There are plenty of terrifying monsters in modern horror, but Obsession zeroes in on the most horrifying nightmare of them all: a man who doesn't understand consent.
Curry Barker's Obsession premiered at TIFF's Midnight Madness block last September. I love TIFF—I mean, I've never actually been, but my old office was on the 9th floor of a building beside where they run it:
I am 80% certain this was for Ford v Ferrari, and 65% certain that it's Matt Damon. Wow, I can't believe I got so close.
Obsession was a hit; it got picked up by Focus Features, and has become one of the most talked-about horror films of the year. And that's because of two very simple things: it's incredibly well acted by the cast, and incredibly well executed by the filmmakers. It has also made a shitload of money.
I like to imagine the producers are sitting on a fat stack of cash like Huell and Kuby from that one scene in Breaking Bad.
The Film
I've heard people refer to this as a "YouTuber" movie—alongside a number of other recent films like Markiplier's Iron Lung, Kane Parsons' Backrooms, and Chris Stuckmann's Shelby Oaks—but I think that label is doing a disservice. YouTube gives grassroots filmmakers a platform to distribute their work without a studio, without a distributor, and without permission. The next generation of filmmaking talent isn't going to come from film school. It's going to come from people who started shooting at sixteen because the tools and the audience became more accessible.
Curry Barker and Cooper Tomlinson from "That's a Bad Idea", their viral sketch comedy and horror channel.
Curry Barker came up through YouTube sketch comedy, and Obsession runs on the same logic as a great comedy bit: rigid escalation, precise timing, and the understanding that the setup and the punchline are the same event viewed from different angles. Barker knows how to hold a shot just a beat too long, stretching a mundane interaction until it snaps into something sinister.
The horror and the dark comedy here aren't in sequence—they're simultaneous. By the midpoint, a scene can shift from funny to genuinely disturbing in the time it takes to cut to a reaction shot, and both registers are doing full work (the audience at the showing I went to was constantly jumping between laughing out loud and shitting their pants).
The premise is dead simple. Bear—played by Michael Johnston—is a music store employee with a longtime crush on his coworker Nikki (played to perfection by Inde Navarrette). He finds a supernatural trinket called the One Wish Willow, and after chickening out on professing his feelings to her, he makes a wish for Nikki to fall in love with him.
And then the movie spends the next ninety minutes making sure you feel terrible about the fact that you sympathized with him.
The Thesis
What Barker understands—and what makes this film smarter than its "monkey paw" premise might suggest—is that the scariest moment in this movie isn't the violence (or Nikki's insistence on standing creepily in the corner of dark rooms). It comes much earlier than that. It's the moment Bear realizes what's happened, and decides he's okay with it.
That's the film's thesis: love obtained without consent isn't love. It's possession. And every horror beat that follows is an extension of that, dialled up to eleven.
This movie is carefully balanced on Inde Navarrette's performance. She has to play a recognizable person, and then something increasingly unrecognizable. Navarrette doesn't just play a monster; she plays the terrifying emptiness of a person whose agency has been scooped out. The horror builds in the uncanny, robotic compliance of a partner who only exists to fulfill a cursed wish. Her transformation from a vibrant, recognizable human into a hollowed-out puppet is where the film finds its real terror.
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Bear gets exactly what he asked for, and the movie forces us to sit in the room and be uncomfortable with it. When the horror arrives, it arrives because you believed in her before it did. Michael Johnston as Bear has the less visible job: the film doesn't position him as a victim, and it doesn't particularly ask you to sympathize with him. He made the wish. That's the line, and Barker doesn't walk away from it.
The social commentary is present and doesn't over-explain itself. Thematically it shares a similar through-line as last year's Companion: a man designing a woman's love rather than earning it, and what that actually is underneath the romantic framing. They approach it from opposite ends (Companion externalizes the violation while Obsession internalizes it), and as a result, this film handles that theme much better. Companion had to underline it. Barker trusts the audience.
The Verdict
The final act is probably the weakest part of the movie. Instead of leaning into the suffocating, psychological dread it built so carefully, the script suddenly feels the need to explain the mechanics of the nightmare. It trades the chilling ambiguity of Bear’s domestic trap for a more conventional, spelled-out climax. The movie is scariest when it’s a quiet observation of obsession; when it tries to tie up its loose ends, it loses some of that claustrophobic bite. Even then, it's a whip-smart script that I have very few gripes with.