“You wished for this…”
Shy and awkward Baron “Bear” Bailey works at a music store called Cassell’s Music along with his three best friends, Nikki, Ian, and Sarah. The store is owned by Sarah’s dad. Recently, Bear has been trying to work up the courage to tell his fun-loving, aspiring-writer friend Nikki about his feelings for her, but Ian keeps telling him not to. Ian reminds Bear of her unflattering nickname: “Freaky Nikki.” Then Bear’s cat Sandy tragically dies after accidentally getting into his prescription oxycodone (the pills were presumably left-over from his recently deceased Nana) and the cat overdoses on the pills. And one night, Nikki tells Bear that she has decided to put in her two weeks at work. She is also frustrated because she has accidentally lost her crystal necklace down the drain. Determined to win her affection, Bear goes out to buy her a new necklace, but instead, at the trinket store he finds an odd novelty item called a “One Wish Willow” which is advertised as: “Amaze Your Friends, You Only Get One Wish.” Even though the cashier tells Bear that people often come back and complain about the product, on a whim, Bear buys a One Wish Willow and, after dropping Nikki off at her house after trivia night, he opens the product and wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone in the world. That’s when things start to go awry.
Immediately, Nikki starts acting strangely, like a clingy obsessed lover. She falsely tells Bear that her dad is dying of cancer and she aggressively seduces Bear. She quickly moves in with him, and her emotions are all over the place, despite strange flashes of apparent clarity during which she panics. She creates a disturbing memorial to Bear’s dead cat Sandy but later tries to claim that her erratic behavior was the result of being on MDMA. She has a loud, embarrassing outburst while they are out on a pizza date. Bear wakes up at 3:45am to find her out of bed, creepily hiding in the shadows, watching him sleep, then she suddenly starts sobbing and prancing around in the darkness. She cuts his hair while he is sleeping and he notices that she has duct-taped his front door shut. At work, he discovers the sandwich she prepared for him was made with the remains of Sandy, his cat. This is coupled with a pair of stalker photos of him inside his lunchbox.
A concerned Ian invites Bear over for a boys’ night without Nikki. Then Bear makes a call to the customer service line for One Wish Willow and the oddly casual representative on the other line says the only way to get rid of his wish is to die, and then he asks if Bear wants to talk to a screaming Nikki on the phone. Bear immediately hangs up, sufficiently disturbed. When Bear enters his house, he finds Nikki waiting for him in the dark covered in filth. She has peed and soiled herself standing in the same place all day long, waiting for him to return home. As she showers, she screams at not being invited to Ian’s house so Bear tells her she can come with him after all (much to Ian’s dismay). But at the party, she draws the attention of everyone, laughing awkwardly and telling a twisted, sexually graphic, violent incestuous “Hansel and Gretel” story in which she references a willow branch, all while staring directly at Bear. She then causes a scene that shocks everyone during a game in which Bear is asked to kiss Sarah. Nikki has an apparently brief moment of lucidity when she screams “It’s not me! It’s not me!” and then shatters a glass bottle on her face requiring a trip to the hospital.
Later that night, Bear gets a text from Sarah asking to meet at the park. As he tries to sneak out, a quiet whispering voice speaks to him from bed. It turns out to be the real Nikki. She asks Bear to kill her before the psychotic fake Nikki wakes up. Instead, he ventures out and meets up with Sarah in her car where she reveals that Ian and Nikki were hooking up casually for two years. Sarah thinks Nikki might be trying to get back at Ian by dating Bear. She shows Bear her long-awaited school letter that she hopes to open together with him. But right as Sarah starts to talk about her feelings for Bear, Nikki bursts out of the shadows and smashes through the car window, repeatedly bashing Sarah’s face into the steering wheel until it is reduced to nothing more than a mutilated bloody pulp.
Bear rushes back to the trinket store where he bought the One Wish Willow and buys up the rest of them. He then races over to Ian’s house, hoping Ian will make a wish for things to return to normal. But Ian doesn’t believe Bear. Skeptical, he sarcastically takes the trinket and wishes for “a billion dollars.” Suddenly, money starts raining down from the ceiling, proving the truth of the One Wish Willow. Bear then runs over to his house where he finds a creepy candle-lit shrine to himself sitting near the naked mutilated body of Sarah while a completely unhinged Nikki starts waving a gun around, dressed in Sarah’s clothes and wearing her scalp. She casually shoots Ian in the head and threatens to kill herself until Bear locks himself in the bathroom and takes a lethal dose of the oxycodone pills (much like his cat at the start of the film). He swallows the pills and then hears the little sing-song sound of the One Wish Willow from outside the bathroom door as Nikki has apparently opened one and wished for Bear to love her in return. Bear stumbles out of the bathroom and slowly kisses Nikki before collapsing on the floor and dying. A distraught Nikki, puts the gun in her mouth until suddenly the One Wish Willow spell is broken (thanks to Bear’s death) and the real Nikki returns, utterly horrified by what she sees. The film ends with her screaming over the credits.
Obsession has a fascinating and inspiring backstory. Not long ago, director Curry Barker was a YouTube sketch comedian. He uploaded a short horror film entitled “The Chair” to his channel in 2023. The film caught the attention of producer James Harris who proposed adapting it into a feature film, but Barker proposed a different idea instead, one based on the classic “Monkey’s Paw” segment of the old Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror II episode (which was in turn based on the 1902 W.W. Jacobs short story of the same name). The film was shot in Los Angeles on a small budget of $750,000 and it became a massive popular success with a box office of a staggering $512.6 million, making it one of the highest grossing independent films of all time.
Final Thoughts:
Obsession is a film that explore a uniquely modern horror: the rise of “incel” culture and struggles over modern dating. In the film, we see one awkward young man grow desperate to gain the affection of his attractive friend without actually having to confess his feelings for her. He has a kind of moral cowardice, even when she asks him point blank if he has feelings for her. And once the horrific spell is cast, Nikki is always lurking, blurry in the background of the scene, moving in the shadows and outside windows, her face obscured, constantly staring at Bear, smiling in a disturbing uncanny manner. At the same time, Curry Barker leaves the audience suspended in incredibly uncomfortable long shots of Nikki smiling at camera. The effect is to twist the screw in the audience’s proverbial mind’s eye.
This is a very scary, deeply unsettling, nightmarish movie and I have been fascinated by all the discussion regarding the subtle, but very potent ‘obsession’ Bear seems to have for Nikki. We might rightly interpret Bear as a metaphor for the rise of obsessive young lonely “incel” men in our culture. Bear doesn’t know how to actually woo and win Nikki’s heart, he simply wants for her to love him by taking the easy, non-risky route. Deep down, he knows that what the One Wish Willow has awoken in Nikki is not the real Nikki, yet he allows the illusion to continue. There is still a part of him that is drawn to the new Nikki’s frightening obsession with him, even if their “relationship” isn’t real, but rather based on her stolen autonomy. In fact, the opening scene of the film shows Bear practicing his own obsessive confession for Nikki across the table from a diner waitress, highlighting the fact that he is practicing for a performance so that she will want him. His intentions are dishonest from the start. Therefore, to what extent should we consider Bear the real predatory maniac in the movie? In what ways do his insecurities and cowardice actually breed the dangerous all-controlling infatuation of Nikki?
Here we are reminded that obsession is unnatural. Bear does not want love, but rather to create a fictional version of another person, to cage her and reduce her to a superficial caricature. The real Nikki is made a prisoner to Bear’s whims. Indeed, in the film Bear is given several chances to seriously dispense with this horrid false-relationship with Nikki, but he repeatedly refuses, at one point he simply asks her to “Be Nikki,” and at another, he asks the voice of the real Nikki whispering to him: “What’s so wrong with being with me?” By this point, Bear has become subsumed in his own resentment and fantasy, he overlooks the terror he has unleashed.
Throughout the film, there is also a quiet examination of love versus romance. For example, when Bear takes Nikki home after trivia night, Nikki tells Bear she is working on a new love story, but he confuses her love story with a mere “romance” (there is similar love vs. romance wordplay mentioned by Ian earlier in the film). Nikki wants to experience love, in all its ups and downs, so she can write about it, but Bear simply wants a fictive “happily ever after” fantasy romance. He doesn’t have the confidence to accept a complicated, autonomous woman, but rather he simply wants an easy person to fill the void in his life. Obsession is a cautionary tale for clumsy young men like Bear, that they should be wary of their all-controlling desires, yet it also carries a warning message for confident young women who may have an awkward “nice guy” friend hanging around because that young man just might be harboring a secret obsession.
Obsession is an incredible achievement: a low-budget horror film that has managed to capture the popular imagination. It is an inspiring reminder that good writing, directing, acting, cinematography, and composing can still triumph over endless big-budget superhero films filled with questionable writing and dizzying CGI. Obsession uses chilling practical effects, classic cinematic trickery of shadows and sounds in the fore and backgrounds, and even reverse photography in several key scenes. And no review would be complete without acknowledging Inde Navarrette’s truly terrifying performance. She gives a harrowing schizophrenic portrayal of two characters battling over control of the same mind. In conclusion, I would place director Curry Barker comfortably among the rising milieux of brilliant new horror directors like Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jordan Peele, and others who are pushing the boundaries and reminding us that true cinema is still possible in the cynical age of AI slop.
Credits:
- Director: Curry Barker
- Written by: Curry Barker
- Produced by: James Harris, Haley Nicole Johnson, Christian Mercuri, Roman Viaris
- Starring:
- Michael Johnston….. Baron “Bear” Bailey
- Inde Navarrette…..Nikki Freeman
- Cooper Tomlinson…..Ian, Bear’s friend
- Megan Lawless…..Sarah, Bear’s other friend who has a crush on him
- Andy Richter…..Carter, the music story boss
- Cinematography by: Taylor Clemons
- Edited by: Curry Barker
- Music by: Rock Burwell
- Production Companies: Blumhouse Productions, Capstone Studios, Tea Shop Productions
- Distributed by: Focus Features (United States) and Universal Pictures (international)
Other Notes:
- The bar where the four friends attend is named “Barker’s Club” a nod to the film’s creator, Curry Barker.
- The crystal shop was shot at “The Green Man” in Burbank, CA and the restaurant scene was shot at “Little Toni’s” pizza restaurant in North Hollywood, CA.
- The “One Wish Willow” customer service representative is voiced by director Curry Barker.