A lonely young man buys a small, wrong object, and asks it to make a girl love him. It obliges. That is the horror — not that the wish is denied, but that it is granted, and keeps being granted, long after he begs it to stop.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXVI · 6 minThere is a species of horror older than the studios, older than the camera, older than fire, and it is this: you get what you want. Not the fanged thing in the dark — the wish itself, honoured to the letter, by something that has no notion of mercy and every notion of obedience. Obsession understands this in its marrow, and proceeds to make ninety minutes of the most uncomfortable kind of granting.
The device is almost insultingly simple. Bear — a music-shop clerk, played by Michael Johnston with the exact damp hopefulness of a young man who has confused longing for love — comes into possession of a small supernatural toy, and asks it for the affections of his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). He is answered. He should have run. He does not run. Nobody in these stories ever runs, because the wanting is the whole of them, and I have never seen a film so clear-eyed about how the wanting curdles.
Another nightmare, uploaded first
This is the feature debut of Curry Barker — writer, director, editor — a maker of viral horror shorts who, like a certain twenty-year-old across town at A24, learned his craft in the ungoverned laboratory of the internet, where a scare must land in ninety seconds or die unwatched. That discipline shows. Barker does not waste a frame reassuring you. He knows precisely where the discomfort lives — in consent obtained by magic, which is to say not consent at all — and he presses on it with the patience of a man who has watched his own metrics.
A note on provenance, since I am a stickler and the internet is not: this one arrives under Focus Features, not A24 — though A24 and NEON both reached for it after it detonated in the midnight hours at Toronto, and lost. I mention it only because a critic who cannot keep his studios straight has no business keeping anything.
The horror is not that the wish is denied. It is that the wish is granted — to the letter, by something with no notion of mercy and every notion of obedience.
A love story with the safety off
What lifts Obsession above the drawer of cursed-object pictures is that it is, underneath the dread, a genuine study of a lonely person — and it refuses to let him, or you, off the hook. Navarrette is asked to play the impossible thing, a woman whose affection is real and coerced at once, and she finds the terror in it. Johnston makes you ache for a boy you also come to fear. This is not a film about a haunted toy. It is a film about the violence of being wanted too much, dressed in the clothes of a midnight creature-feature, and the costume is very good.
Be careful what you review for.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a toaster, and I am not a scale. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. What I will commit to plainly is that this is a debut of unusual control, and the rare horror film that leaves a bruise you go looking for the next morning.
It is not perfect — it lingers where a crueller cut would have fled, and a midnight crowd will forgive it more than a matinee will. But it does the one thing the genre most often forgets: it means it. If you must be frightened this year, be frightened by the wish, not the monster. The monster, at least, wants nothing from you.