If I were Hollywood, I’d be worried. I mean, sure, box office is through the floor, the middle-class backbone of the industry moved out of California, and even I couldn’t kid myself that I had any idea how to entertain the masses any more.
But I think what would put me into a cold sweat are guys like Damian McCarthy, making profitable movies that are better constructed and better looking for a fraction of the price. Or worse, perhaps, Curry Barker, whose little horror film Obsession, made for less than a million dollars, made $20 million in its first four days, with an additional $7 million world-wide. (And over $40 million worldwide in its first week.)
What’s the secret to this film’s smashing success? The staggering drawing power of Andy Richter.
I kid. He’s in this film, and the only name I recognized, yet I never actually noticed him while watching the movie. (I’m sure he played the second female lead’s father, owner of the music store where the four principals work. But I’m actually guessing, it was such a small part, and he’s lost a lot of weight and gotten a lot older since the early days of Conan’s show—about the last time I saw him.)
Pictured: Not Andy Richter. (I couldn’t find even a single shot of him in this movie.)
The odd thing about this movie is that there doesn’t appear, at least on the surface, to be anything remotely novel about it. There are entire horror movies series devoted to wishes, and the evils such things wreak. Obsessive love? A staple of the ’90s, of course, but a theme that never goes away. The classic 1992 Tate Donovan/Sandra Bullock splatterpunk Love Potion No. 9 leaps to mind.
I kid.
The trailers were…murky. Not bad, exactly. They show you the whole plot, but the plot’s not usually the thing in a horror movie. And it’s a teen-oriented horror from Blumhouse, so there’s a little sense of “meh, seen it” but, honestly, what’s the trailer maker gonna do about that?
On the other hand, Obsession has a whopping 8.2 on IMDB with over 19K reviews.
ALMOST as good as Project Hail Mary? You sure you don’t want to bump that score up a little bit?
What the heck was going on here? Apparently the original cut of the film shown at film festivals was gorier and had to be trimmed down for an “R”. But most of those 19K didn’t see the uncensored cut.
Well, look, there aren’t a wealth of watchable films to choose from these days. Figuring it would be over-hyped but acceptable, off The Boy and I went.
And, the thing is, this is not an especially novel film in its broad points. But boy is it competently made. Beyond competent, it’s aesthetically made. It reminds me a bit of Publish or Perish, in that regard. People who know the language of filmmaking and take the care to speak in it.
As an example, it has this modern characteristic of the blacks not being completely black. (This effect is still possible but it’s not done any more for a variety of reasons.) That doesn’t means it phones in the lighting design. When Nikki needs to be obfuscated, she’s obfuscated. At one point, she’s standing in a corner and I couldn’t even tell if it was her. The face looked wrong. Which, again, is not a new technique, but it’s done very effectively here.
One aspect of the storytelling that was extremely effective is that after the protagonist Bear (short for “Baron”, played by Michael Johnston) makes the wish, that Nikki (Inde Navarette) would love him more than anyone in the world, things immediately go wrong. It’s not the “Oh, it was nice for a while but now it’s going wrong” trope, it’s “This is immediately and observably freaky”. Bear knows he’s done something very wrong.
“There are warnings ALL OVER that box!”
In other words, we skip the kind of pandering fantasy step where the audience gets the “fun” part of seeing the main character have the relationship he wants with the hot chick. Well, we do get a little of that, secondarily, in the form of a short romcom-ish montage that occurs after we see the real Nikki being consumed by whatever effect the wish is having on her. We know she’s experiencing a personal hell.
It’s uncomfortable, when it’s not downright horrifying.
Bear and Nikki’s besties are Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless). Ian’s the sensible “tell her how you feel” guy. Sarah (despite a septum piercing) is also a sensible, protective character. Bear is a coward. At first, he’s a sympathetic coward, as his fear of approaching the girl of his dreams is relatable. But as the enormity of what he’s done dawns on him (even if only by accident), his cowardice makes him less and less likable—although still somewhat relatable as he didn’t really expect the wish to work and the only offered fix is rather extreme.
There is a loophole, of course, but even that doesn’t play out like you’d think.
The writer/director had his dad write the story passage that Nikki reads at this point. And it’s a corker!
The acting is great, especially with the four leads, and the peripheral characters do a good job, whether it’s as a kind of comic relief or supporting crew. It’s not quite the Inde Navarette show, but she has the meatiest role, and she chews it up like a pro: She starts as the sassy, caustic writerly type who unsuccessfully navigates he relationship with Bear, probably out of concern for his feelings or a wariness regarding how broaching the topic of romance might rebound negatively on the group dynamic.
After the wish, vestiges of this character re-emerge, as if the wish has cast her into actual Hell and she can only escape for moments at a time. The rest of the time, she simps, she stares, she demands, she has psychotic breaks, she makes situations uncomfortable and then tries to play it off as humor.
If the Academy Awards weren’t just industry-fluffing shills, she would minimally get a nomination for this performance. Think Frederic March for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Only Navarette is working without SFX makeup. There’s an actual old-school light-the-eyeline shot which is great and spooky, especially given how rare those seem to be these days. There may well have been some CGI, but I didn’t notice it. Tactics like stretching a mouth too wide or making eyes too big are commonplace, and if it’s done here at all, it’s suble. (I’m seeing now that there wasn’t much CGI except for one scene where, in retrospect, it makes sense.)
But mostly it’s just top-notch acting. You’re terrified of her, you feel bad for her—she makes Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me look like a pussycat.
So is it an 8.2? I don’t know what the hell that means. I just know if a bunch of twenty-somethings can put this together for $650,000, how hard is it going to be for a modestly financed group in Austin or Miami or any modestly wealthy city to do the same? What do we need Hollywood for?
