I saw OBSESSION this weekend and it immediately made me think of a Superman TV show, but not the one you'd expect.
If you haven't heard the premise of OBSESSION, it's a violent and disturbing film about a young man named Bear who makes a wish with a Wishing Willow that his platonic friend Nikki would love him more than anything else in the world. Almost immediately, the spell turns Nikki amorous, then clingy, then dangerously obsessed with Bear. She becomes very physically forward with him, aggressively coming onto him. All she wants to do is be with him and she won't take no for an answer. It only makes her more insistent.
OBSESSION plays this for disturbing horror, amplified by the fact there are moments where Nikki becomes briefly lucid and see a brief moment of shock and horror about what she's been doing. It's impossible to watch this as wish fulfilment of having the girl you crush on like you back. It's impossible not to see this as a violation of Nikki's mind and body.
Impressively, the movie doesn't go for any gratuitously male-gazey moments. A weaker film would have objectified Nikki, certainly during the first encounter where Bear gets everything he thought he wanted. But writer/director Curry Barker isn't interested in letting the audience off the hook for even a moment.
A genre TV staple is the "A love spell (or virus if you're less supernatural and more sci-fi) goes wrong, making everyone horny and wacky! Isn't that fun?" episode. Probably the earliest version of this is Star Trek's "The Naked Time," which stripped away the characters' inhibitions so that we could see the parts of themselves they most wanted hidden. It's a pretty compelling episode. Unfortunately, it also gave us Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Naked Now," where the effect of the virus is mostly "everyone gets drunk and horny."
In the last decade, maybe you'll find this occurring less often in genre TV, but there was a period where it was obligatory. Hell, you're probably thinking of several examples right now as you're reading this.
The specific example that came to mind for me was a first-season episode of Lois & Clark called "Pheromone, My Lovely." The cast gets exposed to a perfume with a pheromone that removes their inhibitions. Clark turns out to be immune, which ensures plenty of hijinks from the fact Lois isn't and her repressed attraction to Clark comes to the surface. There are three separate sequences of her throwing herself at Clark aggressively, in a succession of skimpier outfits.
Most of those moments lived on in the opening credits for a while after that, so if you ever wondered where the scene of Lois showing a lot of leg while climbing on Clark's desk came from, or the scene of her in a revealing white lace dress, or the scene of her belly dancing in a harem outfit came from, it's from this fan service-y episode. Her lowest point has her showing up to Clark's apartment in that outfit, performing the Dance of the Seven Veils and then waking up the next morning still in the costume, very confused and humiliated.
I have a complicated relationship with this episode. Next to on-screen vomiting, the only thing I find more painful to endure from a TV show is second-hand embarrassment and this episode is FULL of it. I'd say Lois's humiliating antics are spread across half the episode's running time. Perry and Jimmy are affected, but to a less embarrassing degree and their antics are more fleeting compared to Lois's. So seeing Lois Lane turned into a giggling airhead and flaunting herself in a way you know she NEVER would in her right mind is... a lot. I've been a Superman fan all my life. I really, really hate seeing Lois humiliated.
BUT... this episode also aired the week I turned 14. And one cannot deny the appeal of some Teri Hatcher fan service, particularly in the time just before she became the most downloaded woman on the internet. For me, this becomes like that episode of SEINFELD where Jerry's conflict over dating a super-hot woman with now other interesting qualities manifests as his brain and penis being locked into a chess game with each other.
But to return to my original point, this whole episode is undeniably humiliating for Lois. She says so more than once. But the tone of the episode is all "ha ha! Isn't this silly she's completely taken leave of her intelligence and dignity and just wants Clark to fuck her? Also, check out Teri!"
Another detail that I hadn't really taken note of until recently is that pre-mind whammy, there are at least two scenes centered on the idea that Lois is too uptight and too much of a stick in the mud. You don't have to look hard to read the subtext as, "Man, this chick really needs to loosen up. Amiright?" The purpose of those scenes is to make unleashing her wild seem karmic. Maybe she's supposed to deserve it for the crime of caring about getting her work done seriously, or maybe it's to be taken as a lesson she needed in loosening up.
Either way, it's framed as a way of mitigating us from feeling TOO bad about Lois's humiliation and debasement. The show is saying, "We're letting you off the hook. Please enjoy the T&A guilt free."
Knowing this is a beloved episode I can anticipate there'll be a few counter-arguments to my takeaway, so let me deal with them in brief:
- The episode was WRITTEN by a woman, dummy! True, and an interesting detail to note, but not one I find compelling as a mitigating factor.
- The perfume only makes you act on existing attractions, so Lois stalking Clark isn't that bad. Sure, but all that means is that she's throwing herself at someone she really likes as opposed to any rando. But we have a treasure trove of evidence from later scenes where Lois can openly lust after Clark and NONE of it looks like what we see here. She doesn't get moon-eyed and giggly. She's not trotting out the Dance of the Seven Veils. This Lois only exists in this episode.
- You're being too serious and this episode is all meant in good fun. You suck. I'm not accusing them of having set out to send these messages. I'm just pointing out how easy it is for problematic elements to seep into a story if you're not considering the bigger picture.
Anyway, I'm not saying I was always enlightened enough to articulate the issues in this way. If I was aware of most of this, it was something I could only articulate as "Second-hand embarrassment makes this kind of humiliation unbearable to watch." I have an equally hard time with SMALLVILLE's mind-whammy eps. I don't think all of them fall in the same traps as this one, but their very first, "Nicodemus," definitely is a cousin to this episode.
And as I said, this is a genre TV staple, so I'll even spot most of those shows the fact that it became such an accepted trope that for a while, everyone completely just stopped thinking about the implications. It became a question you never ask, like "How does a guy like George Costanza seem to have a very attractive new girlfriend every other week?"
Great storytelling can often come from looking at something that's been done a thousand times, taking a step back and forcing people to see it just slightly different. It's the kind of genius that comes from taking something super familiar and telling it in a way that makes an audience realize, "I never saw it like that before."
In this case, OBSESSION starts with unrequited love. Everyone at some point in their lives has fallen for someone who didn't fell the same for them, and doubtless they wished they could will a mutual attraction into existence. When we meet Bear (Michael Johnson, who perfectly depicts a guy in denial about how horrible his actions are), he's love sick for Nikki, his platonic best friend and co-worker. Early on there's a scene where Nikki tells him one thing they love about their friendship is "I feel like I can talk about anything with you." We all know what that means.
In movie short-hand, that line is usually deployed as a way of twisting the knife on the crushing male. OR it's seen as the green light for them to tell her how they feel, only to learn they misread the situation. MY read on it is that it's the clearest sign the girl does not see the guy as a romantic option. She's affirming their relationship has total disclosure - meaning if she was into you, she'd have SAID it already and conversely, if he was into her, surely HE would have told her already too.
So when Nikki says that, she's assuming an honesty to their relationship that isn't actually there. Indeed, Bear's wavering about his feelings in the conversation DOES seem to get picked up on her radar because she asks him straight out if he's into her. And again he balks at telling the truth. This is smart writing because it's apparent even in the moment that everything that follows is the result of cowardice. Bear had other options. He actively chose the one that robbed Nikki of her autonomy.
Once Bear casts his wish, the effect is immediate. Nikki comes back out to his car and strikes up a flirty conversation with him, during which she momentarily snaps out of the love spell and is like, "What am I doing. I'm acting so weird." The spell reasserts itself quickly, and before long Nikki has asked to spend the night at Bear's house. Though confused by the sudden change in her behavior, he's certainly not going to turn that down. While he first sets her up in the guest room, he also doesn't put up much resistance when she insists he join her in bed and then she takes the lead in seducing him.
Bear's due diligence amounts to repeated questions of "Are you sure? Are you feeling okay?" before he allows himself to indulge. In the real world, we'd say he'd done his part in seeking enthusiastic consent, but there's never any doubt he feels like she's not in her right mind AND that he's the cause of it.
All of this is done in a way that makes the audience squirm uncomfortably rather than being titillated. Lois's mind whammy is played for exploitation and is very indulgent of the male gaze. OBSESSION never does that with Nikki. If you want to an example of the camera making the audience complict in objectifying a female character, under the guise of being the POV of the male lead, go watch Megan Fox fixing a car engine in TRANSFORMERS. The film justifies that as her character being the perfect fantasy girl for its lead, and so that cinematography is merely dramatizing it.
The cheap exploitation version of this idea would have objectified Nikki early on so we see how she's Bear's fantasy. It would have leered at her in the bedroom scene and shot it like a fantasy fulfilled, and then it probably also would have even cloaked her more manic and violent moments as some kind of empowerment.
I'm not even saying you couldn't make an entertaining movie with that approach, but it would be a far baser angle from which to explore the idea. It would be a story with the more simplistic message of "be careful what you wish for" rather than a disturbing exploration of male entitlement and themes of consent.
It also probably would have been a story where Bear is the victim of The Girlfriend From Hell and our empathy would be with him. (Indeed, note in the L&C episode, our empathy is with Clark's exasperation with Lois's sexual come-ons and not Lois herself being unable to even resist her humiliation in her own workplace.) But in OBSESSION, our empathy is always with Nikki.
Nikki is played by the probably-should-be-top-billed Inde Navarrette in one of the most fearless performances I've seen in horror. Inde's most notable credit before this was as Sarah Cortez on SUPERMAN & LOIS (yes, I managed to hold back this detail deep enough for it to be the THIRD Superman show referenced in this review), which I happened to write on throughout its entire run. In fact, I co-wrote one of Inde's two biggest episodes, season two's "Girl... You'll Be a Woman, Soon." If you want to assume bias on my part, go right ahead, but keep in mind that if I didn't genuinely like this film, I just as easily could have said nothing about it.
Inde's performance is unhinged and uninhibited. One relatively early moment really stuck with me. Nikki is in bed with Bear, half-naked and ready to go further when the "real" Nikki asserts herself for a moment. The transition from devotion to the kind of shock you'd feel if you found yourself mostly undressed with your best friend is perfectly played. She actually falls off the bed in shock. Though Bear allows himself a moment of distress, it does absolutely nothing to throw cold water on his desire to consummate the relationship.
Because of how Inde plays that moment, it's impossible to see what happens next as anything but a violation of her. The more unhinged Inde makes Nikki, the greater our empathy for the "real" Nikki who we realize must be some kind of unwilling passenger and spectator to what the demon who's hijacked her body is making her do. Inde finds just the right modulation for her performance where even the most lovey-dovey and romantic declarations feel wrong. Every time Bear looks past it or tries to rationalize it, we hate him just a little big more.
At one point we're given access to the real Nikki, personified by the most agonizing scream I've heard in a horror movie for a long time. Nikki becomes more and more demanding of Bear, and her jealousy of anyone else gets amplified. Most disturbing are the moments where she escalates to self-harm. My interpretation of those instances is it's a dramatization of real Nikki at war with demon Nikki.
In any event, there is nothing vain about Inde's acting in this film. I saw first-hand how hard she could go on a scene when I worked with her, so I wasn't surprised to see she had something like this in her. That doesn't make what she accomplishes here any less impressive. I've seen more than a few of these Girlfriend from Hell kind of movies, and when I was script reader I read even more. It's very apparent to me a movie with these elements could easily tip over into camp.
Nikki is a role that invites going over the top and chewing the scenery. Inde has to go big and manic, but modulate that on just the right frequency so that what she's doing remains disturbing and not just absurdly comic. This performance is on a razor's edge all while being so RIGHT that you're not even thinking about that fact as it's going on. It's the acting equivalent of juggling chainsaws while surfing. Doing either one is impressive enough on its own, but how many people are brave enough to try doing both and risk failing spectacularly.
Is it an Oscar worthy performance, as some of the hype is now saying? Looking at the last five years of the Oscars, I don't think it's any less worthy than any of the performances that were nominated. In terms of the politics, the fact it's a horror film, and a very violent one probably work against it, as does the fact it's Inde's first feature leading role.
If Inde Navarrette gets nominated, I think her Oscar clip needs to be the scene late in Act Two where a seemingly sleeping Nikki is at last able to speak for herself for a few minutes... and she begs Bear to kill her because she can't bear to live in this torment any longer. Her performance is gut wrenching... and you don't even see her face. It's carried entirely by her voice.
Obviously Barker deserves a lot of credit in knowing exactly how to modulate the tone throughout the film. His job is that nothing in the movie gives us permission to laugh AT Nikki as though she's Jim Carrey playing The Mask. This film is confident about how much it wants to upset you and make you look at the ugly truth of a somewhat shopworn premise.
Every laugh in this movie is uncomfortable. Most of the time in horror, the laugh is a release of tension, giving everyone a moment to take a breath and relax. The vast majority of the laughs in OBSESSION only heighten the tension, that sort of nervous, involuntary laugh that is provoked in response to seeing something so insane, the only appropriate reaction is giggles to push back the "What the FUCK?!" energy rattling in your skull.
(Okay, there's one glorious, beautiful broad laugh early in the third act, maybe the only laugh that doesn't directly involve Nikki's behavior in some way.)
The denial of catharsis extends even further. If Crazy Nikki always lashed out by hurting Bear, we'd be cheering her on. If he deserves punishment, then every horror visited on him feels like, "Karma, BITCH!" That's why as unsettling as they are, the self-harm scenes are absolutely necessary. They drive home that this entire story is violence being committed upon Nikki. And for what? The crime of not intuiting that her friend had feelings for her.
The premise never lets itself off the hook. I was very relieved when I saw the film never tried to imply that Nikki's experience was somehow poetic justice for her, that on some level she deserved it. She's not some vixen leading Bear on and taking advantage of his feelings. Even though we later learn she's been hooking up with their mutual friend for two years, it doesn't recontextualize anything done to her as deserved.
I have a hard time turning off the part of my brain that predicts how a film will resolve. This one confounded me because I kept looking for the bread crumbs that would make a non-bleak ending possible, and there were none to be found. That seemingly left only two options - an unearned happy ending, or an unrelentingly dark proper one. It took the right path for the movie and executed it in a way so impactful, the final shot lingers with you for quite some time after.
OBSESSION has been hyped since its debut last September in Toronto. That's eight months of fairly regular conversation - at least in film circles - about how incredible this movie is. The praise was so persistent that even as I anticipated finally seeing the movie, I was dreading the inevitable result of that full court press.
Nine times out of ten (hell, almost TEN times out of ten) when the internet film community goes ga-ga for a festival film, I walk out of it feeling like, "I don't know what you all saw in that, but I'm guessing it helped to see it at 1am after being film drunk from 7 other screenings in two days." With OBSESSION, my expectations were not only met, but surpassed.
After seeing her used to her full potential here, I'm really sad I no longer get to write for Inde Navarrette. Maybe we even could have taken LOIS & CLARK's pheromone premise and rendered it almost as darkly (and a lot less violently) as OBSESSION does. I know she and Alex Garfin would have had a lot of fun with something like that.
In any event, this movie should be the final nail in the "Love Spell makes everyone wacky and lovesick" premise as escapist fluff. This movie is an indictment of that male fantasy as a violation. And it goes to show you, it's possible to find disturbing horror even in the lightest of premises if you come at it from an unfamiliar angle.
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