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That socially anxious male is Bear (Michael Johnson) and his crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is not so much unrequited as unexpressed by him, evoked in an opening fake out where he practices spilling his guts. When given the chance, though, and even when she asks him point-blank if he likes her, he cannot summon the courage to confess. So, when Bear goes to purchase a replacement necklace for one Nikki has lost, he instead buys a One Wish Willow novelty stick. It is a selfless action manifesting instead as a selfish one, in other words, and with an air of desperation in his voice, he wishes that she would love him more than anyone else in the world. It’s “Big” metamorphosing into “Fatal Attraction” as Nikki becomes clingy, codependent, and crazy in a way that haunts the nightmares of men’s rights activists everywhere. And even as Bear seeks a way to reverse the process, he simultaneously remains reluctant to do so, wavering between each course of action. Indeed, if the ending evokes nothing less than Romeo and Juliet, Bear’s tragic flaw is not impetuousness but cowardice, the nice guy archetype rewired as the worst guy ever.
Horror movies often walk a fine line between macabre and humor, where what you are seeing becomes so horrifying that involuntarily, you almost can’t help but laugh. And maybe owing to his background, Barker demonstrates a penchant for walking that line throughout, like a sequence in which a steering wheel is remade into a battering ram, a gruesome visual reinterpretation of The Laughing Song. The casualty in that sequence is Sarah (Megan Lawless), who harbors her own unrequited crush on Bear, a character that the movie never really sees because Bear never really sees her either. No, Barker would yoke us to Bear’s point-of-view, to suffer along with him as he suffers his own lack of self-awareness and failure to act. The thing is, Barker intermittently violates this idea, such as in a comically frightening shot held of Nikki at home after Bear has departed, or in the camera moving independently of Bear when he and Nikki go out to dinner. It reminded me a little of “J*ker,” honestly, an ostensibly provocative movie that undermined its own provocations with a muddled point-of-view that it did not seem to understand as muddled.
Nikki is intended to be seen through Bear’s point-of-view too. That’s why she remains something close to a cipher, a projection of his own desires as much a real person, and when she becomes supernaturally possessed on account of his wish, she in turn becomes a terrifying exaggeration of those desires. “Obsession” furthers that idea by rendering Nikki as being aware of her fate, lived in episodes where she snaps back and is present before essentially being reclaimed by the evil spirit inside her, creating a host of conflicting emotions and registers that Navarrette skillfully toggles between and melds together to create a breathless portrait of a person literally possessed. The real Nikki is there, in other words, not just the amplified projection, and asking Bear for help. Yet this imaginative touch effectively opens its own Pandora’s Box of moral complications. If Nikki is sentient, scenes of her and Bear sleeping together become nothing less than sexual assault, which “Obsession” does not gloss over so much as not even recognize in the first place, a revealing omission. What’s more, the headlong rush of a conclusion that brings Bear face to face with the outer limits of his own self-absorption turns the concluding shot into a punchline that simultaneously just writes Nikki off. It’s clear that she’s a victim, but of whom? Bear? Barker? Or both?
