Though it may make some older generations want to jump out of their skin, the future of horror is on YouTube. With his leap from the social platform to the big screen, the internet sketch comic Curry Barker has joined Talk to Me's Michael and Danny Philippou and 20-year-old Kane Parsons, whose highly anticipated debut Backrooms is due in cinemas later this month, to form a new frontier for the genre – one that's as brutal as it is savvy.
Gone is any feeling of Gothic tenderness, of the misunderstood going bump in the night. Here, the generation exposed to what feels like only the very worst of the world has responded in kind, with horror in which punishment is swift, nasty, and arguably well deserved.
Barker made his debut with the 2024 found-footage, prank-themed horror Milk & Serial, shot for $800 and uploaded directly to YouTube, while Obsession riffs on episodes of The Twilight Zone and WW Jacobs' classic short story The Monkey's Paw. It's built as a shock to the system for the self-declared “nice guys” of the world.
Bear (Michael Johnston), a music-store employee with dark, soulful, vinyl-record eyes, has been quietly bearing a crush on his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). He's too timid to tell her, even when she asks him directly (and kudos to Johnston for making his denials physically painful to the ears).
He's not too timid, however, to pop into his local new age shop and pick up a “One-Wish Willow”, a novelty toy that does, as it turns out, grant a single wish to whoever snaps it in two, with the usual nefarious caveats if you haven't worded said wish carefully. Bear, the fool, chooses “I want Nikki to love me more than anyone else in the world.”
Barker's vision is a little slow to build. Nikki begs to stay the night, and the next, and the next, but peppers her adoration with typical, incongruous “creepy” behaviour. She stands in corners at night and grins. It's only when Bear attempts to live with this cursed arrangement – it's his dream, after all – that the film finally lets loose, starting with an ingeniously staged party scene and ending in unrestrained, bloody chaos.
Obsession is delicately handled work, unafraid to find pockets of humour. Customer service is hilariously inept, even when it's a matter of life or death. But Barker, both as its writer and its director, is also interested in how the dynamic between Bear and Nikki starts to reflect real-life toxicity, and never plays too recklessly where it really matters.
Navarette proves to be extraordinarily agile in this department, too, frighteningly unpredictable in how she might next stretch her features, from grin to grimace, artifice to truth. She makes the most of what can be surprisingly limited screen time – the film, to underline its points of dehumanisation and inscrutability, often sticks her head in shadow or entirely out of frame.
But Obsession ultimately triumphs in how willing it is to make two monsters out of its cautionary tale. Bear, the lover boy who's yearned a little too close to the sun, is repeatedly reminded of the lack of consent in his great wish – at times in literal, startling fashion – and yet his reactions betray just how willing he is to violate that consent when convinced there will be no repercussions. It's certainly the right topic, then, to tackle in an era of cosmic punishment. Obsession will force this man to take accountability, one way or another.
Dir: Curry Barker. Starring: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter. Cert 18, 109 minutes.
'Obsession' is in cinemas from 15 May.
