Obsession

The difference between love and obsession is autonomy. When you're obsessed with something, you lose your sense of self - you fold yourself inwards, outwards, and all around the shape that centres your fixation. In Curry Barker's Obsession he literalises a demonic concept of love and obsession and transforms a "nice guy's" need for getting what he wants into something quite horrific. It's body horror without the squish - her body is completely overtaken and her agency with it, but she's in there somewhere, screaming. There's so much to love here. I came up with a similar idea - though not the horrorfied version - many years ago, and I've been slowly doodling it out in my brain ever since. In my film, the wish isn't "love me more than anything else in the world", it's "love me forever". Both tackle different sides of the same curse. What's so fascinating about this is that Barker has confirmed the One Wish Willow isn't itself cursed - this isn't a monkey paw situation - it's just that Bear's wish was so groteque in its nonchalant beckoning that the end results can only ever go in one direction. Nikki is ovetaken by some sort of version of herself - but it isn't her. She's in there, somewhere - with the aforementioned screams in permanency - but the version of her that lives and controls her physicality is one completely overwhelmed with love for Bear. That's it. Everything grows organically from this singularity, and the film is all the better for it. It explores the sharp edges of a broken glass love and takes to its most extreme conclusions what a love like this could mean. When it is working on this cylinder, it is perfect. It is as horrifying a story of abuse as it is a confusingly simple deconstruction of abusive men who masquerade behind intense romance. Bear is the villain here, and his villainous acts are every single time he opts to go along with the fantasy because Nikki is all he ever wanted. And it goes to show that what he always wanted was never the real her. He claims it was, and sort of tries to back out in a non-committal way (that started with him simply trying to "amend" the wish), but ultimately he decides to continue. It was her body he wanted. It was her commitment to him. He never loved her for the real, fleshed-out, three-dimensional human being that she is - he loved her for the idealised pedestal-sitting vacuum of hotness that he saw her as. He decided she would be the object of his affections at some point, and never allowed any of her real self to enter that definition after that. He soldiered on and allowed his crush to fester until it was rotting, and then he made the wish. It was doomed from the start. I fucking adored Milk & Serial and saw incredible promise in Curry Barker. He shows even more here. There were some hokey first-time-willies in some of the side-characters (the passive, sweary shopkeeper for example), and an over-reliance on tropes at some points, but Barker pushes himself so far with such a low-budget film and that has to be commended. The YouTuber to filmmaker pipeline has another wonder.