67/100
I have never hired a sex worker, and never will. Not because I have any moral objection, but because sex, to me, hinges on genuine mutual desire. That’s the entire point. There’s nothing remotely hot about mere physical proximity to a body I find attractive (which amounts to a doll that’s incredibly lifelike due to actually being alive). The eroticism lies in the reciprocation: A woman I yearn to bone feels the same way about me. That’s why The Lonely Island, in “I Just Had Sex,” comically characterizes the act as “Sure nice of her to let you do that thing / Nice of any girl ever / Now sing.” The joke’s that those two dorks are thrilled to be passively endured.
What’s more, if I were ever for some reason paying someone to fuck me, the last thing I’d do is shell out for an escort or some other “girlfriend experience.” The only thing more repellently humiliating than a woman having sex with me despite (presumably, probably) feeling little or no attraction would be a woman pretending to want me, while I’m entirely conscious that it’s a ruse. Don’t get the appeal of that at all. Cypher choosing to enjoy the Matrix’s cyber-steak I can theoretically wrap my brain around, but a fake orgasm that extends to “Hello”? Hard pass.
Obsession obviously pushes that idea into a much more disturbing realm, one that can only be deemed rape. I miraculously managed to watch the film, seven weeks into its theatrical run, without knowing a thing about it apart from having seen “monkey’s paw” once or twice on social media, and immediately assumed, when Bear makes his wish and Nikki instantly turns flirty, that I knew where it was headed. Fatal Attraction Boulevard, more or less. (I’m old.) So the first jarring moment when Actual Nikki reappears for a split second was—in its upsetting way—a huge relief, reassuring me that Barker wasn’t gonna devote 109 minutes to trading on a clingy-chick stereotype. That’s still there, of course (and I do wonder whether swapping the genders might’ve been more interesting, even though it’s overwhelmingly men who pay for sex), but to my mind heavily outweighed by Bear’s visible reluctance to kill his dream come much too true, even after hearing evidence that the woman he ostensibly loves is essentially screaming nonstop in Hell while he smooches a simulacrum*. (Might give a few Skandie points to whoever voices the blasé customer-service operator.) To some extent he’s stuck, as suicide looks like the only solution, but he also clearly wishes that he’d just phrased the wish a little differently, such that Nikki would “really” adore/desire him. Which would still be false.
Inde Navarrette’s getting all the attention (actually I did hear that in advance as well), which is understandable as she executes some emotional hairpin turns and shrewdly makes the initial switch-flip somewhat subtle, accurately reflecting how romantic signals are often sent with plausible deniability. But I was likewise highly impressed by Michael Johnston, who looks and acts like a morph of young Billy Crudup and young Jeremy Davies (but less twitchy than the latter). While there’s unmistakably a “so-called nice guys are actually the worst” element to Bear, it’s crucial that we not reject him as pure evil the moment he gets his wish and rolls with it; Johnston successfully conveys this kid’s (I’m old) inner struggle, which goes well beyond the unfulfilled wish that Pseudo-Nikki would tone it down a little. Bear understands that he’s doing wrong, and it’s to everyone’s credit—Johnston’s and Navarrette’s and Barker’s—that this scenario frequently suggests someone taking icky advantage of emotional vulnerability (savvy move to mirror that by having Nikki falsely claim her dad has cancer), rather than someone slipping a roofie into their date’s drink. Much more productively provocative.
Question for Waz, who initially bailed on Obsession halfway through (he’s since finished it) and called it “so poorly made”: Whaa? I can maybe understand being underwhelmed by the many celebrated images of Nikki shrouded in darkness, her features obscured. That’s a tad obvious (which doesn’t render it ineffective). But the very first shot grabbed me hard on a strictly formal level—some quick googling reveals that Barker shot this on the Arri Alexa 35, which makes me wonder how Bear’s medium close-up has a warmth and softness that reminded me of fuckin’ Phantom Thread. It’s not often that I get excited about the texture of anything shot digitally. And that simple shot/reverse-shot sequence of over-the-shoulders at the music store, in which Bear’s angle places Nikki way in the distance and so out of focus that we can just barely register her face (a tiny pale blur) turned toward Bear for the entire conversation, with Barker never once calling attention to that…this guy’s got chops.
Alas, he fell prey to an increasingly common horror-movie problem, viz. betraying the movie’s established reality (or sometimes its tone) for the sake of an audience-goosing effect. I’m not talking about Obsession’s big gory setpiece, which perhaps didn’t need to be quite so Irreversible-fire-extinguisher grotesque but follows perfectly from everything we’ve seen prior. It bugged me a whole lot, though, that “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the world” (or whatever the exact words may have been) in no way whatsoever logically leads to Nikki making a sandwich out of Bear’s dead cat (I’ll allow the kitty-corpse shrine), or explains why Nikki spends her nights expertly mimicking the ghost from Pulse’s Forbidden Room. That stuff’s clearly been thrown in for fear that sticking to the story would be insufficiently spooky and revolting; it treats the audience (arguably with reason) like sharks that respond to chum. Significantly lessened the film in my eyes; a more rigorous version would surely be 70+.
Random notes that don’t really fit anywhere above:
• As much as this is a monkey’s paw tale, I also kept thinking about Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer, which for those unfamiliar is a thought experiment about the dangers of AI (dating from well before the current onslaught of same). Super-condensed version: If you instruct machine intelligence to produce as many paperclips as possible, without imposing every carefully limiting rule you can think of and many that you can’t imagine, there’s a significant risk that the machine will achieve this goal in ways irreconcilable with continued human existence. You do not want singleminded pursuit of a goal, absent consideration of possible consequences. Pseudo-Nikki’s the “human” embodiment of that dystopian idea.
• The ending’s not entirely satisfying to me. Nikki was in fact an innocent victim (if barely seen as such; see footnote), and while she escapes Hell in the final seconds, it’s only to emerge into another sort of Hell, what with her impending arrest for committing multiple murders. Arguably there was no way to avoid total bleakness, and I’m not sure how Nikki’s continuing nightmare could be “better honored,” but man that feels harshly punitive. Bear gets off light.
• Anyone know why this film felt obligated to have characters use a fake search engine (I think it was called Probe) and fake Reddit (definitely called Threddit)? I always assume that’s a budget thing, gotta pay significant cash for the rights…but Unfriended reportedly cost only $250K more and merrily used several dozen legitimate apps and sites. What am I missing?
* Someone speculated in a comment that Obsession would trigger my well-known distaste for films about helpless victims who just suffer nonstop. Not an issue here because the suffering’s almost entirely offscreen. We just get horrifying glimpses. Would I have enjoyed this film as told entirely from the real Nikki’s perspective? Almost certainly not.