The no-future love story that took Hollywood by storm
In the 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, Fredric March asked Carole Lombard, “Will you marry me?” She replied ,“Oh, darling, there’s no future in it.” He answered, “Don’t talk like a half-wit. I don’t care about the future.” That’s what made it screwball — and a classic. Almost a hundred years later, Curry Barker’s Obsession resists portraying love comedically; he chooses horror to convey the millennium’s sexual dysfunction.
Barker’s love object Nikki (Inde Navarrette) isn’t a half-wit but becomes a full-blown psychopath when her music store co-worker Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnson) purchases a One-Wish Willow gadget and chants “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the entire world.” Yet Bear and Nikki don’t know what love is and neither does Barker. Obsession’s nightmarish tale exposes the limits of Millennial desire.
In an early scene, Nikki reveals literary ambitions that confuse romance and a love story. She’s still not Barker’s sponsored character. It’s Bear who exhibits the film’s painfully typical, horny, insecure, dishonest cuck personality.
As in The Drama, Obsession’s dialogue doesn’t proceed from screwball-comedy sophistication; it’s what Hollywood wannabes practice as TV-writers’-room cleverness — speech intended to impress naïve couch potatoes. Obsession feels strikingly modern in its depiction of sexual misunderstanding, but its basic, emphatic fear results from the cultural degradation that Curry Barker shares with his unenlightened audience.
In the wake of Obsession’s high box-office numbers, and thanks to the movie’s Millennial appeal, the 26-year-old Barker has been praised as a wunderkind. But it’s simply because he disregards screwball comedy’s romantic legacy and instead prefers Gen Z ignorance of Hollywood’s previous obsessional thrillers: Brian de Palma’s Obsession (1976), which remade Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Beyoncé’s Obsessed (2006), a race-baiting infidelity bash, and the male-victim movies Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction. The industry disregards Curry Barker’s cultural catastrophe, desperately hoping that he has found the key to asinine popularity.
Obsession’s surprising low-budget success is not a point worth praising, just an excuse to pretend that someone has stumbled on a cynical sure thing. Barker is no genius; his predominantly mid-distance shots require zero aesthetics, just YouTube-style banality. The only memorable image is of Nikki’s taped-door barrier that seals Bear into their sex den; its paltry eeriness lies somewhere between The Blair Witch Project and Vertigo — combining ignorance of both art and humanity.
Note the fuzzy black-and-white TV-screen image during Bear and Nikki’s climactic confrontation that accidentally pays homage to The Twilight Zone’s 1960 TV episode The Chaser, in which George Grizzard regrets wishing for a woman’s undying fidelity. The only difference is The Twilight Zone’s mature revelation of the masculine fear of pregnancy and obligation. Nikki’s psychotic hysterics are a diversion from the uncertainty that is poetically depicted through that uncanny lovers-shifting-rooms sequence in Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles.
Just as Barker cheats his characters out of their cinematic heritage, he deprives his music-store characters of any interest in pop music. He overlooks the gender panic of generations that grew up listening to the psychopathic fear in Eminem’s “Kim,” once considered a cuck’s angry anthem, along with the fourth-wave feminist diatribes of Taylor Swift.
Obsession is a filmic version of what hip-hop once called “horrorcore.” Yet Navarrette’s and Johnson’s characterizations, mixing beta male anxiety with feminist threat, are as flat as the cinematography. Nikki loses her agency — and spontaneity — to recite an incestuous Hansel and Gretel story and proceeds to self-degrading and violent behavior and then, ultimately, grotesquely needy rage: “No one on earth will ever comprehend what it feels like to love someone as much as I love you, and everyone in this room will die never knowing the strength of connection that I feel with my Bear. Okay fine, I’m not joking, deal with it!”
Unlike the mature wits who created ’30s screwball comedy, Curry Barker fabricates Obsession to manifest a Millennial man-child’s version of what we can no longer express about the difference between men and women. His cinematic immaturity predicts no future for movies about love or romance.
