Obsession
Horror for the YouTuber era
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Curry Barker, a 26 year-old YouTuber-turned-filmmaker, was most known for his online sketch comedy duo “that’s a bad idea,” before his found footage project Milk & Serial launched him into further virality, culminating with his signing at UTA, a foot into the doors of legitimate media. His next horror enterprise went beyond the ambitions of a YouTuber with its million dollar budget (not a highly visible million, mind you) and was picked up by Focus Features after screening at TIFF’s Midnight Madness. A few weeks before the wide release of Obsession, it was reported that Barker would direct A24’s forthcoming reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Put those sunglasses on, you’re in Hollywood now.
Obsession is about a depressive incel-type named “Bear” (this should be enough to walk out) who wishes upon a doohickey purchased at a crystal store that his crush Nikki, a coworker at the local music store who had all but “friend-zoned” him, would fall madly in love with him. She does, becoming obsessed and possessed as violent chaos ensues. The remaining employees of this Guitar Center stand-in fill out the cast, including a young woman who he “friend-zoned,” played by Megan Lawless, and her father, the store’s manager, Andy Richter. The disheveled former late night sidekick must have seen his old boss in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and followed suit. The group is led by the filmmaker’s comedy partner Cooper Tomlinson, Bear’s close friend and confidant. The purported best buds banter between Tomlinson and bland leading man Michael Johnston reads as incredibly phony, the kind of thing you’d see in any straight-to-video teen film in the years after Superbad came out. All flailing, no heart, and especially no rhythm. Considering that I was a bit ungenerous to Tomlinson’s performance in this film and failed to see his potential comedic repartee with a willing partner, I decided to check out a little bit of “that’s a bad idea” content. I also used this opportunity to take a closer look at the film’s auteur, Curry Barker.
Each video consists of the duo, sometimes with friends as extras, acting out exactly one joke that can be described in a meme-like title. In six random clicks, I found two separate videos that essentially act out the same observational bit, the potential humor that lies in the recipient of a gift telling its literal-minded giver: You shouldn’t have. Both videos have 180,000 views. The quality of cinematography and editing increased over time, per usual with an independent channel, before cresting with a house style of shallow-focus shot-reverse setups that anticipate a few of the recurring phrases in Barker’s cinematic language in Obsession. It is perhaps important to note that none of these videos are funny at all. YouTube makes a good amount of money on them, though.
Back to Obsession. It’s a film whose tonal, thematic, and formal approaches are that of someone who has watched plenty of video essays but hasn’t lived much life. There are some carefully composed images, and scenes with visual strategies that were clearly storyboarded, but they don’t really mean anything, especially when these frames are so devastatingly underlit, underexposed, and textureless. Among the two or three well-planned camera movements, one of them simply existed to emphasize the director’s vanity credit. Clearly, this is more of a branding exercise than a piece of art.
I’m well aware that the reality of horror movies is not that of our own, but there were some confoundingly frustrating moments within the world of Obsession. For example, it opens on a dead cat and a spilled bottle of prescription Oxycodone labeled “DO NOT EAT.” Is this supposed to be a joke? A reference to the brown bag labeled “DEAD DOVE - DO NOT EAT” in the pilot of Arrested Development? That generous connection would still feel out of place, but when the audience realizes how the Oxy seed was planted for third act usage, it becomes obvious how stupid the director thinks they are.
Once the horror really kicks in (and it takes quite a while), Inde Navarrette’s Nikki takes over the show, whether or not the viewer likes it. I did not. Her violent sprees of mugging are meme-ready, more reminiscent of viral trailers for recent films like Smile or M3GAN than any actual horror classics. The ideas within the horror itself are not too pretty nor complicated once you dig an ounce deeper than “an incel gets what he deserves.” What are we to make of the interiority of Nikki? There is nothing in the real her, only the possessed, robotic version whose antics and thematic exploitation reminded me far too much of last year’s miserable Companion with Sophie Thatcher. I’m not even going to wade into the unsavory waters of the extent to which sexual consent exists in this world, but there sure is sex. Yes, some of the kills are in fact nasty, but basically all of the action here is telegraphed moments or even full minutes ahead of time, including the film’s most disgusting kill, one involving a loose brick. The only moment of real spontaneity is the use of a split in Navarrette’s performance, with the “real” Nikki attempting to either come out or simply be put out of her misery. But how are we to buy this, that this version of Nikki even exists, when all we know about her is that she “only liked ‘Bear’ as a friend?” This dynamic, in tandem with the perfunctory use of the couple’s coworkers, paints a very immature portrait of human relations and the complexities of friendship and youth, beyond the blame of immature characters but instead at the hands of its writer.
Obsession is a film made for and by people who seem to spend more time watching YouTube than movies; FUBU in RedLetters. If you’re reading this, you are better than Obsession. To bring back last year’s Companion, the sister film of Obsession, the concept of a horror film about the male expectations of women is very en vogue at the moment, but both of these films have exactly one (poorly executed) idea, and are more fit to be YouTube videos than features distributed by Focus or WB. Horror films have always been about the culture that produced them, beneath layers of artifice and bad taste. Those aforementioned layers are crucial, however, and perhaps Curry Barker should stick to short-form content, where his failure to produce anything gesturing toward beauty, anything beyond a single joke or half-idea, does not necessarily impede upon the quality of his work. Unfortunately he won’t heed my call, as he is now following in the footsteps of David Blue Garcia and John Luessenhop among others, directing yet another film that cheaply exploits the legend Tobe Hooper crafted fifty years ago.
Good stuff as always
I’m going to watch this tomorrow. I’ll report back.