By Michael Morano

Curry Barker’s debut turns dating, consent, and loneliness into a bleak and deeply felt horror tragedy.

Obsession, directed by Curry Barker. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, AMC Assembly Row 12, and AMC Boston Common 19 starting May 15.

Bear (played by Michael Johnston) in a scene from Obsession. 

There’s been a lot of buzz for months in the genre press and on the festival circuit about newcomer writer/director Curry Barker’s horror flick Obsession. I’ve now seen twice before, each time with two very different audiences, and each time it felt like two very different movies.

The first time I saw it was in a theater packed with a younger crowd, leaning Millennial/Gen Z. And the impact was Mack Truck-heavy. The crowd was scared, disturbed, and I even heard a few genuine screams. These people were shook.

The second time it was with an older crowd. I don’t think anyone there was under 30. The vibe was much more muted. Folks seemed to like it, but even my own reaction was softened, feeding off their vibes.

This, of course, got me thinking of Fatal Attraction.

Back in 1987, as a Gen X kid, my reaction to Fatal Attraction was, “Hey! That was pretty good. Play Misty for Me did it better, though. Any popcorn left?”

But the Boomers I knew?

They went out of their fucking minds over Fatal Attraction. It became a cultural phenomenon, landing on the covers of Time and People back when that actually meant something, making the term “fatal attraction” a True Crime and journalistic shorthand for “crazy, creepy, stalker-ish behavior.” To say nothing of the line, “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!” which became instantly iconic, even among people who’ve never seen the movie.

Context? Sure…

Fatal Attraction features Michael Douglas playing a lawyer and a paragon of successful, Reagan-era, suburban Dad energy (who is, in my opinion, kind of punchably smug). He has a fling with a book editor played by Glenn Close (who gives a performance for the ages) and then, like the real dick that he is, he cuts her off. Close goes off the rails, and there is an explosion of violence in an ending tacked on by the studio —far weaker than the original, more emotionally brutal version—but I digress.

Fatal Attraction was a vortex of Boomer anxiety. Close represents a newly empowered professional woman of the yuppie era who, as a threat to Douglas’ monolithic dad energy, must be seen as “crazy.” Worries about AIDS and herpes and the consequences of casual sex simmer just beneath the surface, along with unwanted pregnancy, dwindling abortion rights, the instability of new money, the marriage market, and untreated mental illness. The movie tweaked a lot of nerves, all related to Boomer ideas and experiences of relationships and sex. As Tom Hanks said in Sleepless in Seattle: “[Fatal Attraction] scared the shit out of me! It scared the shit out of every man in America!”

In much the same way, Obsession is a cauldron of dating and relationship anxieties among the Gen Z and Millennial crowd. It’ll punch their buttons hard, much the way Fatal Attraction punched the buttons of their parents and grandparents.

Billy Crudup lookalike Bear (Michael Johnston) has a massive crush on one of his best friends, Linda Cardinelli lookalike Nikki (Inde Navarrette, who needs to win an Oscar for this performance). He’s too much of a chicken to flat out tell Nikki he has feelings for her. Rather than grow a pair and be honest, Bear takes an unorthodox route to win Nikki’s affections, and things, of course, go to utter shit.

What Gen Z/Millennial fears about dating, intimacy, and relationships does Obsession wrestle with? Well, it’s not just the anxiety of guys being “friend-zoned” by young women they like—there’s also the anxiety young women feel about “friend-zoning” the men in their lives. There’s the fear of being stuck in the same town, with the same dead-end job, the same circle of friends, going to the same Trivia Nights each Wednesday and not realizing your ambitions. There are a lot of issues about consent to chew over in this flick, and about personal and psychological boundaries, as well as mental illness and drug use. Somebody’s going to write a master’s thesis about the film’s subtexts.

Is Obsession scary? Yes… I won’t go into details, but this tale of (maybe?) unrequited love is, above all else, really, really sad.

Obsession moves from one highly effective horror set piece to the next. You could argue that these sequences feel episodic, and perhaps they do—but that misses the point. Each one grows out of emotional, character-driven escalation, and in turn deepens the emotional groundwork for what follows.

More than a horror movie, Obsession is a tragedy. And it’s a very effective one. Bear’s tragic flaw is cowardice, but you can understand it. He’s living a crummy life, and even before the events of the movie, he’s stuck living alone in his late grandma’s house without a lot of prospects, and he loses one of his main emotional supports. But just as with Hamlet, Bear’s paralysis leads to suffering for nearly everyone around him. Both times I saw Obsession, I left the theater feeling massively bummed out.

I think Obsession might prove to be a classic because of how thoroughly it illustrates how messed up dating and loneliness have become for younger people today. I really hope Gen Z and Millennial young’uns can settle in and catch double features of Fatal Attraction and Obsession with the older people in their lives. It might lead to some fruitful family discussions. Or explosions of violence?

But even if it doesn’t prove to be a classic, there’s no denying Obsession delivers dump trucks of jolts, sharpened by a profound melancholy.

Author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano would love to take a print of Fatal Attraction for a free movie night at the Boomer retirement haven The Villages in Florida.