I’d intended to watch Chained this past week, since the novel I finished reading last week was heavily influenced by it. But then I got a chance to see an advanced screening of Obsession through my membership in the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers.
I’ll skip to the end and say that if you like horror, you should see this movie. Full stop. It was so good and so well done. I don’t watch trailers for movies anymore, so I went into this cold. The experience was great knowing nothing about it. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I’ve watched the trailer and–well… I don’t know if I’m just aware of it more as an adult and a writer, but marketing departments don’t give a crap about pacing or story development or earned reveals. That’s why I avoid trailers.
It’s the classic story of boy secretly loves girl who just thinks of him as a friend. But boy is too much of a pansy to have an honest conversation about his feelings with the girl, so uses magic to make her fall in love with him. Then it all goes horribly wrong.
I don’t think it’s spoiling anything for that surface level synopsis. This is a horror movie after all and we know what we’re getting into here. The story also isn’t very original. It’s a well worn trope across many genres. So what makes this movie so good? Because a good story told well makes a good movie, even if you know the story, even if you’re reasonably sure how it will end up because you came to see a horror movie and not a romantic comedy.
But what makes this movie great is the performance of Inde Navarrette as the objet d’amour. The over the top, unhinged moments aren’t even the best parts of her performance. At a party, she reads an excerpt from the novel she’s writing, and in the barely constrained intensity of this moment, you couldn’t hear a sound in the theater. Everyone was holding their breath, waiting for the moment to shatter. When it did, it was a meant-to-be-light-hearted joke that both eased the tension of the moment as well as ratcheting up the tension of the story. Because we, the audience, knows what’s really going on.
Speaking of that kind of moment, that’s the kind of thing that makes this movie so good in my opinion. The tension ratchets up, twisting us in our seats, and then there’s a little light-hearted moment that releases it. Until a certain point in the story, and then there’s only intensity piling on.
The movie hasn’t released yet, so I’m not going to go into a spoiler-y review. But it’s a good movie that’s worth the watch. If you’re still not sure and you want to watch the trailer, here you go.
Bonus content, a bit of spoiler.
If you’re observant, you’ll notice that on the picture I posted as the cover image of this review, which was the splash screen for the advanced screening, there’s a phone number on the screen. Of course I texted the number. I had to opt in to receiving messages, obviously for legal reasons. But since Wednesday, I have received 28 text and voice messages from Nikki ranging in delivery from sweet to psychotic. I know I was bagging on the marketing department earlier in the post, but this is a grand slam.
