So this is what you get when the studios hire a 25-year-old to direct a horror movie. Obsession, the breakthrough feature of erstwhile YouTuber Curry Barker, places the monkey's paw of innumerable movie nightmares in the sweaty palm of youth: its protagonist, Bear (Michael Johnston), is an overlooked sap pining after the girl of his dreams. The film's opening movement works from the assumption we'll be more compelled than we are by the sight of a twitchy doofus stumbling over his words, but fortunately for us, if not for Barker's young hero, Bear has something tucked away in his back pocket: a junkshop lucky charm on which he wishes that his sparky crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) will love him more than anyone in the entire world. And whaddaya know: it works. Yes, it finally gets this whey-faced poltroon laid, so it's good for something, I guess, but soon Nikki's making Bear's life a living hell, whether via erratic behaviour, loud shrieks in the middle of the night (and not the fun kind), the worst packed lunch in Christendom, or the kind of suffocating clinginess that eventually generates a bodycount. Chicks, huh?, Barker gurgles with every new plot development; hey fellas, am I right? So the narrative develops in twisty, often grisly ways, but the underlying worldview never does - and can't, because it's fundamentally puerile. Barker is trying to make a big deal here - maybe even a career - out of a phase all swoony young men pass through and hopefully leave well behind them.
The triumph of the current horror renaissance is that it's been one of the few areas wherein the studios have succeeded in delivering something for everyone: light comedy-horror, full-on ordeals, big auteurist swings. Runaway box-office would suggest Obsession is itself meeting some need, but the demographic Barker's apparently targeting is altogether niche: young men - no, more specific yet: young American men - who've been so busy on Fortnite or Roblox that they haven't yet learnt to relate to the opposite sex. This plot proceeds from two adolescent contingencies, one dreamy, one nightmarish. What if you had a girl entirely at your beck and call? Wouldn't it be terrible if you had to deal with her all the freaking time? If Johnston, a duller Jeremy Davies, proves a dead loss in the lead, Navarrette at least makes a lively puppet on a string, jerked around and then jerking her puppetmaster around in turn. But Nikki isn't a playable character so much as an idea a 25-year-old has in his head about woman-as-nightmare: all the actress can resort to, over the long haul, is pulling exaggerated emoji faces. Nikki is happy. Nikki is angry. Nikki is never once a credible threat. Barker takes all these developments terribly seriously - he has to; you do at that age - but all he's really arrived at is a Weird Science with the underlying misogyny dialled up to 11 and precisely none of the laughs. The movie's sludgy visual sense, meanwhile, would indicate the YouTube generation aren't going to be the saviours of cinema some studio chiefs clearly hope. I'll give Obsession this: it is genuinely horrible, and it may carry us deeper into the young male psyche than even its maker realises. But this kind of thinking was no fun back when I was 25, it proves no more fun now, and no-one should be making a career or money off the back of it, however much we may raise our boys on a diet of podcasts and pornography. Curry Barker has just been set to working on a redo of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so let's hope this is the last any of us see or hear from him. We had a good run while it lasted.
Obsession is now playing in selected cinemas.
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