Toronto film festival: Writer-director Curry Barker follows up $800 YouTube hit Milk & Serial with a frighteningly effective, and head-smashingly gory, cautionary tale
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his year’s Sundance saw the real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play with the grotesque reality of being literally stuck to one another in the body horror Together, a wincingly effective lark that turned codependency into a curse. It didn’t really find its audience upon too-wide release this summer, a campaign that couldn’t succinctly explain the plot or convey a tone that went from horror to comedy and back again.
At Toronto, YouTuber turned film-maker Curry Barker’s similarly themed Obsession should be an easier sell when it gets swiftly bought and packaged (it’s entering the festival as a sure-to-be-fought-over sales title). It’s a cleaner, more concise pitch – love spell gone wrong – and its reaction-securing moments of horrible violence even more alarming, a Midnight Madness winner that will probably live on past the witching hour.
It’s the perfect next chapter for Barker, who found fame last year when his $800-budgeted online prankster horror Milk & Serial made headlines for being far better than it had any right to be (and better than the majority of horror films with far higher production costs). Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that he knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.
