Obsession

Obsession: Yet another film marketed as horror that lacks horror and yet another critically acclaimed film that is a dud of a disappointment.  The ultra-thin story centers upon a hemming-and-hawing, meek near-incel named Baron "Bear" Bailey, who works at a small local family-owned music shop that somehow generates enough sales to keep four employees on the clock per shift (that is a rather petty script nit-pick, I admit, but anyone who has ever worked retail, and especially anyone currently misfortunate enough to be employed at Family Dollar or Dollar General or Dollar Tree will notice this deviation from our current Late Stage Capitalism labor management practices). But anyways, and more to the story’s ultra-thin point, Bear harbors a painfully frustrated and unspoken romantic affection for co-worker Nikki.  The incellular Bear, upon hearing Nikki has lost her cherished crystal necklace, decides that purchasing a new necklace and presenting it to her as a gift will be the perfect opportunity for him to express his feelings for her.  Blue-balled Bear thus heads to the local New Age herb-and-crystal shoppe (a kind of bohemian business establishment that seems copied from a Portlandia sketch) to buy the necklace, but being the deeply insecure nerd he is, he doubts his necklace choice.  About to leave the store in empty-handed despair, he happens to notice a peculiar novelty item known as a *One Wish Willow.*   Thinking this quirky little oddity of an impulse item might amuse Nikki, Bear does indeed buy it on impulse.  But, alas, when the time comes for the bumbling Bear to give Nikki the gift and declare his feelings, he turtles.  Alone in his car he berates himself for his heterosexual incompetence and in a rash act of bitter self-pitying irony, he snaps the One Wish Willow in two while wishing for Nikki to "love him more than anything in the world."  It’s no spoiler, of course, to reveal that this is exactly what happens.  The rest of the film, in varying degrees of quality and gore, is a series of relationships-are-Hell set-pieces that eventually lead Bear to mourn for his old onanistic existence. Nikki’s original intelligent and sarcastic disposition is entirely supplanted by a volatile, manic Bear-smitten doppelgänger. She begins to exhibit biploar unhinged behavior: staying up all night watching Bear as he sleeps, standing in place and urinating and defecating while waiting for him to return from work, threatening acts of self-harm to extort his loyalty, and then, during a social gathering upon witnessing Bear about to kiss another young woman during a parlor game, Nikki actually does self-harm as she mutilates her own face with a broken bottle. From here, the picture descends into the familiar crude climax of most American horror films: rapidly occurring acts of wanton violence the typical horror audience will have been numbed to dozens of films ago (or two Terrifier films ago) separated by the briefest interludes of character reflection, in Obsession’s case, this means Bear accepting the full consequences of his catastrophic violation of Nikki's autonomy, followed by a lightning quick role reversal which ensures the movie ends with the de rigueur horror film balancing of the cosmic order.

There’s no need to list all the film’s many plot holes (how did Sandy the cat manage to open dead grandma’s bottle of oxycodone and why did Sandy like the taste of them so much he/she ate enough of them to die, couldn’t the filmmaker find a more plausible way to set up the feline cannibal lunch scene? Why are the rules of the One Wish Willow so vague? Why does Nikki become violently obsessive rather than simply “in love,” Bear’s wish was that she love him more than anything, not that she become insanely jealously obsessive, to list just a few so you know I am not exaggerating when I say there are many, though unless you have seen the film you have no way to know if I have just listed them all and am lying when I say there are more), better to lament its wasted opportunity.  The film could have been a first-rate character study of our modern American adult male, the increasingly celibate terminal adolescent who can’t connect with women because of his submission to the electronic and pornographic environment, yet still feels entitled to “have one.”  Almost all of Obsession’s one hundred and eight minute run time is spent on how Bear can manage his problems (how to get Nikki, how to keep Nikki, how to keep his friends from wondering how he got Nikki, how to keep his friends from noticing how oddly Nikki is behaving, how to keep Nikki from hurting herself, how to keep Nikki from hurting others) rather than Bear recognizing his role in creating his problems.  There was greater character development in the 25 minute Twilight Zone love obsession episode The Chaser than in this film.  Indeed, Bear’s last scene epiphany is too little, too late to save the movie from being anything other than an occasionally creepy, occasionally gory and reviews-contradicting never funny Make-A-Wish gimmick flick in which the gimmick is the sick boy’s wish ultimately turns out to be a wish to die.