‘Obsession’ Star Inde Navarrette Delivers the Year’s Best Performance — So Let’s Talk Awards Season

It’s impossible to talk about Curry Barker’s horrifying feature debut Obsession without mentioning Inde Navarrette‘s star-making performance as Nikki. She starts things off as a confident young woman who is transformed into a possessive, increasingly terrifying shell of her former self after her hapless coworker Bear (Michael Johnston) makes a wish on a novelty toy for her to love him “more than anyone else in the entire world.”

What makes the performance so effective is that she never lets Nikki become a caricature of a possessed girl, even as the film spirals further and further into nightmare territory. Like Jeff Goldblum, who was snubbed for Best Actor for his performance in The Fly, Navarrette manages to maintain a sense of humanity, clinging to fragments of her former self and pleading for mercy as Bear’s wish hollows her out from the inside.

In one of the earlier scenes in the film, Nikki sits across from Bear at a restaurant, her eyes sparkling as she reminds him that she loves him “so, so, so, so, so much.” When Bear asks her if she loves him more than anyone else, she looks around the restaurant with a girlish, slightly bashful expression. “Yes,” she quips, her lips suddenly tight. “More than anyone.” But before Bear can even muster the courage to ask her the question that’s actually on his mind, we already know something terrible is about to erupt. This is truly brilliant stuff.

In Dread Central’s review of , Editorial Director Josh Korngut wrote: “The not-so-secret weapon is Inde Navarrette as Nikki. Her ghoulishness has all the makings of a newly minted horror icon. I’m not exaggerating when I say this performance is genuinely startling. Think of s fireworks in , then imagine she’s been bitten by a Deadite suffering from the world’s worst migraines. Her suffering is nearly as frightening as the suffering she enacts on the world around her. It’s a revelation.”