A recent sort of “new wave” movement in horror films is discarding old ideas that were based only on scaring you. I offer two examples.
My first example is called Sleep. It’s the debut feature of Korean writer and director Jason Yu, telling of a young wife, played by Jung Yu-mi, who notices that her husband, played by Lee Sun-kyun, is having increasingly alarming sleepwalking episodes, at one point eating raw meat from the fridge and then trying to crawl out of an upstairs window. A psychiatrist diagnoses him with REM Sleep Behavior Disorder and prescribes medication. But it doesn’t get better right away. Meanwhile she gives birth to a baby, and the young mother’s fears that her husband could harm the newborn lead her to place increasing restrictions on his sleep, such as tying him up and bundling him into a tight sleeping bag. He’s just as upset as she is, and he agrees to whatever she demands, but the fear spirals out of control to the point where the wife starts to seem more dangerous than the husband. With new medication he starts to get better, but now she’s too far gone.
Sleep cleverly uses the secret fear and anger that can often go unexpressed in a marriage to portray how the idea of total togetherness can veer into self-destruction. It’s beautifully and precisely directed. It also doesn’t try to resolve the question of what caused all this, leaving us in a similar kind of uncertainty to that experienced by the characters.
My second example is Obsession, which has been a surprising hit in theaters this summer. It’s the second feature from writer-director Curry Barker. Much less restrained than Sleep, but similar emotionally, it has a humorous streak (Barker got started with comedy videos) along with an authentic basic idea, the dangerous similarity between love (or more precisely, being “in love”) and obsession.
The beginning of the film is inauspicious: Barron, a young man played by Michael Johnston, is being coached by his stereotypically juvenile friend on how to tell a woman friend that he’s interested in her romantically. Johnston plays Barron (“Bear” for short) as a jumble of self-conscious anxiety, the classic “shy guy.” The young woman in question is Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, who seems content to just be Bear’s friend. But he’s too nervous to ask for more.
Barker uses a throwaway supernatural gimmick: a novelty toy that Bear finds in a weird gift shop called a “One Wish Willow” a stick that grants one wish when you crack it. He wishes that Nikki would love him more than anything else in the world. This is a “monkey’s paw” variation on the old saying “careful what you wish for.”
I won’t spoil things by describing the escalating consequences of this wish being granted. It does get bloody and gory towards the end. It’s all handled with deft humor, though, and with a surprising touch of compassion and even tragedy. Navarrette is fantastic as Nikki. Of course when she becomes completely obsessed with Bear, it stops being fun and becomes creepy. Furthermore, Bear has essentially taken away her free will, which is very harmful to this person he thinks he loves. Barker exposes the adolescent romantic love idea as superficial at best, because it sees the loved one as an object, and when boundaries fail, even for people in love, you lose the sense of self that is needed in order to really be present in a relationship.
Obsession is emotionally intense, a horror fable designed to reveal truths about ourselves we’ve tried to avoid.
