This year’s Sundance saw the real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play with the grotesque reality of being literally stuck to one another in the body horror Together, a wincingly effective lark that turned codependency into a curse. It didn’t really find its audience upon too-wide release this summer, a campaign that couldn’t succinctly explain the plot or convey a tone that went from horror to comedy and back again.
At Toronto, YouTuber turned film-maker Curry Barker’s similarly themed Obsession should be an easier sell when it gets swiftly bought and packaged (it’s entering the festival as a sure-to-be-fought-over sales title). It’s a cleaner, more concise pitch – love spell gone wrong – and its reaction-securing moments of horrible violence even more alarming, a Midnight Madness winner that will probably live on past the witching hour.
It’s the perfect next chapter for Barker, who found fame last year when his $800-budgeted online prankster horror Milk & Serial made headlines for being far better than it had any right to be (and better than the majority of horror films with far higher production costs). Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that he knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.
It’s the story of a man making a wish he lives to regret, a familiar horror trope given a more cannily thought through treatment than we’re used to seeing (Wishmaster this is not). The man is Bear (Michael Johnston), a music store employee with an obvious crush on his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). They’re living in the “finishes each other’s sentences” sitcom stage before a boy-girl duo ends up having sex but he can’t seem to make any progress and despite her longtime affection for him, it doesn’t seem like she’s all that interested in redefining what they have. When she drops her crystal necklace down the drain, he capitalises on the chance to prove his romantic side, picking up a replacement at a local witchy store. But while browsing, he spots a novelty gift that promises to grant you one wish …
The initial stages, as Nikki suddenly finds him utterly irresistible, give Bear everything he ever wanted. An insatiable sexual appetite, an endless desire to spend time with him, a forever plus one, a finger snap transformation to exactly what he’d been dreaming about. But the realities of total undying love soon start to grate. Close becomes clingy and rationality completely disappears along with her personality, a creature tirelessly living for just one purpose. There are also unprovoked freak-outs, as if she’s briefly possessed by something or someone else, the horrific curdling of the perfect girlfriend.
It’s a more serious film than one might expect given the silliness of the set-up but Barker still avoids losing himself in the tiresome dirge of po-faced trauma horror. It’s tangentially similar to last year’s The Substance – dream-come-true product turns into nightmare – but the tone is somewhere closer to the gory grimness of the Smile movies, with Barker also overdosing on eerily overexaggerated sound design. He takes the hokey premise and digs in to deal with the day-to-day realities of how torturous it would really become. What would it feel like to have your No 1 crush finally want you back? Would that person still be the same one that you fell for? And what if you didn’t like the person you’ve made them become? And what does any of this make you? Barker treats unconditional, and creepily non-consensual, love like a demonic curse, making Nikki sick with her all-consuming need to be closer and closer to Bear. It torments her, changes how she acts and who she is and Navarrette is astonishingly, chillingly good at the intricacies of such a transformation, her voice and body warping into something inhuman and ultimately unrecognisable (her from-the-pits-of-hell screams are hard to shake). There’s a seat-clenching unpredictability to whatever Nikki is going to do next that keeps us on an uncomfortable edge, even if we find that the clues were there all along …
Like the Philippou brothers, who also came from YouTube to make the horror hit Talk to Me, Barker has a passion for the visceral repulsion of head-smashing and in one particularly nasty scene, knows how to make the aftermath even harder to watch, and listen to, than the event itself. His shocks are brutally efficient but as a director of mostly shorts, he’s still yet to master pace. There’s something a little indulgent about the film’s 108-minute length, which in the last act adds bagginess to what could have been a tightier, punchier horror. Barker is no by means alone with this issue in the genre, though, and he’s got time to figure that out with super-producer Jason Blum signing Barker up this week. It’s the kind of dream ascent that any film-maker would wish for.
