Obsession

This is by far my favorite film of the year so far. The whole monkey’s paw story is such a foundational concept in horror that’s been done in so many other works that you wouldn’t expect a film which kind of just pushes that idea to its logical extremes to be so effective, and yet it absolutely is.  The way this film incorporates the uncanny into its cinematic language is very reminiscent of the film Pulse by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The way Nikki moves around and acts in certain scenes is so unsettling and disturbing, Inde Navarrette did an incredible job. I also saw a behind the scenes video that showed the uncanny makeup used on Navarrette during some of the more dimly lit sequences in the film and that little detail just struck me as brilliant. It’s such a subtle trick that you don’t even realize it’s there and yet it manages to be so incredibly effective. In fact it’s probably made all the more effective specifically because you don’t realize it’s there because it almost makes you feel like you’re imagining things. The shot is so dark and the makeup so subtle that you can’t quite tell if it actually looks weird or if it’s just in your head, but you feel that something is off on that primal level making it all the more disturbing. Granted, the projector in the theater I was seeing this in was a bit dim, so it could’ve also just been that, but either way, for a couple moments in this film, just the sheer level of uncanniness really did activate a bit of my fight or flight response. It really got to me.  I think the most effective part of the film’s horror is its psychological dimension. Curry Barker is clearly interested in the mind of his characters. In a more traditional film which follows this same basic formula, I feel that the Nikki character, after having this wish imposed upon her by the main character Bear, would be somewhat psychologically sidelined and relegated to the more simplistic role of the psycho yandere antagonist (I know that the term “yandere” is generally only reserved for anime but I couldn’t think of a better term for this kind of character archetype), whereas most of the psychological focus would be squarely on the main character and how he deals with this horrifying conundrum that he’s found himself in. With this film however, I absolutely love that Barker is so in tune with what’s going on inside of Nikki’s head too. Barker puts so much of the focus on the implicit psychological horror of Nikki’s situation and how the effects of this wish manifest in and distorts her mind, it’s not by any means perfect and there’s still some moments where she does things that feel a bit contrived for the sake of horror, but overall the way her psychological unraveling is handled felt so much more meticulous and logical than you’d expect which just makes it all the more disturbing. In that way this film is quite reminiscent of Possession by Andrzej Żuławski, and the admittedly more ambiguous situation that Isabelle Adjani‘s character in that film finds herself in. I do feel that Adjani’s character in Possession was written with a bit more psychological integrity (or to say with not quite as much contrived bullshit), but given that this film is obviously going for something quite a bit more conventional and broadly appealing than Possession, those little moments of cheese and genre convention don't exactly bother me.  I also think this film manages to incorporate a lot of incredibly funny humor into the mix without it ever subtracting from the horror, which I think is one of the most difficult balancing acts a filmmaker could ever do. It’s the kind of awkward, sometimes situational humor which also has this strong undercurrent of unsettlement, where at any moment it feels like it can go from uncomfortably funny to downright terrifying at just the drop of a hat. There are even scenes in this film where simultaneously one part of me will be laughing at the absurdity of a moment while the other part of me will be more unsettled than I have been from any other film I’ve seen in the past five years at least.  I don’t really know what else to say about this film other than all the rave reviews are completely warranted and it’s absolutely incredible. I hope everyone goes and sees this film and it grosses well over a hundred times its budget.