Key points
Curry Barker’s new horror film, Obsession, follows a man who gets more than he bargained for when he wishes that his crush would love him back.
The filmmaker, 26, reveals he shot two versions of the ending.
He explains why, after getting his dad’s feedback, he decided to go with the ending he hadn’t originally intended to use.
This article contains major spoilers for Obsession.
Curry Barker didn’t let his obsession get in the way of a perfect ending.
The 26-year-old director tells Entertainment Weekly he had a clear vision for the conclusion of his second horror feature, Obsession, which follows a nebbish young man named Bear (Michael Johnston), who gets a lot more than he bargained for when he wishes for his crush, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), to love him “more than anyone in the f—ing world.”
“I was really obsessed with this Romeo and Juliet ending, actually,” the filmmaker teases of his original idea, which he shot but didn’t end up using after his dad (and others) talked him out of it.
In the final version now in theaters, the twisted story ends with Bear dying by suicide, thus releasing Nikki from the power of his magic wish — made by snapping a “One Wish Willow” stick, a gag gift he bought at a novelty store that, it turns out, actually works.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in ‘Obsession’
Credit: Focus Features /Courtesy Everett Collection
While under its spell, Nikki loses control of her body and mind, overtaken by a dark, desperate version of herself who will do anything — from self-harm to straight up murder — to spend every waking second by Bear’s side.
In Barker’s original “Romeo and Juliet ending,” that nightmare ends with Nikki taking her own life as well.
“We shot both; we shot this ending that you see in the movie, and we shot the ending where she ends it all,” Barker says. “We had shot a ton of different versions of the official ending, the one that’s in the script, the one that I was excited about, and I was like, Okay, we’ll do one ending where [Nikki] survives, but we’ll just do one take of it, and then we’ll move on.“
The director allowed only one take for this version because of the complicated setup — the scene unfolds without any cuts and involves a complex, upside-down camera movement.
“It was a very technical shot, and so we only gave her one where she survives,” he explains. But Navarrette’s “performance was so good,” Barker says, he had to reconsider his initial plan.
“You see her coming to this realization that she’s alive again, and she’s looking around the room, and she looks so disturbed, and I just remember my dad and multiple people around me being like, ‘Dude, I think it’s way more disturbing if she just survives this thing.’ I was like, ‘Ah, you’re right.’ And so we switched it.”
When Nikki, bloodied and battered, regains control of herself and looks around the room, she finds Bear, one of her best friends before his fateful wish, dead in her hands, and another close friend (and casual hookup), Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), also deceased; she had shot him in the head moments earlier while still possessed.
If waking up to all that doesn’t sound disturbing enough, Barker says Nikki also retains her memories of being trapped in a kind of purgatory while under the spell of the One Wish Willow.
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in ‘Obsession’
Credit: Focus Features /Courtesy Everett Collection
“I think she’s experienced awful, awful things in there,” he shares. “I think she’s pretty traumatized by what she saw, and she’s traumatized by not having control of her body. That’s kind of why the Romeo and Juliet ending works for me, because she was taking control for the first time in a while.”
Barker knows he’s not the first to tell a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for — the basic premise for Obsession, he’s noted, is loosely inspired by the first segment of The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror II,” itself a parody of W. W. Jacobs’s short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” What separates his take on the narrative archetype, he says, is the way Obsession explores questions of control and consent.
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“I think what’s interesting is that there is media that has tackled this idea, and hasn’t really delved into the fact that love should be earned and what that actually means when you’re wishing for someone else to love you without their consent,” he explains.
For those interested in how the original ending would’ve looked, Barker says you just might get your wish.
“It would be cool to do a director’s cut or whatever where we do the alternate ending,” he muses. “And I can make it 20 minutes longer.”
Obession is now in theaters.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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