Obsession

The film starts from a very old fantasy —wishing that someone would love you— and turns it into something diseased. Obsession works because it understands that the problem is not excessive love, but the disappearance of the other person's will. What could have been a simple “be careful what you wish for” story becomes a film about possession, identity and consent.
What impressed me most was Inde Navarrette. Her performance carries much of the horror because she manages to convey two states at once: outwardly she can appear devoted, obsessed or completely ruled by an emotion; underneath, she leaves tiny signs of fear, rigidity and disconnection. There are moments when she seems to be carrying out behavior that does not belong to her, as if part of her were still watching from somewhere inside. That contradiction is far more disturbing than any jump scare.
That is also the film's central idea: forcing someone to love you destroys the very thing that gives love value. If you remove the possibility of saying no, changing your mind or walking away, what remains is not love but control. Obsession turns that romantic fantasy into psychological and bodily horror, and the more literal the wish becomes, the more disturbing its consequences feel.
Curry Barker handles the tone well because he never confines the film to one register. There is horror, black comedy, discomfort and violence, but the sadness underneath never disappears completely. That mixture could easily have become ridiculous, yet it works because the film takes the characters' suffering seriously even when it embraces extreme ideas.
Michael Johnston also works because his character is not reduced to a flat monster. The film understands that a selfish decision can grow from a recognizable emotional insecurity and still cause enormous harm. That makes the conflict more uncomfortable: understanding the need for affection does not mean justifying what is done with it. The film navigates that line quite effectively.
Visually, it does not need grand flourishes. Its strongest material lies in bodies, looks, silences and the way an apparently intimate situation can become oppressive. Barker understands that a smile can be more frightening than a scream if the audience suspects that the smile does not truly belong to the person wearing it.
I also liked that the supernatural rules never become a manual. There is a logic of desire, punishment and consequence, but the important thing is not to understand every mechanism scientifically. What matters is that every attempt to control the problem creates another one. That structure of badly phrased wishes connects with classic tales, but here it is adapted to a very contemporary fear: wanting a person as if they were an object designed to satisfy you.
Not everything is perfect. There are moments when the film pushes close to excess, and some decisions are clearly designed to provoke a strong reaction. There is also a certain moral simplicity to the premise: we understand very early that something deeply wrong is happening. But the staging and, above all, Navarrette's performance keep that obviousness from killing the tension.
For me, the best thing about Obsession is that the protagonist never becomes simply “the obsessed girl.” The film preserves the sense that there is a person behind the behavior, someone being displaced from herself. That is why she inspires pity as well as fear. And when a horror film makes me care more about a character's identity than about the next scare, it has already achieved quite a lot.
Obsession is a powerful, twisted horror film, and much sadder than it first appears. It may begin from a familiar premise, but it finds its own route into control, objectification and the loss of identity. And it has its ultimate weapon in Inde Navarrette: she is so convincing that, at times, it feels as if what is happening to her is real.