Horror is becoming a home for comedy sketch writers to have seismic debuts! Jordan Peele went from cracking jokes as Key & Peele to stunning when he released Get Out, Zach Cregger, a former Whitest Kid U’ Know, blew everyone’s hair back with Barbarian, and now Curry Barker is finding similar success with his original horror concept Obsession. The low budgets and reliable audience certainly help get these projects out the door, but the success of these three features shattered expectations in more ways than just box office performance.

Obsession has a simple enough plot. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a young man, working at a music supply store, hanging out with his friends at pub trivia, and he desperately wants to ask out Nikki (Inde Navarette), a member of this friend group. He just can’t build up the courage to actually ask her out on a date. It’s a little high school for a grown man that pays bills, but we all mature at our own rate I suppose. That excuse works for him to a point in my opinion, but I also don’t want to get too far into spoiler country. While shopping for a gift for her he comes across a charming novelty item, a One-Wish-Willow. Simply state your wish, break the stick in half, and you desire will be granted. So he wishes that Nikki was madly in love with him, and boy howdy she is immediately in love with him.

The film manages a lot of clever scares as the tension of Nikki’s idolization of Bear ramps up and up. There’s awkward and unsettling moments between just the two of them, and then further insanity as they make their newfound and fast paced relationship public. Through it all the best movie magic on screen is the work done by Navarette, who not only puts on an award worthy performance of a love obsessed Nikki, but oscillates back and forth as the real Nikki occasionally comes to the surface. She scampers around in the door, holds her smile in unsettling ways, speaks to Bear in that way that makes anyone else watching feel deeply uneasy. It’s work that a movie can rest it’s entire premise on, and Obsession should and does.

But alongside that are a brilliant use of shadow and light in the camera work, some hilarious comedic moments that break the tension at appropriate moments, and the dread that’s unspooling as you realize there’s no way this thing can have a happy ending. Bear’s best firend is played by Cooper Tomlinson a longtime collaborator of Curry Barker and is used in ways that are not too dissimilar to their comedy sketches. He absolutely has the best joke delivered towards the end, a moment that releases tension as much as it heightens the tragedy that was unavoidable as soon as the story began.

There are logic issues to pick at if you have the time, and the lead character being deeply unlikeable is a bit of a hang up. I’d hardly say that Bear is a guy you can root for at any point. Even if he didn’t realize he was robbing a woman of her autonomy when he broke the willow stick, once he’s realized it’s worked he doesn’t exactly work overtime to bring her back to her rightful self. It’s more like watching a train wreck than anything, you simply can’t look away. But the structure of the film is as solid as any tenured director could hope for, and the fact that Director Barker managed it on his first at bat is truly remarkable.

4/5