LOS ANGELES — There is a particular thrill, increasingly rare, in watching a filmmaker arrive fully formed. Obsession, the debut theatrical feature written, directed and edited by 26-year-old Curry Barker, delivers it in the first ten minutes and never lets go.
On paper the premise courts camp. Bear, a shy clerk played by Michael Johnston, acquires a supernatural novelty toy called One Wish Willow and wishes that his coworker Nikki would love him. The wish is granted, monstrously. In lesser hands it is a sketch. Barker, who came up making exactly those on YouTube before the micro-budget sensation Milk & Serial, instead plays it dead straight, and the discipline is the whole point.
Working with cinematographer Taylor Clemons, he frames the film center-weighted, with a faint excess of headroom that leaves every composition subtly, productively wrong. The horror grows out of behavior rather than jolts. The comedy, when it comes, shares the same setup-and-payoff architecture as the scares — a fusion critics have likened to Barbarian, and one Barker handles with unusual confidence for a first feature.
He reportedly protected that vision against the usual pressures, declining a seven-figure offer that would have softened the film's lead into something more conventionally heroic. Whether or not the exact figure holds, the finished film bears out the instinct: Obsession is unwilling to flatter anyone.
It would be a curiosity if it weren't also so well made — and so well received, with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating, a 77 on Metacritic, and an A-minus CinemaScore following its Midnight Madness premiere at Toronto, where Focus Features acquired it, reportedly at a record price for a genre title.
Anchoring all of it is Inde Navarrette, whose performance as Nikki — reportedly built on practical makeup rather than digital trickery — is the kind of breakout the genre lives for. Together, director and star have made the most quietly radical horror film of the year: proof that vision, not budget, is still the rarest resource in the room.
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