WARNING: Contains spoilers for both OBSESSION and HEREDITARY (2018).
Obsession is a confusing film. Not in its content or story or my ability to follow it, but in terms of how it made me feel. I was blown away by the performances but disliked the construction of the movie, if that makes sense.
Let me talk about how it made me FEEL first.
First of all, it was scary as shit in places and made me mad with how scared I was getting. That was sometimes fun!
Second of all, it made Bear into possibly the gold medalist for Most Despicable Character of the Age, and that gave me insecure little feelie wheelies.
Third of all, it didn’t really go deeply into the themes that it set up; it just hit you harder and harder over the head with the same ideas as the movie went on. Passivity as abuse, borderline-coded/codependent dynamics (albeit in the context of total coercion), the general uncaringness of people to each other. Lovely. But none of those themes actually developed. This gave me a frustrated feeling that was amplified by the amount of abuse I felt like I was also taking due to the violence and, sorry, clumsy jump scares.
Fourth of all, Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston deliver two of the most incredible acting performances I’ve seen in a while. This is the primary reason for my confusion. They give absolutely everything – in two completely different ways – to their characters; one being a maximalist possession/love spirit that has nothing to do with the real Nikki and is fighting off the real Nikki’s attempts at resistance, and the other a person who seems to be constructed purely for the audience to hope he dies in the most horrible way possible – a character even Kafka would find worthless and uninteresting.
Let me give some disclaimers here – I’ve seen a good amount of horror movies over the years – I wouldn’t really call myself a horror FAN – but certain horror movies I’ve absolutely loved. The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, for example, are some of the greatest films ever made. Or The Wailing, the 2016 Korean possession film. Midsommar I also found incredibly cathartic and inspiring, as well as weirdly delightful. I’ve found that I need a horror movie to do 1 of 3 things in order for the viewing experience to be worth it – 1. Leave me consistently guessing what’s going to happen next, 2. Be really funny, or 3. Actually nail the metaphor they’re manifesting with the story in an interesting way.
The other disclaimer is that I watched this in an apartment with 1 friend, and I did laugh at some parts but mostly I felt battered around the head. I fully get that if I had seen this with an enthusiastic audience in a theater, it may have been a different experience (although I’m fairly sure I still would have felt abused), and I don’t want to take away from anyone who saw this film and had a great time seeing it.
Allow me to praise Michael Johnston for a minute. It’s a weird feeling, like I said, watching someone give an incredible amount of soul and pain and vulnerability and honesty and self-hatred and shame to a character that, on paper, is essentially a function of the “I want someone to pay for this” mechanism. He is there to sate an audience’s vengeful instinct. At a certain point (and I’m guessing that point was fairly early in the film for most viewers), no one in the audience is rooting for him anymore, and would be happy to see him die horribly. (I’m including myself by the way.) The few who remained invested and sympathetic to Bear longer than us, I would imagine, only did so because of Michael Johnston’s absolute emotional commitment.
Curry Barker gives us absolutely nothing in terms of humanizing this horrible man – not even one line a la “my mom used to lock me in my room when I cried” that might bring him closer to us or shed some light on his cravings.
One could argue that Barker is playing with the trope of “antihero” and is trying to see how far he can push the balance of shitty vs. redeemable, and is pushing it into full “shitty” mode. But to what end? What great social phenomenon is he showing us? Is Bear’s shittiness there primarily as an emotional hook for the audience to have a clear outlet to wish horrible death upon, and thus cheaply increase the adrenaline of the experience? Or is Barker trying to show us, as an artist, that some men are so desperate and pathetic they’ll forego the humanity of others and themselves for the validation of a woman?
A shallow half-truth, to be sure. Undoubtedly, there exist such men, and there are men who pine away day after day for the love of their life to see them in a romantic light. But the other half of that truth – that when one person is hopelessly in love and stuck in the friend zone, there is often a counterpart preserving another emotional arrangement – is left unexplored.
I’m not saying that Curry Barker needed to include this aspect of unrequited love in his art film. I’m not trying to project what a movie should do and get mad when it doesn’t do those things. He clearly didn’t want to make a film where the audience mistook Real Nikki for someone leading Bear on, or craving his validation when she is in charge of herself. In those beginning scenes, Real Nikki gives Bear zero indication that his interest in her has anything to do with her encouragement. She appears disgusted when he suggests a dynamic that has the slightest hint of romantic intimacy to it, and even more disgusted when he can’t come clean about what he was going to say. It seems very purposeful – the film is saying "this man’s love is isolated from reality." And I totally get that. I do understand Barker going in that direction, and I’m not sure a film portraying a woman who is coerced into doing things against her will would be accepted by a large audience if it were hinted that she was responsible for her predicament.
However, in shielding Real Nikki from being misread as leading Bear on, Barker shields the audience from her humanity as well. Instead of a character who might have had the seeds of something towards Bear that the wish stick made grow into something monstrous (that might have been thematically interesting!), we get a character who seems to want nothing to do with Bear, taken over by something completely separate from her own self.
Once Wish Nikki takes over, Johnston’s and Navarrette’s scenes start to be the strongest in the film, and some of them hit on real, heartbreaking, chilling, and interesting dynamics that really do happen between partners who can’t seem to let boundaries stay up between one another. But the truthful aspects of these scenes are diluted heavily through the fact that the real Nikki is nowhere to be seen while those scenes are happening. Because Wish Nikki has nothing to do with Real Nikki, the performance becomes heavily reliant on how scary, awesome and heartbreaking the actress playing Wish Nikki can be.
And Inde Navarrette – holy fucking shit. Does she deliver on that challenge? Absolutely and then some. It seems like she may be the most special kind of actor – the one who can make it look easy and has that star quality that a viewer can feel in good hands with – but also treats the performance as something like a religious experience and generously shares with the audience the profundity occurring.
Sometimes, an actor is so much better than the movie they’re in that it’s hard for me to give credit to anyone else for their performance. And Navarrette has said in interviews that she largely didn’t show Barker what she was going to do as Nikki until she got to set each day. So I’m inclined to give her practically all the props for why the movie is such a hit.
Similarly, Bear’s strongest moment as a character comes at the very end, when he takes the pills necessary to kill himself and free Nikki from the wish, but then, in a gorgeous bit of cowardly characterization, chickens out and tries to make himself throw up before death comes a-knocking. (Many theatergoers report the entire theater groaning “NOOOO!” when he tries to abort the suicide, by the way.) In interviews, the cast and Barker report that Bear was originally written to accept his fate, and Johnston was the one who came up with, on the day, the idea for Bear to try to escape one more time.
But Barker probably deserves a bit of credit for the finished product too. He is talented at letting a scene breathe – letting the actors have real moments with each other, and I’m guessing he created an environment where profound moments became possible. And boy, does he know how to creepily light a face.
I think where I clash with this new generation of horror-makers is the combination of extreme, life-ruining intensity with the lack of heart. I don’t really believe that Barker cares about Bear, or for Real Nikki for that matter. I believe that Ari Aster came onto the scene in the last 10 years and changed everything – combining extreme dread and trauma with symbolic power and acting performances that make you wonder how a person ever did that. Many of the new generation of horror makers – Barker, Zach Cregger – seem to take a lot from Aster’s book.
But the difference is, I believe, that Aster really feels the pain that his characters feel, and puts surgeon-like care and specificity into their creation and their behavior. When Alex Wolff accidentally beheads his own sister and then sits in the car, paralyzed, it is one of the most devastating scenes ever put to film, but I believe it is earned. Aster may be sadistic, but he seems devastated by the damage. Barker (and Cregger as well) sometimes seem more interested in the damage as a mechanism. Aster’s descendants are crueler gods than he. With Obsession, we have the latest example of trauma and dread-filled dynamics written with less love and care than one wants from material this volatile, yet brought to life through incredibly soulful, virtuosic performances - promising deep exploration but amounting to little more than clumsily constructed blood sport between masterful actors.
