My fifteen-year-old’s bedroom light was still on when I came home from the theater, sometime after 11. He was sitting at his computer, across the room from his weight bench, framed by a backsplash of half-empty cologne bottles he had traded with his friends. I told him that I had just seen the craziest movie, and he looked up, amused.
“Was it Obsession?”
I consider myself more up to speed with movies than most dads in their mid-40s, but I’d heard nothing about Obsession until the day before, when a friend — also a 40-something dad — asked if I wanted to watch it with him. Meanwhile, my son and his friends had apparently been talking about it for weeks, which likely explained why most of the other people in the packed theater fell in their age bracket. Two girls, definitely closer in age to our sons, asked if we wouldn’t mind shifting over a seat so they could sit together. We didn’t mind, and we did, before the previews that seemed unusually loud and with enough time to squeeze in the obligatory final trip to the restroom before the movie began.
Obsession has drawn comparisons to The Blair Witch Project — another horror film produced by relatively unknown directors whose box office returns far surpassed its budget. Obsession’s director, as it turns out, was born just two months after TBWP’s theatrical release. I was a senior in college that summer when I saw TBWP in theaters and, until watching Obsession, it was the closest I’d come to screaming at the screen in a movie theater — then, too, less out of fright and more out of frustration at the twentysomethings on the screen who were oblivious to their impending doom.
But while The Blair Witch Project’s Gen-X protagonists were risk-takers, Obsession may be director Curry Barker’s way of telling his YouTube fanbase to grow a pair. Love involves risk and giving up control, and as Nikki, Obsession’s object of obsession, makes clear, it isn’t always romantic. Nikki spells out this life lesson for Bear, Obsession’s twentysomething protagonist, just as she hand-holds him down the path that would allow him to admit his feelings for her. When she’s done, all that’s left for him to say is “Yes.” It’s the one remaining step for him to take — and it’s still too hard.
Bear opts instead for the safer road of fantastical thinking, and it comes in the form of a magic stick that he cradles, bends, and breaks in the dark solitude of his car. It confers control and domination, and in true Faustian fashion, he soon discovers that a friendship with benefits minus the friendship isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. His best friend, Ian, who brags that his biggest turn-on is trivia night at the pub, doesn’t fare much better. Endowed with a magic stick of his own, Ian responds with all the foresight of a prepubescent boy, and like Bear, he reaps none of the reward.
While the men in Obsession are boys playing it safe, the women are its risk-takers. Nikki, who could be the Gen-Z nod to Winona Ryder’s Reality Bites character, gives her two-week notice at the music store so she can work full-time on her novel. Sarah, the fourth member of their love rectangle, pushes on through repeated rejections in her applications to art school. Their appetites for risk are rewarded with Obsession’s cruelest twist: the men’s fears crush and devour the women unafraid to confront theirs.
“Why is it so horrible to be with me?” Bear poses this question late in Obsession, and when he does, it’s unclear whether he’s talking to Nikki or himself.
Which fears do we outgrow by middle age, and which ones still linger? My friend and I both jumped at Obsession’s jump scares, which is somewhat reassuring — by the time my dad was my age, he would reliably fall asleep five minutes into the previews. Our 40s are, after all, a season of life in which we have much under our control: our riskiest academic, career, and family decisions are largely in the rearview mirror; we’ve mostly settled on our best friends and favorite colognes; and for another decade or so, we still have some say over the form and function of our bodies. The fear of being unwanted, on the other hand — to show up as our true selves, to enter a room unannounced, to ask someone to a movie, only to be turned down — is one we never quite leave fully behind.
My son said he jumped at Obsession’s jump scares too, but he found Bear’s character completely unrecognizable and unrelatable — no one in his school, let alone any of his friends, could ever be that messed up. (My friend’s teenage son had a franker appraisal: “Bear’s a loser.”) Obsession’s main takeaway, according to my son, was just to be careful what you wish for.
I was relieved, of course, to hear that our sons saw Bear more as boogeyman than as the boy next door. But one thing horror movies do is allow us to see, amplified on a giant screen, what could happen if our disordered desires were given free rein to run their course. In that sense, perhaps more frightening than getting what we wish for is our capacity for wishing those things in the first place. My son may never bend a magic stick, but he may one day face the terrible recognition of a heart curved in on itself — incurvatus in se. And in that moment of terror, God willing, he’ll be met with the shocking consolation of grace.
