Curry Barker’s debut feature takes one of horror’s oldest warnings and makes it feel freshly vicious: be careful what you wish for, especially when the wish is another person.
The premise could not be simpler. Boy loves girl. Boy makes a wish. Girl loves him back. Then everything starts to rot.
You think you know this story. Obsession knows you think you know this story, then spends the rest of its runtime tightening the trap.
Written, directed, and edited by Barker, Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5, 2025, before arriving in American theaters on May 15, 2026. Made for under $1 million, the film has earned $148 million worldwide after Focus Features acquired it out of TIFF for around $15 million. It holds a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, matched by a 95 percent audience rating.
Numbers alone do not make a film matter. What they suggest here is more interesting. Obsession has become a rare modern horror success by turning a familiar supernatural hook into something morally ugly, emotionally precise, and difficult to shake.
Think of what Get Out did with the dinner party, what Hereditary did with grief, or what The Babadook did with a children’s book. Obsession does something similar with one of the oldest and most embarrassing romantic fantasies: the wish that someone would simply love you back.
Bear, played by Michael Johnston, is a music store employee and hopeless romantic who gets his hands on a supernatural toy called the One Wish Willow. He uses it to make his longtime crush, Nikki Freeman, played by Inde Navarrette, fall in love with him.
The wish works immediately. Completely. Horrifically.
That is where Barker’s film becomes sharper than the usual “wish gone wrong” story. The horror is not only that Bear’s choice has consequences. It is that he refuses to fully understand what those consequences mean. Nikki’s obsession is not romantic. It is not fate. It is a violation. She did not choose him. She did not choose any of this. The film never lets that fact fade into the background.
This is the moral territory that Weird Science, Love Potion No. 9, and decades of wishful-thinking rom-coms mostly avoided. Obsession enters that territory and locks the door behind you.
Barker came up through YouTube as part of the sketch comedy duo that’s a bad idea, making horror shorts before his microbudget found-footage feature Milk & Serial launched him into the industry. He belongs to a growing wave of YouTube-to-Hollywood horror filmmakers, alongside Danny and Michael Philippou of Talk to Me, Markiplier’s Iron Lung, and Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks, all of whom brought DIY instincts and deep genre literacy into mainstream horror.
That background explains Obsession’s strange, risky rhythm. The film can be funny one second and deeply unpleasant the next, often without warning.
At its best, it plays like a Tim Robinson I Think You Should Leave sketch tilted into the dark: a social nightmare that keeps escalating because nobody knows how to stop it. The comedy becomes horror, the horror becomes cringe, and the cringe becomes something harder to name. This is not monster horror or slasher horror. It is horror built from panic, denial, and the awful momentum of a situation that has already gone too far.
Barker avoids the heavy-handed thesis-making that has weighed down some recent prestige horror. He does not over-explain the rules. He does not bury the film in mythology. He keeps the focus where it belongs: consent, entitlement, male fragility, selfishness, and the violence of wanting someone to feel something they do not feel.
The supernatural device is almost beside the point. The One Wish Willow is not the meaning of the film. It is the tool that makes the meaning impossible to ignore.
Barker’s spiritual ancestors here are less Wes Craven and more Yorgos Lanthimos, particularly the cold moral geometry of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, where the horror comes not only from what happens, but from how long it takes the person responsible to face it.
Shot in just 20 days, Obsession does not look constrained. Cinematographer Taylor Clemons keeps the frame tight and the atmosphere increasingly airless, especially in the second half. The visual pressure mirrors Bear’s moral collapse. He built the trap. Then he realized he was also inside it.
Johnston gives Bear just enough softness to make him uncomfortable rather than cartoonish. He is not a grand villain in the Fatal Attraction mold, not a predator the audience can easily distance itself from. He is worse in a more recognizable way: a person who does something wrong out of longing, then delays accountability because admitting the truth would destroy the fantasy.
The performance sits in a register similar to Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network. You understand why this person did what he did, and that understanding offers no comfort at all.
But the film belongs to Inde Navarrette.
As Nikki, Navarrette has the harder and more haunting role. She plays a woman whose agency has been hijacked, someone who becomes both threat and victim at once. Think of Barry Keoghan’s Martin in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, with that same placid, inevitable menace, then add grief to it.
Navarrette’s obsession is frightening, but what makes it linger is the flicker of something trapped beneath it. At times, Nikki seems almost aware of what is happening to her, as if she is watching herself from inside a locked room.
That is the performance that follows you home.
The film reportedly came close to an NC-17 rating before cuts were made, and it is easy to see why. Obsession is not content to be merely creepy. It pushes its premise into territory that feels intimate, embarrassing, and cruel in the way great horror can be when it stops performing fear and starts producing it.
Its real shock is not gore or spectacle. It is recognition.
The best comparison for Obsession is not another horror movie. It is the memory of something you once justified to yourself, only to understand years later what it really was. Barker creates that delayed dread in real time. Bear does not grasp the damage all at once. He understands it in pieces, and each piece makes the previous one worse.
That is why the film works. It is less interested in jump scares than in moral aftershocks. The supernatural wish is the engine, but the real horror is ordinary: entitlement dressed up as love, selfishness disguised as longing, harm excused because the person causing it is sad.
In another era, in a softer film, Bear could have been the protagonist of a romantic comedy. The sharpest thing about Obsession is that it knows this, then turns that fantasy inside out.
Barker’s next film, Anything but Ghosts, starring Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, is already in the works. After Obsession, that becomes one to watch.
As for this one: see it. Then spend the next few days trying to explain why it bothered you so much. You probably will not enjoy the answer.