One of the year’s most terrifying cinematic experiences comes from a 26-year-old filmmaker whose career began with YouTube prank videos and an $800 microbudget feature dumped online for free. Yet, the transition makes immediate sense after Curry Barker spends 109 straight minutes stress-testing the structural integrity of your nervous system while forcing you to watch a deeply insecure man make catastrophically selfish decisions in rooms custom-lit for sleep paralysis.
Curry Barker’s Obsession opens with a grown man rehearsing how to confess his feelings to his crush, while his friend tries to gas him up with the kind of half-serious macho confidence that only makes nervous men even more nervous. Bear (Michael Johnston), works at a music store alongside Nikki (Inde Navarrette), his childhood friend and object of near-total emotional fixation. Barker gives their relationship enough woozy, lived-in details to sell their recognisable chemistry early on. Nikki jokes with him casually and treats him with a relaxed affection reserved for somebody she trusts completely. And Bear interprets every interaction as latent romantic possibilities — insecure men can turn basic human warmth into forensic evidence with terrifying efficiency.
Obsession (English)
Director: Curry Barker
Cast: Inde Navarrette, Michael Johnston, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and Andy Richter
Runtime: 109 minutes
Storyline: A music store employee buys a supernatural toy that grants him his wish for his crush to fall in love with him, resulting in horrifying consequences.
That emotional confusion becomes catastrophic once Bear buys a “One Wish Willow” from a crystal shop. The object promises one wish upon snapping a branch in half, and Barker wisely avoids overcomplicating the mythology because the horror already exists inside the desire itself. Bear does not wish for courage, nor for honesty. In a moment of frustration, he wishes for Nikki to “love him more than anything else in the world”.
The film turns vicious almost immediately after the wish takes hold. Nikki suddenly appears in front of Bear with glazed eyes, overwhelming affection, and a manic sexual intensity that initially flatters every lonely fantasy rattling around inside his head. Barker stages these early scenes with a deeply uncomfortable precision because Bear clearly understands that something fundamental has ruptured inside her personality. Johnston plays the panic beautifully during moments where Nikki insists she is happy or says she is not being taken advantage of, since Bear reacts with a jittery defensive terror. He already knows the wish stripped away her autonomy, and every reassurance sounds accusatory because he understands exactly what he did.
A still from ‘Obsession’
| Photo Credit:
Universal Pictures
The genius of the film lies in how patiently Barker corrodes ordinary domestic space. Nikki’s obsession first registers as clinginess, then mutates into territorial control once she starts sealing apartment doors shut with duct tape to stop Bear from leaving for work. She watches him with a frozen stillness of a predator waiting for movement. And Barker fully understands that audiences will tolerate almost anything right up until Navarrette starts moving like a corrupted stop-motion puppet, like somebody manually adjusting a mannequin between frames.
Horror fans are likely going to spend years talking about this performance because Barker gives Navarrette room to push her body and voice into genuinely upsetting territory without sanding down the ugliness for prestige-horror respectability. Watching her snap between lovestruck devotion and feral panic reminded me of Toni Collette in Hereditary or Morfydd Clarke in Saint Maud, and likely shared the same electric feeling audiences must have had watching Isabelle Adjani unravel in Possession for the first time.
Barker’s visual control sharpens the terror further because he understands that shadows work best when they conceal information alongside physical threats. Large sections of Obsession unfold in rooms where your eyes spend several seconds adjusting before locating Nikki somewhere inside the frame. Barker never relies on the dead-air fakeouts or percussion-sting ambushes currently clogging multiplex horror. His tension comes from blocking, negative space, and some hair-raising editing rhythms that steadily remove any sense of safety from ordinary interactions. Horror films spend years trying to manufacture instant-classic scenes through sheer volume and editing aggression, but Barker gets there through one absolutely petrifying scene that simply holds on Nikki standing motionless in darkness, lit just enough to reveal a creepy, uncanny valley distortion of Naverette’s face wailing in the dark, as if every syllable were contaminated.
The film gains much of its power from Barker’s interest in the mechanics of male entitlement within supposedly decent “nice guy” personalities. Bear never resembles a stereotypical predator because the film roots his behavior inside insecurity, loneliness, and emotional passivity, which makes his choices harder to dismiss as monstrous aberration. He continues this clearly non-consensual obsessionship with Nikki, entirely aware that something inside her has been displaced, and hides the truth from friends because he wants the relationship badly enough to tolerate the increasingly horrifying consequences.
A still from ‘Obsession’
| Photo Credit:
Universal Pictures
Barker builds the horror around the realisation that somebody can understand consent intellectually while still violating another person’s autonomy once emotional frustration overrides restraint. Johnston plays these scenes with a useful degree of cowardice that keeps the character believable, since Bear always looks like somebody trying to convince himself that he still deserves sympathy. Even during scenes where he faces unimaginable horror, Barker keeps reminding you that this entire nightmare began because one insecure guy wanted to fulfil his manic pixie dream girl fantasies, devoid of all vulnerability. The internet sure owes every woman in the “bear vs man” debate a formal apology after this.
After Milk & Serial, Barker already looked like a filmmaker with a strong instinct for digital-age anxiety, but Obsession confirms something harder to fake. He understands how embarrassment, desire, resentment, and loneliness distort moral judgment long before violence takes control, which allows the supernatural material to feel disconceetingly plausible even at its most grotesque.
The impressive thing is how physically exhausting the film becomes by the end. Barker sustains this atmosphere of damp panic and social rot for nearly two hours through careful worldbuilding, and two lead performances operating at stupendous intensity. Johnston makes Bear painfully believable as somebody whose self-loathing keeps mutating into entitlement, while Navarrette delivers a horror all-timer performance that will more than likely permanently alter the actor’s career trajectory.
You will probably leave Obsession feeling vaguely feverish, slightly nauseous, and deeply annoyed that a former YouTube prank comedian tested the very limits of soiling yourself (I failed).
Obsession is currently running in theatres
Published – May 29, 2026 11:04 am IST
