May was the month of horror, shown through Kane Parsons’ surrealist “Backrooms,” the masterfully exercised genre conventions in Damian McCarthy’s haunted house story, “Hokum” and whatever “Passenger” was trying to be. Curry Barker’s “Obsession,” the current poster child of the genre, felt like a heavy-handed swing and miss from an underdeveloped and uninteresting filmmaker.
“Obsession,” starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarette, follows Bear — a music store employee — as he tries to manage his way around a wish that comes into fruition in darker ways than he imagined. The film’s painfully simple premise is derivative of the common “careful what you wish for” trope in horror films, yet adds absolutely nothing to the trope’s canon within the genre. The first two acts are largely lifeless with a few comedic exceptions that remind the audience of Barker’s real experience — comedy. The film’s utter lack of subtlety is one of the more obvious and gangrenous holes, leaving its thematic bearing in a bumbling and ungraceful stumble towards the final act.
The predictable plot was fully revealed far too early and the remainder of the film did not have a moment of individuality. If one were to doze in and out of sleep every fifteen minutes while watching, they would hardly miss any nuance in the film. A bad video essay could not spoon-feed this movie’s themes out any more than it does on its own. The lightness of the plot would lend itself nicely into a more character-driven tone if the film’s script gave any of the characters an opportunity to be something more than stagnant, modern-horror caricatures. Navarette’s standout performance resists these external factors as hard as it can, helping this film barely keep its head up over the rising tides of misdirection and poor execution from Barker.
The plot’s only redeeming factor is the way the largely lackluster third act ties up its bows in the only way it possibly could, which is essentially akin to being impressed by ChatGPT adding a conclusion paragraph to a “The Catcher in the Rye” report.
There are multiple nonsensical character decisions and dialogue choices, which are evidently the only ways Barker knew how to move the story forward. As for the directing, the film attempted to create tension through cheap, modern horror “scares,” but they fell flat almost every time. Horror audiences should not be subjected to creepy spider-walking and girls standing in shadowy corners smiling for any longer. “Obsession” shows Barker in an awkward, prepubescent stage as a filmmaker and writer, with tucked in notes of charisma that still need developing.
