Obsession: Christ, That Poor Girl
Yesterday, I took myself on a solo date to see Obsession. I have to say, in an empty ass theater, you hear so much more of the background noise. You also get to hear small, individual reactions from other viewers and can kind of gauge whether you're missing things. I will say, I don't think I missed anything. This was fucking good that I was sat at attention the whole time.
AN ALERT ABOUT THIS FILM: A cat dies, pretty much immediately. The cat resurfaces later in the film, desecrated. It's sad. I wish I knew. So there you go.
Bear, one of a quartet friend group, prepares to tell another friend in the group, Nikki, how he feels for her. In the midst of his nerves and attempting to woo the girl, he goes to an apothecary and purchases a "One-Wish Willow", an unassuming gimmicky product claiming to grant you one, one-time-use wish. Eventually, in Bear's failure to express himself to Nikki, he uses the One-Wish Willow himself. This split-second decision changes the course of the lives of each friend, eventually ending in regret, blood, and fatal ultimatums.
I have a lot I liked about this movie. I found the plot really easy to digest, which occasionally resulted in layup guesses at where the movie was going, but I can look beyond the tropes to appreciate what's in front of me.
The aspect ratio of this film forced you to zero in on what was happening. There was less room to look off to the side and miss something happening in front of you. I found that really cool as I'm always scanning the background for clues and indicators.
I liked that Bear was a pussy, through and through. I like that he also remained selfish to a bitter end. His character was very well-worked in the sense that his actions were somewhat predictable in a "Oh come-the-fuck-on" way. You almost never agree with his actions, but they are true to form.
I don't know if it was just the theater I was in having excellent acoustics, but the background noises were very apparent in this film. There was the repeated use of an owl hoot, and I feel like it was indicative of something, but I'm not sure what. My best guess would be that they happened at points of realization for Bear, but that might not be true. He certainly didn't realize jack-shit (outwardly, in an actionable way, anyway) until he was worried about his own well-being.
NIKKI WAS FUCKING TERRIFYING. I am so fucking scared of the dark, and this is so niche, but one of my biggest fears is watching someone I love be erratic and not respond to me (I'm certain this fear comes from watching too many horror films as a child.). Her jagged leg movements, the slow creep she did from the corner of the room to Bear's bedside... I was fiddling with my seat trying to separate myself from the moment. THAT is an indicator of a fantastiaclly produced scene.
I like that when Nikki started acting bizzare, screaming at the top of her lungs and then flipping to a "okay honey :)" response, it almost forced me to let out a dry-humor chuckle in the same space that Bear would have been letting out an awkward-moment chuckle. It immersed me in the scenes a tangible way, which is phenomenal.
I loved that there was a "True Nikki" and a "Wish Nikki" battling for control over Nikki's body throughout the film. The moments where she was so scared and repulsed that she shoves herself away, and the immediate snap back to clinging and obsession were jarring in such a good way. There's a scene where Bear makes a phone call to the TabiCat company that created the One-Wish Willow, and the operator says "do you want to talk to Nikki?" and it is just the screams of someone who is clearly in agony was an excellent, excellent touch. I can say the same for the scene where Nikki's body is sleeping, and True Nikki asks Bear to please just kill her while Wish Nikki is asleep. Her character is one of my most favorite "villain"-ish characters in recent memory.
I really, really hate to put this in my "likes" category, but the cat's death was in fact relevant to the plot and NOT needless, as is almost always the case. Wish Nikki's obsession over the cat dying and getting rid of the body, the only being that Bear loved other than her, was astute.
There is a poem Nikki reads in a scene at a party where you can clearly tell that the two entities inside Nikki's body are battling and that one is being tortured. I wish I could remember any of the verbiage, but truly, it was so insane. It was such an intrinsic touch.
I think the cat dying was integral to the plot. However: I do not understand how the cat died. I do not understand how the cat got into the medicine cabinet and opened Bear's late grandma's sleeping pills. I understand it was a setup for Bear's ultimate demise, but it's genuinely impossible for that to happen. I must have missed something that made the death possible, but even Bear said "how did you get into these?" when he found that poor little baby.
This is a nitpick, I know. I hate that an idiot man made a stupid decision, waited as long as possible to try to reverse it, and left True Nikki to clean up the mess. Though, this is indicative of his love for Nikki always having been skin deep (no pun intended), which was clear from the jump. Bear killing himself, in that moment, was the most selfish thing he could've possibly done. True Nikki already begged to die, Wish Nikki already killed literally everyone else and mutilated her body to an insane extent, and Bear kills himself. You stupid fuck. Couldn't even leave her with a note on the spare One-Wish Willow you had? Absolute pussy, sorry. I wouldn't have wanted it to end any other way, really, but thinking about it pisses me off lol.
The subplots were pushed really, really hard. The blatant body language and verbal cues were so in-your-face that it became annoying. I knew within the first five minutes that Ian and Nikki had been sleeping together and that Sarah was into Bear. It was so obvious that I initially thought Nikki was Sarah, until they called her Sarah.
The director had these scenes where Nikki would do these really prolonged, giant smiles in long camera shots. It was not alarming or creepy, at all. Those shots were a waste of time and would've been better utilized if she was doing those grandiose smiles and the eyes looked somewhat tortured, like if they were wide open and the pupils were shot then it would've been a much better addition to the atmosphere. A small thing, but it happened enough to take notice.
This movie was so fucking good. In speaking to others about this movie I learned it was low-budget/indie, which makes sense, because they relied more on human action than special effects to amplify the "creep" factor. If this movie had a higher budget, I probably wouldn't have loved it as much, because they'd lean on more SFX opportunities. High props to Blumhouse for putting their name on some more non-slop films. Everything felt so organic, which pulls you into the story more. Incredible. For these reasons, I'd give this an 8.5 or 9/10. Curry Barker did a phenomenal job and you can't ask for much more than what Obession delivers in the horror genre.
This is a high, high recommend from me. Feel free to leave some discussion if you feel I've missed something. Overall, May/June have been a very good season for horror. Excited to see what fall may bring :)
