kind of flick lives and dies on its female lead, and Navarette is fantastic. She blends Frankenhooker broadness (“I thought we were having a nice date!” she wails,  a massive cartoon frown plastered across her face) and icky, Single White Female-style fervency on a dime, all while completely maintaining our sympathy. Her facial expressions are almost elastic as she bends and stretches her mouth into pouts, screeches, doe-eyed leers, serving up a 🙁 that gives Florence Pugh a run for her money. Someone put this girl in the next Smile, stat. 

Thematically, too, Obsession has things to chew on. This is a bad romance that wants you to think more actively than most about questions of intimacy, cowardice, consent, and responsibility, even before it comes to invoking the forces of darkness to get the girl. His friends ask Bear if he’s taking advantage of his new, obviously addled lovergirl and stop inviting him to parties. “Just because you did this to her doesn’t mean [her love for you] isn’t real,” a blandly villainous voice tells him on the phone, inviting him into the passive world of wish fulfillment without shame. “It’s okay babe,” a bloodsoaked Nikki tells him meanwhile, eerie adulation dripping from every perky syllable, “this is all your fault!” He’s known that the whole time, and that’s the problem. Barker wrings his horror from the quotidian queasiness of people’s desires with a shrug and a wry, shiteating grin that says, careful what you wish for, man, or fuck around and find out. Finding out has never been more fun.