Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Everything’s a riff on a riff on a riff anymore, but I suppose the thing that still makes the difference is whether it’s done well. I have to admit that Obsession kind of exceeded my expectations. Granted, I went in with the bar pretty low—I knew this film got positive reviews, but as a rule the horror genre just isn’t my jam. I don’t tend to be impressed unless the movie is great enough to transcend the horror genre. I’d be hard pressed to say Obsession manages that, but it’s got a specific enough vibe to make it stand apart in a surprisingly compelling way.

We’re now 124 years from the original W.W. Jacobs horror short story The Monkey’s Paw, but we’re still not done seeing variations on its premise. You could spend a week listing off all the stories people have written about a wish gone horribly wrong because it wasn’t worded quite right or the person making the wish didn’t think it through. Plenty of people have already compared Obsession to Big, the 1988 comedy in which a kid wishes to be “big” and gets more than he bargained for by turning into Tom Hanks. Obsession is a little bit like if Big and The Exorcist had a baby.

The other thing Obsession has in common with countless other films is a character changed or possessed by powers beyond their control. Writer-director Curry Barker offers a bit of a fresh twist on this by having the possessed character turn out to be the victim as much as the villain, someone conscious of what’s happening to her but still unable to do anything about it.

In fact, you could have a fun debate about this movie: is the protagonist, a young man named Bear (a truly fantastic Michael Johnston) really the villain? We learn in very economic storytelling in the first few scenes that he’s got a huge crush on a woman in his friend group, Nikki (an increasingly unsettling Inde Navarrette), but is too scared to share his true feelings. He goes to a store to find her a replacement for a lost crystal necklace, and finds a product called a “One Wish Willow.” The instructions are to snap it in half and make one wish, and in a moment of panicked desperation Bear does this and says, “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world.”

You can imagine where this heads, and it heads there surprisingly quickly, underscoring the immediacy of the wish’s effect. I went into this movie expecting a sprinkling of comedy, and I have to say, there was only a couple of times I chuckled, and that was only out of nervousness. Barker is good at unraveling tension, especially as Nikki becomes more and more unhinged. And yet, when she literally says to Bear, “It’s all your fault,” she’s actually right. And because he’s spent so much time being in love with her, Bear even spends a fair amount of time selfishly convincing himself he can somehow make it work.

I won’t spoil what happens thereafter, but it feels worth warning the animal lovers that Bear’s cat, who is dead the moment we see it onscreen, factors significantly into the plot, and in no good ways. The best I can say is that it turns out to have been Bear’s own mistake that Sandy, the cat, has died; it somehow got into his mess of pills, presumably for his plethora of anxieties. How a cat would have gotten into pills with a secure lid while also eating its own food remains a mystery, but whatever. Maybe Bear just didn’t replace the lid well enough and then it fell from the counter? These are oddly laid out details, and we merely find the cat lying on the floor next to its own vomit and cat food spread around the floor mixed with pills. And this all happens before Bear even makes his wish, so I suppose we’re meant to see his judgment has been impaired by the trauma. This doesn’t stop him from jumping at the chance to attend Trivia Night when he learns Nikki will be there. You’ll have to watch the movie to find out how Sandy figures into the story thereafter.

There are two other people in Bear’s friend group, all of whom work at a music store run by a middle-aged man played by Andy Richter, the most random appearance of a single semi-famous face in the movie. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, the store owner’s daughter who has her own unrequited feelings for Bear. And then there’s Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), the most annoying of them all, a guy who is never truly listening when people need him to. This friend group winds up with a lot more going on between more of them than it seems at first, and I’m not sure all of that was necessary, but I guess it’s a way to thicken the plot.

When it all comes down to it, Obsession is a relatively predictable riff on The Monkey’s Paw, but it has enough fresh twists to it to make it worth a look if you’re into these kinds of movies. The performances elevate the otherwise fairly average material, and certainly some of the dialogue, especially in the beginning when things come across as a bit more contrived. When things turn creepy, though, they turn genuinely unsettling, and eventually we learn that is the case for both Bear and Nikki, who find themselves in a metaphysical bind with no solutions—or at least, no pleasant ones. Obsession gets pretty gruesome in its second half, and should delight the audiences who are coming for exactly that—not to mention the jump-scares that I never particularly enjoy.

But hey, if nothing else, Obsession is everything it promises to be, and Curry Barker and his cast deserve credit for that. This is the kind of movie I usually actively avoid, and I feel like I’m paying it a compliment by saying I don’t regret having seen it.

*Hey dipshit, be careful what you wish for!*

Overall: B