Last weekend I finally watched Obsession. The movie was enough of a cultural phenomenon that virtually every news site and film critic and podcaster has chimed in at least once, but probably multiple times, about What It Means For the Culture, so I don’t know if I have any original thoughts about it.
If you’ve been tuned out on pop culture, just know that it’s a basic Monkey’s Paw setup in which a hapless loser wishes that his crush would love him more than anyone else in the whole world. It’s a well-directed movie, and it was made for very little money so the special effects are more stagecraft than CGI, which is fun to watch. But be warned that the movie is relentlessly dark in spirit. I don’t know if I would have the stomach to watch it again anytime soon.
Everyone is correct to point out that the central character of Nikki is played to the absolute hilt by Inde Navarette. She gives a performance that is as unselfconscious and expressive as Nicolas Cage—which, if you know me, is about as big a compliment as I can give an actor. I hope she makes the most of the big opportunities that I’m sure are about to come her way.
There’s a cultural conversation around the movie that’s been pretty disconcerting. It feels as though some critics are reviewing the movie they think they saw, but not the movie that writer-director Curry Barker actually made. For instance, on the Cannonball podcast, New York magazine pop culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién said Obsession was a movie “about the crazy girlfriend who’s going to destroy your life and how the cost of loving a woman is to have your life completely cratered.”
Which is just categorically not true. That is not in any way what the movie is about! You could make plenty of feminist arguments against Obsession, but I don’t think anyone involved in the making of the film would say either of those messages were the messages they they were trying to send, and as a viewer it’s just not a good-faith description of the movie.
Anyway, people have been chasing each other in circles over this movie for weeks, and nobody cares if another racer joins the demolition derby. But I do feel compelled to say that while other movies this year have made more of a mark on me—shout out to The Drama and I Love Boosters—I’m still excited to see a tiny movie make such a giant splash in the general cultural conversation.
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