“It’s Not Me”: Inde Navarrette’s brilliant non-naturalistic performance in Obsession

Johanna Isaacson

Obsession tells the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), a lost young man who is in love with his friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), an independent young woman. Rather than render himself vulnerable he uses a novelty item to wish for her intense, unconditional love, and gets more than he bargained for. Before Bear’s curse, Nikki was salty, forthright, and ambitious. As Bear’s “dream girl” she takes on the persona of the well-worn trope, the “manic pixie,” giving up her own ambitions to quirkily help Bear fulfill his own. Or rather, she tries and fails to take on this persona, exposing its fundamental horrors.

In Obsession, the seemingly spontaneous emotions of a woman following romantic codes are revealed as labor, and this revelation is largely dependent on Inde Navarrette’s brilliant, non-naturalistic approach to the role. Her talent has been widely noted in reviews, but I predict that as this film becomes the subject of academic criticism, less attention will be paid to her performance than to director Curry Barker’s (admittedly fascinating) direction and screenplay, as well as to audience reception and to the larger ascension of YouTube creators. The lack of focus on acting in scholarly work stems from laudable impulses to concentrate on the medium’s particular formal properties. However, it is important that we consider how performance styles and choices complement or contradict the film language of shots, sound, and editing.

Critics’ omission of performance is especially problematic because, historically, women’s primary access to creativity in cinema has been acting, as they have been excluded from production roles. Even as this is changing, the lack of attention to women’s performances in horror films deny us full access to the ways these “monstrous” interpretations of feminized behavior and roles estrange women’s naturalized care work and emotional labor.

Horror films are rife with masterful acting that refuses naturalism and instead estranges women’s roles. Some recent tour de force examples of these typical roles of mother, wife, and maid are Toni Collette in Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), Mia Goth in Pearl (Ti West, 2022), and Betty Gabriel in Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017). Not only are there few academic discussions of these performances, but none of these three actors were nominated for Oscars despite widespread ecstatic praise. Many attributed these snubs to horror’s degraded status, but I believe more is going on. These non-naturalistic performances are socially transgressive, unveiling not only fears of the possible demands and anger of wives, mothers, and maids, but of the labor and terror that goes into performing femininity. The non-naturalistic techniques required to expose the taboo aspects of these roles are akin to Bertolt Brecht’s notion of the Verfremdungseffekt, or V–effekt, (translated as estrangement effect or alienation effect) a radical approach to performance that intends to sharpen both the actor’s and the audience’s critical faculties through gestures, postures, and speech. When wielded by contemporary actresses, this method ruptures our assumptions about women’s needs, behaviors, and reactions to their social context. The purpose of this method, Elin Diamond argues, is to “defamiliarize what ideology makes seem normal, acceptable, inescapable.”

These performances expose what Alva Gotby calls naturalized “emotional reproduction.” This labor is made more insidious by its opacity. To make this work visible, Gotby argues, it must be unveiled “as an acquired capacity rather than something inherent in particular subjects.” The virtuosity of acting itself draws attention to the production of emotion as a skill. Women’s non-naturalistic acting highlights the seeming paradox pointed out by Gotby, that it takes hard work to make feminine emotions appear natural, passive, reactive, non-social, and spontaneous.

Young women may seem to be exempt from these emotional requisites. Many proclaim that Gen Z has come of age into a post-feminist moment where traditional roles of wife and mother are optional. However, young women’s widespread heteropessimism points to the truth. In an age where precariously employed women who identify as heterosexual must choose from a field of pickup artists, incels, and neo-traditionalist young men, dating itself is complex emotional labor. Inde Navarrette’s performance in Obsession follows Florence Pugh in Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), and Sophie Thatcher in Companion (Drew Hancock, 2025), as they illustrate, through non-naturalistic acting, the minefield of roles on offer—Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Pick Me Girl, Trad-Wife-in-waiting—as young women face patriarchal violence lurking beneath contemporary “romance.”

Obsession points out these terrors by taking on the tropes of the romantic comedy. After Bear makes his wish, Nikki finds excuses to be constantly near him. Yet, this is not immediately depicted as the behavior of an obsessed woman. Instead, we see a typical “falling in love” montage as the couple cuddle, cook, play instruments, and flirt accompanied by romantic music, which distorts as we see hints of inequality and pathology. Nikki tries to close Bear’s laptop to make out, but he reopens it. Nikki gazes at Bear adoringly as they watch a movie. Bear gently takes her chin and points her face back at the screen. Following this montage, we settle into a date between the two at a restaurant. Here Nikki begins by acting as the Pick Me Girl, lavishing Bear with attention while muttering “bitch” under her breath when Bear describes a female teacher who once contradicted him.

Keeping it light, Nikki asks Bear what he wants to do with his life. The directionless young man treats the question as a joke, saying he wants to be a food critic to get free meals. Nikki plays along with him, but tiny furrows and concern mix in with her cool-girl responses. Before Bear’s wish, she was about to change her whole life to become a writer. Now she gives him a cherished keepsake from her mother, a “tiger’s eye” stone that is supposed to support confidence and will power. Handing over this treasure signifies that she has ceded all her ambition to support this aimless young man. This once-woman is now a Manic Pixie Dream Girl whose subjectivity is sacrificed as she is reduced to pretty muse.

When Bear asks about the gift Nikki replies: “Bear I love you so, so, so, so, so much. I don’t think I could live without you,” her face somehow radiating intense love and sadness at once. Yet rather than acknowledge the strangeness and unfairness of her sacrifice, Bear confronts her with a lie she has told him to justify her sudden affection: “Does your dad really have cancer?” Nikki’s face freezes, and she tilts her head slightly. She finally must be honest. “No,” she says. Then, as if just discovering her ability to say “no” she repeats the word twelve times, imbuing it with intensifying fury. Yet, because of Bear’s wish, her rage can’t be directed at him, and so she smiles as she screams. Anger devolves into childishness. Giving up all poise and righteousness, she sob-whines: “I thought we were having a nice date.” “We are having a nice date,” Bear assures her. At this, she suddenly transforms into adult, self-possessed Nikki again, demonstrated by a steeliness that overtakes her features, as she grapples with her confounding status as a permanent sex-slave. “Then why does it matter?” she asks coldly. Bear shrugs off the question. An abrupt cut shows the couple having sex. During the act, Nikki’s face turns listlessly away from Bear, though she continues to emit enthusiastic moans. Navarrette’s brilliantly mobile acting escalates a “normal” date into a showcase of romantic impasse faced by women in a so-called “post-feminist” world that has deepened and obscured patriarchal norms rather than dispelling them.

This horror reaches one of many frenetic peaks when Nikki crashes her former friend/lover, Ian’s (Cooper Tomlinson) party. The aggressively masculine Ian is both foil and complement to Bear’s nice guy, with the film’s two young men showing that both types feed into Nikki’s doom. From the film’s beginning, Ian influences Bear to refrain from confessing his true feelings to Nikki, rather encouraging him to “neg” her with the moniker “Freaky Nikki,” a name he knows she hates. We later find out that Ian has been sleeping with Nikki, though he is emotionally indifferent toward her. Still, he professes to show concern that Bear is taking advantage of Nikki’s poor mental health to date her. Yet, instead of including her in a wider sociality, he bans her from his party, daring Bear to come alone to his “boys’ night.” Of course, Nikki forces Bear to bring her anyway. When Ian confronts him about this, Bear notes that it’s not actually a boys’ night since their friend Sarah (Megan Lawless) was invited. To this, Ian responds, “Sarah did nothing wrong,” indicating that Nikki’s uncool, excessive emotions are “wrong” and justify her ostracism.

Thus, when Nikki arrives at the party, she is already stigmatized. Still, she pursues her prime directive and perches on a sofa, gazing at Bear adoringly, oblivious of everyone else. When a party game dare forces Bear to switch seats away from her, she says childishly, “I showered baby.” A male partygoer jokes, “Geez, Bear what kind of spell did you put on her?” In response to this, Nikki explodes into wild laughter, breaking with social conventions by obeying them too enthusiastically. That is, Nikki is supposed to laugh at men’s jokes, but she can’t calibrate the “correct” volume and duration of a cool girl’s laugh.

Thus, Nikki’s behavior not only denaturalizes the “cool girl’s” proper courtship etiquette, but her place in larger social structures. At a party, men should inhabit center stage, joking and drinking, while “Pick Me Girls” remain on the sidelines: supporting, laughing, flirting, and never taking offense (it is no accident that Obsession fails to pass the Bechdel test). At once spellbound and battling against her imprisonment, Nikki explodes these social codes. During the same party game, she responds to a dare by reading from a novel she has been working on, an incestuous version of “Hansel and Gretel,” replete with macabre details such as: “He would relent and choose to lie beside me like he had many nights before. If not, I would fillet his meaty forearm, roll it like a stick of licorice and insert the flesh between my legs.” She stands and centers herself in the middle of the crowd while vividly reading her work, imbuing the characters she has invented with theatrical, strangely accented voices. This perversely “uncool” rebellion reveals that “normal” young women are not meant to take up space nor exhibit creativity.

The “Pick Me Girl,” is expected to stay impassive, treating bad behavior as a joke. If, for instance, her boyfriend kissed another girl as part of a party game, the codes require her to laugh it off. Yet, when Bear picks a Jenga card telling him to kiss the person on his left, Sarah, Nikki emphatically does not play along. Instead, she abruptly stands and fixes her face in an exaggerated pout-frown. From there she walks robotically behind Sarah’s seat, still wearing the frown mask. With seemingly super strength she pulls Sarah’s chair back and kneels stiffly before Bear, puckering her lips exaggeratedly. After a few long seconds Bear gives her a perfunctory kiss, after which she sighs deeply as if she has experienced true romance. Gazing deeply at Bear, she speaks softly, as if they are the only two people in the room: “No one on this earth will ever comprehend what it feels like to love someone as much as I love you.” Without transition, her voice then becomes loud and impersonal, as if she were making a political speech: “And everyone in this room will die never feeling the strength of connection I have felt with my Bear.” When, finally, Ian asks her if she’s okay, Nikki once again transforms, summoning the cool girl she knows everyone wants to see. “I’m just kidding guys,” she says lightly, laughing and trying to get them to play along. Rapidly swiveling again, she then musters the old Nikki, who was honest and straightforward, and says in a deadpan, resigned voice, “K’ fine, I’m not joking. Deal with it.”

Rather than “deal with it,” Ian offers the crowd jello shots, pretending nothing happened. Nikki returns to fondling Bear but is suddenly struck with intense fear. Backing away from him, her body moves jerkily, conjuring horror tropes of uncanny possession. Her screams are pure and terrible: “It’s not me!” Before anyone can move, she breaks a bottle and smashes it into her face. Following this, her features seem to disaggregate into component parts. Her head tilts and her eyes widen like a sweetly repentant child who has acted naughtily, but her mouth gapes, gulps, and smiles in demented contortions, conjuring demonic possession. During these fluctuations she repeats, “I’m so sorry” and laughs wildly. Says Navarrette of her character: “She has no bodily autonomy. [Imagine how] terrifying it would be to watch your life being lived through your own eyes and you have no control over it.”

Jason Read argues that the theories and debates about Obsession are its most interesting elements. Such engaged participation is inspired, asserts Bertolt Brecht, not when audiences are immersed in an “entertainment” but when they are estranged, forced to think rather than purely feel. Inde Navarrette’s alienating, jolting, theatrical performance of a woman simultaneously obsessed, possessed, and terrorized does not allow for simplistic empathy or antipathy. Instead, Navarrette forces us to engage with the wider context in which Gen Z navigates love and dating. In her theatrical non-verisimilitude, then, Navarrette accesses a deeper realism. This is realism as Brecht defines it, “Realist means: laying bare society’s causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators…” In the viewpoint of the dominated, often glimpsed in horror, realism allows us insight into femininity itself as a painful, exhausting performance compounded by the compulsion to call it love.

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