Inde Navarrette has captivated audiences with her scarily nuanced portrayal of Nikki in Curry Barker's low-budget box office sensation, Obsession — a chilling exploration of the darker side of modern masculinity, disguised as a familiar cautionary tale.
But behind Nikki's infamous grin is a character Navarrette has fiercely defended from the very beginning. Author, critic and host of The Final Girls podcast Anna Bogutskaya chatted with Inde Navarrette about the making of Obsession and the risks she took in bringing Nikki to life.
THE SCARIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD
Anna Bogutskaya
Inde Navarrette has been talking about Nikki for over a year, ever since the independent horror film Obsession premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness in 2025. I was at that festival, and could not get a ticket for love nor money nor bribery for the buzziest screening of the event. A year on, Obsession has grossed over $520 million worldwide, made its director Curry Barker into the promised one of horror filmmaking, TIFF the launchpad for future blockbusters, and Inde Navarrette an overnight sensation. "I felt like at the time that if that was the biggest my career had ever got, that I would take that night at Midnight Madness and just hold it close to my heart", she tells me over an evening Zoom call, clear-eyed and poised in a way that discombobulates anyone who still has her maniacally attached Nikki in their minds. That stretched smile and squinty eyes. The maniacally, uber-ultra-mega anxiously attached Nikki has been the sort of breakout role that actors and their agents fantasise about."
When she read the script, Navarrette knew exactly what she wanted to do with Nikki: "I felt like to me this was a story of the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody. I fought for the role and I auditioned multiple times. I really, really, really felt like I wanted to do her justice. I didn't want this to be another crazy girlfriend story. I felt like it was so nuanced and so real and so raw." Pundits have been trying to diagnose the magic box office sauce in Obsession: is it the Gen-Z, the YouTube, or the Inde of it all?
The film roughly adapts, like many have before it, the "The Monkey's Paw" trope: a morality lesson found originally in the 1902 short story by W.W. Jacobs. Be careful what you wish for, basically. If you've managed to only experience Obsession through memes, a cursory summary of the story that's taken box office and Hollywood pundits by storm: an introverted guy called Bear pines for his best friend Nikki and, frustrated with his own inability to vocalize his feelings to her, he wishes that she fell in love with him. To Bear's surprise, his wish is magically granted. In an instant switch, Nikki becomes completely devoted to him to a pathological degree. What follows is Bear's dream and any woman's nightmare. A montage shows them frolicking, caught up in those first, effervescent months of coupledom. The nightmare is knowing that the entire romance is forcibly one-sided. Nikki is not present for any of the kisses, cuddles or cutesy dinners. From Bear's point of view, this wish-gone-wrong is the best and worst thing to happen to him. His dream girl falls madly in love with him, but it goes sour, as all magically granted wishes will not do. But for Nikki, it's a horror show from start to finish. To some, the scares come from the bunny boiler trope: a woman driven mad by her unrequited feelings for a man. To others, myself included, the terror is actually in the glimmers of the real Nikki that peak through Inde Navarrette's performance: submerged somewhere else, imprisoned in her own body, unable to control what it does or says, screaming somewhere far away.
Most of that comes down to Navarrette's performance. There are innumerable risks to a role like this: "I knew going in that I wanted to shock myself and I wanted to leave some vulnerability of the character to the day to play the realness of it, and that's risky because if you're not doing, you know, the work, then is it going to be there on the day?" The filmmakers only had twenty days to shoot the film. When Barker asked Navarrette to show him what she had prepared for Nikki’s "freakouts", she said no. "I remember the first time that I said it, I was so dead serious, and he thought I was joking," she recalls. That's a bold move, brave even, I tell her. Navarrette was happy to talk through what her character was feeling, what was going through her head, but unwilling to rehearse what she knew were the pivotal moments of the film. She recalled telling Barker: "I just want you to trust me. I don't want to make you mad. I'm not doing this to upset you. I'm not doing this because I want to go home and sleep. I'm very serious as an actor, and I want to let you know that this is what I need."
One of the first scenes they shot was a make out scene between Nikki and Bear. In the middle of it, Nikki snaps back into herself, and for a moment is overtaken by terror and confusion. The direction she got from Barker was: "While you're doing it, I want there to be this thought process: recognise your surroundings, question it, and then I want you to look at him and the fear to come in. And I want that all to happen in three seconds." Nailing that scene was a turning point in their relationship, building an unspoken kind of trust: "So every single switch that you see on screen happened that day. I did not rehearse it, and that is what I felt like was needed." Nikki's freakouts (or switches) have become iconic at lighting speed and her demented grin is bound to be a low-cost, popular Halloween costume this year. But Obsession's true horror is hidden in plain sight: "Whenever we think about the worst things that have ever happened to us, at least for me, I see the before. I try to remember the during. If my brain will let me, I remember the shock and realisation, and all I can remember is the after."
At any given point in the film, Navarrette's performance is doing double duty: "whenever she's Wish Nikki, I wanted to play on kind of that biological response of what is going on because that's what Bear's experiencing. He does not know what's going to happen and why is she acting this way. But then also whenever that's happening, to add just a little bit of pain wherever I could to remind the audience where the Real Nikki was. I knew that if I added that, that there was going to be an audience that understood it, and I never wanted the audience to lose where the real Nikki was." The ever present layer of Real Nikki bubbling under the largesse of Wish Nikki was a conscious choice between Navarrette and Barker: "Very early on in prep work Curry and I decided to create this idea that whenever she pops back into her body at the beginning, she pops in from where she was before. Then, as she fights to see through her own eyes is when she starts to realise what Bear is doing, a person that she considered to be her friend, and not only a person that she considered to be her friend that she listened to, that she cared about, that she opened up to, that she deemed to be safe, and how fucking horrific that is." In other words: she played Nikki like the victim of the whole thing, rather than the crazy girlfriend. Navarrette's performance wordlessly articulates those glimmers: "You start to see the pain and the terror amplified at the very beginning. It's confusion, and then it turns into terror, and then it turns into absolute desperation, and then it turns into fury."
Even now, millions of dollars and endless red carpet appearances and photoshoots and interviews later, Navarrette loves Nikki: "I'll always protect Nikki. There's a saying that says darkness can only live in areas where light doesn't shine, and I think that us as people do not show aspects of ourselves that we have been taught that are unlovable or unlikable, and I want to create characters that showcase what humans experience, and I think that's why horror is so beloved because it showcases things that we are not comfortable showcasing as a society."
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