Obsession
ketchup on steak, drinking game jenga. absolute fucking despair. ketchup on steak, drinking game jenga. the crushing reality of all that can never be gained back.
a tremendously dreadful movie that left me with perhaps the strongest desire for a protagonist to die in a long time. inde navarette. inde navaratte. inde navarette. a larger than life performance that makes this movie the early-year-defining blockbuster it has blown up into. masterfully aware and additive to the gender commentary the film seeks to achieve, she plays into everything it needs and more. charming. dismissive. uncanny. clingy. desperate. threatening. terrifying. she is easily the actress to beat at this point in the year and i can only hope she carries her deserved momentum into awards season. johnston and the supporting cast play wonderfully as shockingly convincing close friends. ian showed up fat and wearing jeans. in the rare case of the manic pixie dream girl archetype being utilized in a proper manner rather than as an amateur writer’s go-to. sarah is her own person independent of her relationships to other characters and does not say or do the perfect thing at every given opportunity in the same way the audience is given through bear’s lens of nikki in the first 20 minutes of the film. she’s someone he can “happen” to be with rather than a pedestaled idol and the one time he’s able to let things happen naturally rather than exacting an outside force for aid and bear squanders it just the same as everything else not for the sake of his own growth or development but as a reinforcement that his cowardice continues to hurt everyone around him.
on a technical level, Obsession succeeds on the front of movement the most through a notable camera trick involving nikki that made my skin crawl and the immaculate use of shadows and the off-screen interactions or things looming in the distance that snatch your attention when relevant.
very rarely have i left a theater with the same concoction of mourning, dread, fear, and (positive) contempt that curry barker’s breakout has left me with. so daringly contemporary and explorative of a New Modern Horror involving our relationships with one another and the patriarchal need to be not only known by women but loved without employing vulnerability; when kindness and affection all too often are intertwined into the makings of idealist romantic projection and they are somehow left to be responsible for picking up the pieces of a misunderstanding.