The monster is very much there. The beauty of Obsession, however, is that you don’t know that monster’s going to eat you until it’s fully in view. Of course, blurred lines are central to the success of the slow-burning terror, and their fuzziness played a major role in the way Navarrette both viewed and portrayed Nikki.
“It always gets tricky when we want to talk about consent, a very important issue and conversation,” Navarrette considers. “I think that the film does a really good job explaining how those lines can get blurred, and how one person’s story and experience may not be what other people perceive it to be. It’s very specific to that, and I think with Nikki, you really get it into the nitty-gritty of what that looks like.”
Going into Obsession, one expects to be confronted with thematic horror, with the trauma of what Nikki is going through playing a central role in the viewer’s discomfort and fear. That is, of course, prevalent throughout the film. Full disclosure, though: this bad boy is gonna make you jump in your seat more than once. Seasoned horror fans let out full-on hollers in early festival screenings of Obsession, and those screams were earned.
For Barker, it is about playing with a metaphor for the “modern toxic relationship.” Still, the tangible scares were as important as the thematic ones: “You want to incorporate those scares, and then you want to weave it with all the psychological stuff,” he says.
Meanwhile, Navarrette was excited to, in her words, act nuts and get paid.
“I think it’s one of the best parts of my job,” she says with a laugh. “At least to me, there’s no better shoe to put my foot in.” Humor aside, there’s never a moment that Navarrette lost sight of what her character was going through. “Nikki had a beautiful life. She had wonderful friends; she had trivia night; I mean, what an absolute gift to have all of those things! And then for all of it to be taken away completely out of your control.”
