For me Obsession appears to know what it is trying to say but chooses to do something different instead. It takes a rather clever play on the careful-what-you-wish-for/monkey paw trope, an idea that in itself could be horrifyingly creepy and instead turns it into an excuse to lean into standard horror movie creepiness instead. The idea here, that a man chooses for a woman who she should be in love with against her will, would have been enough on its own to make a truly disturbing film. Instead Obsession is obsessed with just having her act creepy, violently, and uses jump scares to scare us. But the worst part is that the film hints at how scary it's actual premise is at moments before falling back into being just another horror movie like all the rest.
The film starts out great. It sets up its story perfectly; a "nice-guy" is in love with a beautiful and truly lovely young woman who has apparently "friendzoned" him but can't bring himself to let her know how he feels. Instead he snaps a toy wish granter (which to be fair he thinks is just a joke and won't have any real effect) wishing that she would love him more than anyone in the world. From there the story gets going and for me gets off track.
Imagine the film where she acted like a real person madly in love, perhaps unhealthily obsessed, perhaps acting out against those she sees as threatening to their relationship. He would have to wrestle with her possessiveness and with the reality that he knows this is not what she chose and that her love for him wasn't a choice she made. There is so much potential there. But this film mostly ignores that only taking short glimpses into that world.
Instead it immediately has her acting "weird" like she's possessed by some evil spirit more like a traditional horror movie. She does a lot of things that no one would do in any realistic context. The film even has moments where it leans into the possession idea. But mostly it leaps from unnatural behaviour to violent act like it's an Exorcist movie. There is no reason she would feed him a cat nor walk around like a crab hiding in the dark. The film just felt off a lot of the time. What I wanted was for him to wrestle with the fact that he has essentially assaulted her and the worsening of this as he continues on but the film barely scratches this surface instead leaning into being creepy in a traditional horror movie sort of way. It's like the film has a very limited understanding of relationships and consent, the very things that this morality tale really need to work.
As the film ends it finally taps into some of the energy I wanted from this and leaves its very bleak ending in a place that made sense to me. But by then I was already over this version of this story. Perhaps someone else will do a better job of this one day but this isn't that film.
Obsession
Starring: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Andy Richter
Writer/Director: Curry Barker
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