(Warning: story and plot twists discussed in explicit detail)
Curry Barker Obsession (2025) is basically W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw," and "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" meet Fatal Attraction and Misery-- nothing startling new, only he's leaned into the sneaky comic spin of the premise, has a terrific cast to inhabit the roles, and the visual chops to tell the story with snap and zing.
Part of the fun of watching this in the theaters is how keyed up the audience gets, the film provoking either startled gasps or uncomfortable laughs, sometimes both at the same time. Barker as I've just learned is part of an internet sketch comedy duo 'that's a bad idea' on YouTube, and he joins filmmakers like Danny and Michael Philippou, who also graduated from YouTube to make 2023's Talk to Me; Dan Trachtenberg, who directed the mostly terrific 10 Cloverfield Lane; Bo Burnham, who did the funny Eight Grade-- young turks emerging from the tumult of the web to make longform genre content on the big screen.
Barker's also part of another trend, comedians turned horror filmmakers, and the first example of which to pop to mind being Jordan Peele with his assertion that comedy and horror both depend on timing-- to get the biggest response (of laughter or terror) out of the audience one must know how to keep the tension high, and at what point to release said tension. You also see Barker playing with conventions: the girl Nikki (Inde Navarrete) suddenly standing at her front door looking at her best friend Bear (Michael Johnston); matters have undergone turnaround at this point in the romcom as expected, the girl ready to confess her magically induced love for the boy-- but why does Nikki stand so still for so long, and why is her face veiled in shadow?.
Maybe what makes Barker's story so effective is how he makes you buy into the two characters: Nikki as Navarrete plays her is a beauty but not a standoffish one; she's warm, she's caring, she leans into you as if what you have to say really matters, and you absolutely believe Bear would fall for her, along with Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, the other half of Barker's YouTube duo) and everyone else. And Bear is sweetly clumsy, almost hopeless in his frustration at not having the courage to say what he needs to say; Johnston catches that awkwardness with all the pain of lived experience. Yes the movie works as a horror and a comedy but also as near-romance, the will-they-won't-they-can't-they-please-pretty-please? variety-- tension's essential to that genre too.
Mention must be made of Tomlinson's Ian, the grating best friend with all the wrong advice for Bear to win the girl; when you later learn that Ian in fact is having a casual relationship with Nikki you realize he's been keeping Bear off balance all this time, screwing with his friend's head and Nikki both. The murkier question is: why did Nikki sleep with Ian? One can speculate-- maybe just for physical relief; maybe Ian has a side that appeals to Nikki; maybe his persistence just wore her down; maybe maybe maybe-- it's the kind of unanswered question that either makes you ponder the mystery of human nature or fume at the laziness of the scriptwriter, depending on how you feel about the final result.
There's a setpiece, a boy's night out party involving an uninvited guest and drunken Jenga that hurtles along the razor edge of horrifyingly hilarious and hilariously horrifying and is about the perfect distillation or demonstration or what have you of Peele's assertion that horror and comedy are conjoined twin. The rest of the picture doesn't maintain that peak but does have its own satisfyingly relentless logic, and the picture ends with what looks like release but is really is the beginning of the rest of someone's very messed up life.
How does the picture compare? It's a sharper script than Fatal Attraction, slyer more darkly stylish than the O so literal Misery. It does fall short of what I feel to be the high water mark of female stalker flicks, Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, for a number of reasons: 1) Adel, daughter of Victor Hugo, is more contradictory and perverse and makes no pretense she has reasons; 2) the story depends not on the supernatural or on horror effects but on the dark splendor of Nestor Almendros' cinematography; 3) Isabelle Adjani, whose translucent skin glows on the big screen, and whose sprung-open eyes promise total monomaniacal focus (at one point she asks a hypnotist if he could compel someone to fall in love, basically contemplating the same wish as Bear in this picture). I'd even call the film's conclusion grimmer (if more lyrical)-- Adele alone and self-sufficient, achieving perfection in her insanity. I like Obsession's Nikki just fine, but compared to Adele she's strictly minor league.
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