The new horror film "Whiplash" has become a breakout hit. Twenty-six-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker wrote and directed the film for just $750,000—and in less than two weeks, it's earned over $68 million at the box office. Word of mouth is spreading: it's shattered records, posting an "unprecedented" increase in box office receipts in its second week compared to its first. "I don't know if I've ever seen such a jump in the second week," Paul Dergarabedian, head of market trends at Comscore, told Variety. "It's a testament to the film's warm reception.".
Why are people so fascinated by the film "Obsession"? Well, it's incredibly captivating and genuinely unsettling. It's also inventive: largely eschewing sudden jump scares, it instead relies on dark lighting, clever staging, minimalist visuals, and an air of unpredictability to create tension and surprise. And it features excellent performances, including a brilliant performance from the masterfully transformative Inda Navarrete, who will undoubtedly land even more high-profile roles in the future.
Just as the film avoids visual cliches, it also avoids the hackneyed horror movie tropes in its story.
But, in my view, the film's genius (and much of the underlying social media commentary) lies in its ability to take a deceptively simple premise—"be careful what you wish for"—and extract from it a wealth of meaning, laced with subtle social commentary. The film is about dysfunctional relationships, and the monster in this film isn't so much a specific character or entity, but rather the way intense desire can breed suffering and become a pretext for exploitation.
Bear, played by Michael Johnston, is hopelessly in love with his girlfriend Nikki, played by Navarrete. Unable to muster the courage to ask her out, he breaks a toy called the "Willow of One Wishing" that he buys from an occult shop. Immediately after he breaks the toy, her behavior changes dramatically: Nikki stops treating him like a normal friend and begins obsessively wanting to be with him as much as possible. She seems inexplicably possessed . What follows is an unusual interpretation of the parable about the dangers of wish fulfillment.
Nikki Bear's infatuation with him is a strange mix of the manic, the desperate, and the creepy. She seems to be making up stories to make her desire to be with him seem more believable, but something is clearly off in the way she can't bear to be separated from him even for a moment, frantically searching for ways to win him over, and keeping a close eye on him. Since this is a horror film, the methods she uses to do so are alternately creepy and disgusting, including watching him in his dreams and using his recently deceased pet for some horrific home projects.
Michael Johnston is pictured in a scene from the film "Obsession." Universal Pictures.
But Nikki's apparent curse doesn't render her entirely incomprehensible to audiences. Much of the film's power and humor—and it certainly elicited laughs in theaters—comes from something universally recognizable about Nikki: almost everyone has been a little crazy with love at one point or another. Nikki's desire to change herself to please Bear, her jealousy, her mortifying self-deprecation, her attempts to control the situation, her dishonesty—these are the hallmarks of (unhealthy) love. She's cursed, but her obsession feels vaguely familiar, even human.
However, as the story unfolds, another thread of obsession emerges. Even when Bear runs out of excuses for Nikki's increasingly erratic behavior, he continually refuses to acknowledge how bad things are or openly acknowledge what he accidentally did to her. The underlying reason for this is that he himself is completely consumed by the desperate hope that her new feelings for him might, on some level, be genuine. He deliberately denies the obvious conclusion that her feelings can't be genuine if they were caused by his accidental spell, and repeatedly tries to figure out how to make this disastrous dynamic work in the hopes of fulfilling his fantasy. Bear is so pathetically fixated on approval that he buries his hand in the sand, hiding what's happening.
At first glance, the most benign version of this relationship resembles toxic codependency, such as when Bear's friend chides him for not being able to go to a party alone without Nikki. But over time (SPOILER ALERT!), Bear is forced to acknowledge that Nikki is being haunted by a demonic entity, still in her body but no longer in control, and wants to be killed to free herself from its power. Bear refuses to do so. He's not simply deluded and hoping to profit from an accident, but exploiting someone else's vulnerability. Bear's immaturity and cowardice become an excuse for violence and violation of consent.
Ultimately, Bear feels cornered and forced to take action, trying to right his wrong, but things unfold in unexpected ways. That's the beauty of "Obsession"—the film avoids not only visual clichés but also the tired horror tropes of its story. And it explores all these ideas without resorting to didacticism. This hasn't stopped many people from giving the film simplistic reviews online, but all the better if it inspires more people to watch something so fresh and multifaceted.
The article "Obsession Uses a Deceptively Simple Premise to Explore the Dangers of Desire" first appeared on MS NOW. .
This article was originally published on ms.now.