‘Obsession’ review: the year’s most terrifying horror film so far

Dubbed “the Gen-Z Fatal Attraction” by its male star Michael Johnston, Obsession’s debut director Curry Barker has been equally open about his creepy, quirky chiller’s influences. And there are many. From Hitchcockian suspense thriller Hereditary to Elisabeth Moss’ The Invisible Man reboot by way of classics Misery and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this is genre geekdom at its nerdiest. Oooh-eee!

The film starts, as all good American teen movies do, in a grotty diner. Johnston’s Bear is professing his love to a waitress across a sticky plastic-topped table. It’s awkward. It’s intense. It’s not going well. But don’t worry, he’s just practicing. The waitress is only a friend – and Bear is rehearsing before he meets actual apple-of-his-eye Nikki at a bar later on. You’ll get used to this. Barker loves to pull the rug on his audience when they’ve just got comfortable.

Fast-forward to the evening, and Bear is driving Nikki (Inde Navarrette) home through their suburban, Stephen King-esque neighbourhood. Think dim streetlights, white picket fences and wooden mailboxes. The dweeby lad couldn’t summon enough courage to confess his affections… and fails again at the steps to Nikki’s porch. In a fit of adolescent pique he snatches up the One Wish Willow – a cheap, supposedly magical, stick-in-a-box recently bought from the local ‘new-age’ apothecary – and breaks it in half as instructed: “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone else in the world,” he mutters rashly. Say goodbye to the friend zone, Bear. And hello to The Twilight Zone!

This central conceit, predictably, was also borrowed. Barker says he first heard about the well-used cinematic tool in a Simpsons ‘Treehouse Of Horror’ episode, itself parodying gothic short story The Monkey’s Paw, by Edwardian author W. W. Jacobs. So how has Hollywood’s latest wunderkind turned something so seemingly derivative into the freshest horror movie of the year?

Well, he gets a bit of help from his actors. Johnston makes anxious wet blanket Bear just sympathetic enough to be relatable, but it’s the largely unknown Navarrette who carries Obsession. Her Nikki, transformed by the One Wish Willow from confident cool girl to the kind of drippy love-muffin who hides mawkish handwritten notes in their boyfriend’s lunchbox, provides more laughs than a lot of romcoms and will fill your nightmares too. Seriously, the noises she produces alone will have you packing earplugs for future cinema trips.

However, it’s not just a case of the cast stitching a smooth modern tapestry out of Barker’s patchwork of inspirations. His dialogue, though dense at times, is sharp and pithy. Clever, sparse lighting adds mystery. And the way he uses sound, almost as a jump-scare on its own, feels unlike anything you’ll see this year. From nothing, terrifying shadows come screaming out of dark corners and doorways to send your stomach springboarding into your oesophagus. See it on the biggest screen, with the loudest speaker system you can find.