In horror movies, sometimes the art of acting is a secondary concern. The main attraction in most horror films is typically the horror itself, whether it’s a high-concept premise, the kill scenes, the setpieces, and so on. It must be said that most great horror movies cannot overlook the craft of acting — for example, unleashing a bloodcurdling scream on cue is more difficult than most people realize, and ends up taking a toll on you physically. Yet the canon of genres thought to be filled with great screen performances has typically excluded horror.

Thankfully, that’s all beginning to change. In addition to the horror film becoming generally reappraised as worthy of cultural reverence, performances like Toni Collette in “Hereditary” have led horror fans and cinephiles alike to demand that the genre be treated with as much artistic respect as any other. Thus, we saw the likes of Amy Madigan win an Academy Award this past March for “Weapons,” the first time something like that had occurred in 30-plus years. Who might be next is anyone’s guess, but those who’ve seen Curry Barker’s “Obsession” are already campaigning for Inde Navarrette to be awarded for her exceptional performance. 

She plays Nikki, a young woman put under a love spell that goes dangerously awry. The role requires a great deal from Navarrette beyond portraying fear, strength, and/or vulnerability. It’s one of the most unique horror characters we’ve seen in a minute, and Barker knew that finding the right actress for the role wouldn’t be easy. As he explained to me during a recent chat, the process of finding the perfect Nikki took a while, but a specific quality Navarrette brought to it was what helped her win the part.

Even though Curry Barker wrote Nikki in a specific way, no other actress could’ve played her as effectively as Inde Navarrette does. Barker’s script contains a remarkable amount of ambiguity and nuance, something which Navarrette captures brilliantly. As Barker explained, finding someone who could encapsulate all the qualities of the character took some time, and in the end, it was a particular attitude that helped Navarrette land the role:

“It was a little bit of a process, as it was for finding everybody, but she had this naturalness to her … She brought something to Nikki. And what I mean by that is if you separate the two characters into Freaky Nikki and Nikki, normal person, she brought something really unique to her…this kind of attitude, this kind of like, ‘I’m a bro too.’…But what Inde really brought was this kind of bro-y kind of sassy [quality] where I was like, ‘Oh, this is great, because it makes Bear feel so much like he’s in the friend zone.'”

As Barker describes, it’s Nikki’s “one of the gang” easygoing quality that confuses Bear about her true feelings, leading him to make the horrible decision to use a One Wish Willow to win her affection. That quality only becomes more unstable and pronounced as Freaky Nikki devolves. Even with this quality, Barker said that Navarrette waited to play all her performance cards until shooting:

“She didn’t show us how far she could go until the day, until we were on set … Of course, we watched movies together, we watched references and stuff … So she was well-prepared, but we were all kind of crossing our fingers like, ‘Hope she can do this.’ And then we were so happy to see that she could.”

The result of Curry Barker and Inde Navarette’s efforts with Nikki is the most singular horror character in a long while. In my opinion, you’d have to go all the way back to Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” or Sissy Spacek in “Carrie” for a comparison. Nikki isn’t a riff on a well-established archetype like, say, Art the Clown is. Instead, she’s neither supernatural nor wholly normal. So much of why she’s disturbing is that both Barker and Navarrette let her be so human. As Barker explained, he wanted to emphasize the reality of the situation:

“It’s the fine line of like, ‘Okay, fine. The magic is real. Let’s move past that.’ Now I get to tell a story about a girl who’s insanely obsessed with a guy to the point where she’ll do crazy things and exploring that and kind of forgetting that it’s a result of magic. And yeah, you’ve got these supernatural elements of her popping back into her body, which was really fun to play with, but I also wanted to lean into just a crazy girlfriend instead of leaning into demonic possessed, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ like a robotic thing.”

In other words, “Obsession” never stops reminding Bear — and us — that Nikki is not a monster or some other entity, but is a real woman whose psyche and personality are being torn asunder. Navarrette’s performance is so disturbing because Nikki is simultaneously a version of herself and not herself at all. It’s a dissonance that on paper might sound impossible to play, but Navarrette makes it look distressingly possible. For that alone, she deserves to be considered when awards start getting handed out next year. Voters, ignore her at your peril.

“Obsession” is in theaters now.