Grotesque words on 'Obsession'

A film review is a grotesque thing.

A film review is a grotesque thing. It is a bloated, trodden, snivelling coalescence of words, detailing every plot point and every brilliant line that the author wants their audience to know that they saw, and heard. The average review amounts to no more than the author saying: I saw the movie, and I want to tell you I saw the movie, and yes, we saw the same things. A film review is an insecure grasp for recognition, community, compatriots, and confirmation.

This is a review of Curry Barker’s Obsession. There will be spoilers. I am not going to go over Inde Navarette’s breakout performance, the Top 5 Lines in The Movie That We All Watched, or attempt to situate the film in a wider cinematic context of feminist horror. All of these points are self-referential; they don’t step outside of the world of the movie itself, and are therefore shudderingly uninteresting. I think that a review, unoriginal as it must be, ought at least to be interesting.

Obsession is, at its core, a film about bodily conquest. It is a film about rape, about disregard, about male pretensions of domination. The film is unique in that the antagonist, the immediate architect of all that goes bad in this story, is by no means the villain. Nikki is only perceived as such by her male peers, as overwhelming and oppressive and hysterical.

‘Hysterical’ as an adjective derives from the same root word as hysterectomy: a Greek root hystera, meaning uterus. Historical medicinal practices blamed the ‘wandering womb’ for a woman’s emotions, and hysteria was only recently removed from clinical diagnostic terms. It is a misogynist descriptor, rooted in perceptions of women as overly emotional, flailing, and irrational in comparison to men. As weaker.

Ironic, then, that the ignition of this story is the emotional weakness and cowardice of the main man, Bear. Unable to confess his feelings of romantic interest to Nikki, despite being offered the perfect opportunity (1), he resorts to a mythological wish-fulfilling voodoo to make her his. Whether or not Nikki liked Bear back is irrelevant; the point is, he doesn’t ask, and he uses his one wish, his one chance for anything that the whole world has to offer, to assume ownership of her emotions and her body.

Perhaps Bear never really believed that the one-wish willow was legit, but this cavalier attitude doesn’t mollify his actions. Whether his wish was one of total conviction, or a ‘what the hell, worth a shot’, the fact remains that Bear uses his free ticket to literally anything on forcing this girl to not just like him, but be obsessed with him. Rather than own his feelings, and admit them to her, or even wish for something ameliorative to his own character, the kind of thing that might attract her to him naturally, Bear takes the easy way out. He purchases Nikki, only to freak out when she fulfills the total extent of what it is that he wished for.

This disregard, the way you might with a shiny new toy that you buy all excitedly, only to tire of and refund, is because Bear had no idea what ‘love’ or ‘obsession’ means, outside of complete subordination. He’s not looking for a life partner, a wife, a homemaker; all he knows is that he likes this girl, he’s attracted to her, he wants to sleep with her, and rather than bring any of that about organically, you know, in the way where it might really mean something, he gets handed a ticket to everything he’s fantasised about for the last few years and his eyes light up with dollar signs. What Nikki wants is irrelevant. In fact, we find out that the real Nikki (not this demon that he’s playing around with, that looks like her and sounds like her and is utterly besotted with him) is screaming in what one imagines to be the agony of some fiery underworld, and this does nothing to change Bear’s behaviour.

Because he doesn’t really care about Nikki, about loving her and seeing her happy; he wants the body that looks like Nikki’s body to kiss him, to lie with him at night, to be seen holding his hand in public. He wants what everyone identifies as ‘Nikki’ to be ‘his’, in everyone else’s minds. The soul is optional. He wants ownership of her body and speech, because that’s the cheapest, quickest, most socially-recognised way of her being his. And he has sex with this woman, and they live together, and they go on dates. These things happen unconsentingly, without exception, because they are entirely of Bear’s design, and Nikki — the real Nikki, trapped, withering — was never asked.

Of course the way that Nikki acts is unacceptable. Of course duct taping a door shut, bludgeoning a friend’s face with a steering wheel, and writing incestuous retellings of fairy tales is all terrifyingly strange. But that’s only Nikki in signifier, in the way that you look at a person and say ‘that’s Bob’, because you see the body that looks like Bob’s and he talks to you the way Bob would, without knowing if that’s really Bob at all. Because it’s not Nikki, because the real Nikki, as we have noted, is burning in Satan’s grasp. Bear knows this and doesn’t care, because he is having sex with the body that looks like the girl he’s had a crush on for a while.

When Bear decides that he’s had enough playing around with this woman of his own manifestation, when the obsession that he plainly wished for becomes too much for him to handle, he seeks a way out. He’s left with two options: Either the wish needs to be counterbalanced by an opposing wish, or the wish maker must die, to cancel out the effects of the wish.

The first avenue is fruitless; Bear’s friend dismisses his (hysterical) pleading as nonsense, and instead opts for a billion dollars, which rain down in gorgeous, tragic confirmation.

So Bear opts for the second way out, and tries to kill himself, to ‘save the real Nikki’, ‘rescue her from that burning hell’. That would be one, very favourable way of reading Bear’s actions at the end of the movie. The more realistic interpretation, to my mind, is that Bear has realised that his life is in pieces, his friends destroyed, his home and job inaccessible and decrepit, and finally, that the ‘woman’ he has ‘loved’ and ‘dated’ for so long is not real, but is instead entirely of his own construction, and utterly meaningless. And so, with nowhere to turn, and having made quite the big mess of it all, and maybe feeling just a little guilty, Bear elects to kill himself, with the same overdosing that took his cat.

But Bear doesn’t die, and steps out from the bathroom, pills swallowed, to find Nikki holding a snapped one-wish willow, the same instrument of destruction that got us here, presumably wishing for him to be obsessed with her also. Redemption, karma, simulation. The playing field is evened.

And, while Bear takes his place next to Nikki in the hell of his own design, the two demons embrace each other in the burning wreckage of it all, diffident, inarticulate, happy and unreal.

(1) Nikki asks Bear, in their first car ride, ‘Do you like me? Cause, now would be the time to tell me.’ and looks visibly disappointed at his negative response. This is the tragic element of the movie that haunts all that is to come, the total avoidability of all the future mess and disruption.