Film Review: 'Obsession' Outshines 'Wonder Woman 1984' with Darker, More Moral Supernatural Horror

“Wonder Woman 1984” is a weird movie. The film begins with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) wishing on a magic artifact for the person she loves to come back to life. But instead of bringing him back to life, the artifact goes the long way around, and makes him possess another, unwilling man’s body. So Wonder Woman has her romance, and a lot of sex, without ever getting one participant’s consent, and the movie never reckons with how completely horrifying that is.

Curry Barker’s supernatural nightmare “Obsession” is a better version of “Wonder Woman 1984.” You couldn’t call it a remake but it’s certainly playing with the same narrative toys.

The film stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a hapless music store employee with a crush on his co-worker, Nikki (Inde Navarette). Maybe she likes him too, maybe she doesn’t, but he’s too insecure to make his move. In an act of desperation Bear whips out a novelty toy called a “One Wish Willow” and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. It works. Instantly.

Bear can’t believe his good fortune. Nikki adores him, respects him, supports him, wants to spend all her time with him, has sex with him and even makes horrifying altars with the corpse of his dead cat, which he’s a lot less into. There are moments when Nikki suddenly changes personality and looks shocked and horrified at what her life has become. But within seconds she always goes back to “normal,” where she’s so deliriously co-dependent that when Bear’s not home she just stands in one place, waiting for him to return, soiling herself because she’s nothing without him.

Lots of stories are about getting what you wished for and wishing you hadn’t. If the wishmaster is evil, like in the “Wishmaster” movies, the story is about innocent people getting tricked. But when the wisher is evil, or has even one evil thought, the story is about how despicable they are.

“Obsession” begins with a wish that could not be rationalized in a world where wishes were real, and Barker’s vicious screenplay makes a convincing case that even fantasizing about wishing someone else would love you, even though they don’t want to, is a moral failing whether your wish came true or not. How could you — yes, you — be so self-absorbed that you would alter the fabric of reality just to remove someone else’s free will?

When you watch “Wonder Woman 1984” from the perspective of the hapless victim, you experience that same visceral shudder, even though that film is oblivious to its own creepiness. “Obsession,” on the other hand, knows how profoundly wrong this is. And in Barker’s eagerness to make “Obsession” as scary as possible — and it’ll scare the bejeezus out of you — he makes uncomfortable choices. By telling the story from Bear’s perspective he invites you to sympathize with a person who’s done terrible things and, at least initially, is eager to profit from