Curry Barker’s Obsession is a reworking of Fatal Attraction for the era of toxic codependency – and watching it in a full cinema, I could imagine how it must have felt to have seen Adrian Lyne’s film at the time. Building on his YouTube feature Milk and Serial, Barker crafts a narrative that at first seems somewhat familiar – a young man, Bear, played by Michael Johnston, craves the affection of his crush, Nikki, played by Inde Navarette, and in desperation resorts to supernatural means, buying a “One Wish Willow” from a local bric-a-brac store and wish for Nikki to love and need him more than anyone else in the world. Amazingly, his wish comes true, and Nikki becomes obsessed, which is gratifying at first (but occasionally terrifying) and then terrifying in the main (although still somewhat gratifying). Barker cut his teeth making YouTube shorts, and pranking plays a key role in Milk and Serial; here, that oscillation between the terrors and gratifications of toxic codependency makes for a remarkably agile tone, full of vertiginous shifts that are both horrifying and hilarious.

In other words, a fairly straightforward premise quickly gives way to full-blown horror auteurism, much as the film takes us through several different layers of comically creepy commentary. Most immediately, Obsession speaks to the male fear of being “friend zoned,” or emasculated, by the object of affection; one of the few “normal” interactions we see between Bear and Nikki, before he makes the wish, is her ragging him for ordering a pina colada at the local bar, the feminine drink par excellence. This shifts into a crisis of reading intention, especially when the desired women seems to be interested, or seems to fit the fantasy of the man. If Nikki is unreadable in her “natural” state, she’s even more so once she’s started to become obsessed with Bear, and her transition period creates a series of dissonant moments that blur the line between consent and non-consent. On the night after the spell is set, the two are together on his bed, when she suddenly and temporarily “awakens,” whether from or to her new fugue state is unclear, and pushes him away from her in horror, as he scrambles to clarify that he didn’t force anything. Likewise, when she turns up outside his house later on, and assures him that he didn’t take advantage of her, Bear takes this very reassurance as a sign that her consent and agency is somehow impeded.

There’s a profound message here, then, about the nature of desire, and the reliance of desire on unattainability – if not total unattainability, then at least the knowledge that a part of the beloved remains beyond complete possession – which makes it somewhat deflating for Bear to receive everything he has ever wanted from Nikki. Yet there’s also something more specific going on here around a contemporary form of toxic codependency – that of the social media couple, or the couple who mediate each other as if they were online; the demands of a 24-hour adoring gaze that, in Barker’s horror lexicon, produces an array of obscured yet high-alert faces that remain perpetually poised in the background. When Bear first tells his best friend Ian, played by Cooper Tomlinson, about Nikki’s transition, at the music store where they all work, she’s there in the background the whole time, face blurred but fixed in a manic smile as she watches the two friends talking. In another scene, Nikki freezes in a position of domestic servitude, staring at the door for twelve hours while Bear is at work, and not even moving to eat or to use the bathroom. The Insta connection becomes especially clear when Nikki leaves a couple of grainy polaroids in Bear’s lunchbox, with a post-it reading “To my little food critic,” only for her other note to reveal he’s been eating his dead cat, the spiritual sequel to Fatal Attraction’s bunny boiler.

Within this toxic codependency, Barker beautifully sketches out a powerful and unsettling relationship dynamic, one that seems tacitly endorsed by many beloved romcoms. At its core is a female coercive control that demands the man give up everything – friends, family, personal life – for her. There’s no doubt that Nikki, in this incarnation, is a psychopath; if such a thing as toxic femininity exists, then this is it. But as much as Bear might rail against it, he needs and enables this toxic dependency too, as evinced in possibly the most haunting scene of the film, when the “real” Nicky briefly speaks to him in the middle of the night, insisting that she has never truly been with him, and enjoining him to kill her while the “other” Nikki’s is asleep, in response to which Bear simply backs away from the bed, absorbing himself into the darkness from which the “other” Nicky’s obsession has emerged, and in which her face has been periodically obscured. Beneath all his terror, then, Bear needs and fuels Nikki’s craziness, and it’s only after she brutally murders one of their friends does he even consider getting in touch with the manufacturer of the One Wish Willow and attempting to reverse it. Nikki is right, then, to tell Bear that “you wanted this, you wished for this,” and yet the power of the film is that it doesn’t entirely reduce her toxicity to a facet or projection of his flawed masculinity; this is genuine toxic codependency, in which both parties are complicit in their insane scheme.

Despite that darkness, Obsession is very funny at times, reflecting Barker’s origin in online sketch comedy. Some of the best moments see Nikki alternating between trite relationship cliches (“If space is what you need, then take it”) and going completely off the wall in her psychotic-demonic outbursts. What Barker reveals is that a certain amount of toxic codependency is taken for granted, accepted politely as a staple of middle-class society, even when it becomes truly grating, so there’s something hilarious about seeing Nikki exceed even that threshold to insist on Bear’s life as her territory. There’s also a wry comedy in the way that everybody in Bear’s world immediately assumes that he is the only toxic member of the relationship and distance themselves from him because it looks like he’s taking advantage of Nikki, in a kind of bourgeois exercise in consensus-building risk management. Granted, by making the wish in the first place, Bear has orchestrated the situation, and has taken advantage of Nikki in the most profound way, but her behaviour is so excessive that it ruptures this polite and tasteful tendency to blame the man and instead raises deeper questions about heteronormative codependency as an institution in itself.

That sense of institutions ultimately makes Obsession a kind of companion piece to Michael Shanks’ Together in its vision of codependency bereft of a public sphere – or codependency that erodes a public sphere, specifically the third spaces that might have once provided both parties with a place to recalibrate themselves. In both Together and Obsession the core couple retreats from the public – the only time we see Nikki as Nikki, apart from the final moments, is in the bar where she meets Bear and his friends each week for trivia; conversely, when Nikki is under the spell of the One Wish Willow, she does everything in her power to prevent Bear from going back out into the world, including scotch taping their front door closed. No doubt, we glimpse a broader community when Ian hold his guys’ night, but Nikki quickly invites herself and ends up dominating the proceedings with another insane outburst. Scenes like this make it feel that Carter’s critique of codependency goes beyond individual relationships and instead speaks to a world where men and women (whether cis or trans) are expected to be in constant codependence with each other, eroding the male and female-coded thirdspaces that, in the film’s vision, once relieved relationships of their claustrophobia. Certainly everyone here, whether individual or coupled, seems to live alone, to barely exist relationally to the world around them, perhaps explaining why so much of the action unfolds in parked cars, hermetically sealed silos that never quite constellate into a home, let alone a community, but never come with the possibility of a genuine journey or line of flight either. Hence the film’s final structure of feeling: the inherent unhomeliness of a new era of socially mediated codependency, the profound isolation that comes with the demands of a 24-hour gaze, and the together-aloneness of our new digitally denuded public sphere.