Roughly two years ago, it felt like everyone I knew was talking about Milk & Serial on Letterboxd and social media. I’d never heard of it, but I’m a big fan of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, so I was confused why a documentary about a morning breakfast would spell “cereal” wrong. Turns out, Milk & Serial was actually a horror movie from filmmaker Curry Barker that reportedly had a budget of $10 or something wild like that and it was released on YouTube. In my quest to stay on the cutting edge of horror, I opened up YouTube, sat through some ads (I can’t afford YouTube Premium, are you nuts?!), and saw what all the fuss was about. In this case, “fuss” meant “bad movie.” Learning that Barker scored a much bigger budget, courtesy of Blumhouse, for his next feature, Obsession, I was cautiously optimistic, especially as the movie scored 200% positive on Rotten Tomatoes or whatever the hell these commercials keep telling me. The good news is that Obsession is definitely a step up from Milk & Serial, though it still falls short of something I’d call a “good movie.”

Bear (Michael Johnston) is finally building up the courage to tell his childhood best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) how much he cares about her, but instead of actually doing it, he jokingly uses a “One Wish Willow” to wish for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. This wish works, but not entirely as intended, as it makes Nikki absolutely psychotic; she stays awake to watch him sleep, she’s temperamental anytime he’s not showing her affection, and she’s dementedly jealous. Bear, as you can imagine, hopes to undo this wish, though the company that makes these One Wish Willows confirms it will only end if he dies — quite the predicament!

Let’s start with the positives! With more money, Barker’s direction is a marked improvement from Milk & Serial, as Obsession has this surreal sheen to the whole thing that makes every scene feel dreamlike, disconnecting the audience from any sense of grounded reality. He also filmed it in the 1.50:1 aspect ratio, making it look more like the framing of old 4:3 TVs, which makes the whole experience feel a bit more claustrophobic. Given the nature of Nikki’s obsession (like the movie title) with Bear, this framing makes the entire movie feel more suffocating, as it prevents the characters from allowing one another much on-screen distance.

Navarette is fantastically committed to this role and deserves lots of praise. She effectively conveys a very sweet and endearing character who deservedly earns the affection of Bear, and the audience, yet can change the inflection in her voice to confirm why she and Bear have only ever just been friends. When she starts to descend down a path of psychosis, she fully throws herself into derangement with both her facial contortions and overall physicality. The actor feels like a true discovery, and hopefully this is just the start of a long career (preferably in horror). Johnston manages to be serviceably pathetic without being entirely embarrassing, quietly pining for Nikki and being too much of a coward to just talk to her, without ever being cringeworthy.

Where the movie suffers is in its overall story and in its script. In addition to not liking Milk & Serial, I was apprehensive about Obsession because I watched the trailers and felt like I got the gist of what this movie was. Turns out, I was completely right! You win again, Wolfman! The entire setup of the movie is a “Monkey’s Paw”: a character makes a wish, has their wish granted, but in a way that comes with consequences. What makes these stories so effective is that it’s the person who makes the wish who has to deal with the consequences — you wish for a million dollars, only to get hit by a car and earn the money in a lawsuit. With Obsession, Bear gets his wish, but it’s Nikki who suffers the consequences, so it feels like it misses the entire point of what “Monkey’s Paw” stories are really about, which is that instant gratification isn’t as fulfilling as it seems. Sure, Bear inadvertently suffers some awkward encounters because of Nikki’s derangement, but nothing that couldn’t be prevented if he had called the authorities to intervene.

You’d think that with a movie called “Obsession,” the filmmakers could have merely made Bear wish that Nikki was obsessed with him — a casual, flippant request that could be easily twisted into something more disturbing. No, he wishes she loved him more than anyone in the world, which meant she became psychotic with love. Nikki loved Bear, so she proceeded to do a number of insane things that nobody has ever done out of “love,” just because we, as an audience, know that this is a “Monkey’s Paw” story. It feels like Barker wanted to try to reinvent the rules of a “Monkey’s Paw” or circumvent expectations, but he doesn’t seem to have understood the rules in the first place. It’s like if you were setting up a vampire movie where these monsters were nocturnal and couldn’t go out into the daylight without exploding, but just arbitrarily decided, instead of drinking blood, they drink piss, and just never explain it. Obsession picks and chooses what rules of familiar wish-fulfillment narratives it wants to honor without bringing anything new to the table. Had Nikki revealed her love to Bear, but admitted it was a familial and platonic love, that would have been more in the spirit of unintended consequences!

Adding more frustration to the entire ordeal is that this was a movie written and directed by a man, starring a man, and it’s the woman who is the victim of all the terribleness, making the whole experience feel just a bit icky. Nikki’s first signals that she’s gone wackadoo is the stereotypical “clingy” behavior of wondering who Bear is calling and why she can’t come to all events he’s attending. I’m not going to outright say the movie is misogynistic, but I’m not not going to say that. Sure, this movie is fiction and Bear isn’t portrayed as a malicious figure, though there’s an inherent ickiness to Bear’s desires and how it’s Nikki who has to deal with the consequences of his actions that gives the whole narrative a sense of male entitlement that’s difficult to shake.

At times, Barker does offer glimpses that there’s more to this story than “Lady Goes Crazy” and that there might be an underlying, otherworldly force that’s pulling the strings, though these concepts are only ever hinted at and then abandoned. I won’t get into full-blown spoilers, but there are clues that “Nikki” might not actually be “Nikki.” This teases some overall mythology that could explain what’s unfolding and hints at how these One Wish Willows came to exist in the first place, but those mythological teases feel like they were just injected into the story to fill time. Had there been some reveal of, “Oh, see, the One Wish Willows were made by a demon and anytime one is used, the demon can come to Earth,” no matter how absurd, it could have justified a variety of my complaints with the premise, and I never got any of that.

Obsession is a vast improvement from Milk & Serial, so that’s nice to see, and with more money, Barker can clearly deliver a more effective experience. Navarette’s performance is the obvious standout and she deserves all of the accolades she’s been earning with the role, but between the ambiguous mythology and overall disconnect between Bear’s wishes and the consequences he suffers, Barker clearly makes a better director than he does a writer, so I look forward to him getting the chance to direct someone else’s script.

Wolfman Moon Scale