REVIEW

In Haunting, Hilarious ‘OBSESSION’ A “Nice Guy” Wishes His Way Out of the Friend-Zone

By Matt Oakes · May 13, 2026

Mild-mannered Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush on his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). The trouble is, she’s very much out of his league. This doesn’t prevent Bear from harboring romantic feelings, or from planning to finally gather the courage to ask her out on a proper date – and no, regular trivia night with their mutual friends and coworkers Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) does not count. Putting the hopeless in hopeless romantic, Bear is the kind of “nice guy” accustomed to finishing last, though even he can’t quite bring himself to weaponize his cat’s unexpected death as a sympathy play when Nikki nudges him toward trivia despite the “other things” he claims to have going on. It’s a funny, pathetic little beat, but it also throws us slightly off-kilter. Bear’s fixation on Nikki doesn’t read as simple puppy love, but as something already verging on sinister – doubly so with the film being called Obsession and filmmaker Curry Barker only just beginning to toy with the audience.

When he finally gets the golden opportunity to man up and reveal his feelings, he balks. Fortunately, he has purchased a “magical” totem at a novelty shop: a supernatural “One Wish Willow” that grants him a single wish. Naturally, he wishes for Nikki to love him. More than anyone else on earth. Unfortunately, the wish stick is no gimmick, giving new meaning to the phrase “be careful what you wish for” in this psychologically harrowing and darkly hilarious nightmare of escalating obsession and control.

As soon as Bear exacts his wish, Nikki’s immediate and unwavering devotion flips on like a light switch and instantly starts causing all kinds of chaos. For one, Nikki isn’t subtly revealing some long-lingering crush on Bear; she’s straight-up fawning over him. Obsessed. She doesn’t want him to leave her side, throws herself at him physically, and makes up weird excuses for her strange behavior that, upon even the slightest fact-checking, turn out to be totally bogus. It’s clear to us that Bear’s wish has rewired Nikki, twisting her psychology until she’s less the real, complicated person he supposedly fell in love with and more a doting marionette on strings. But Bear looks for every excuse he can to explain away her sudden swing in feelings – she took Molly! Her dad is dying! She has a stomach bug! – hoping that her affection just so happens to coincide with his wish, rather than acknowledge the weird side effects of her forced affection piling up fast. What follows is a devastating, darkly comic reckoning with domination dressed up as desire, as Obsession mines both horror and uncomfortable laughter from romantic fantasies curdling into violent, unchecked obsession.

Obsession pulls off a very tricky balancing act, being legitimately scary and darkly hilarious, often within the same scene, as it shifts back and forth between dread and nervous laughter with impressive precision. A lot of this is due to Navarrette’s performance, which modulates between subtle breaks in her voice that imply a kind of creeping psychosis and sudden explosions of full-blown screaming, only to snap back into gentle, calming coos. Just as the film plays with shadow, expertly commanded by cinematographer Taylor Clemons, obscuring figures in darkened rooms at night, so too does it allow the negative space in communication to become pregnant with all kinds of meaning.

A pause can read as wounded confusion in one moment, manipulative calculation in the next, and then as some awful, glitching byproduct of Nikki’s rewired devotion. The silence between words becomes its own kind of horror show, forcing us to question whether we’re watching genuine feeling, supernatural compulsion, or some grotesque fusion of the two. It calls to mind Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead, and Jane Levy’s performance in particular, which similarly communicated paranormal psychosis and insanity alongside a much more interior, restrained terror. And blood rain. Navarrette pulls off this delicate balancing act with gusto, her performance powering the movie’s discomfort and comedy on her thin, unassuming, but nevertheless terrifying, shoulders.

Johnston is just as important a piece of the equation as the meek, closed-book Bear. His quiet interiority slowly curdles into disquiet, allowing the horror of Nikki’s transformation into fem-bot occupying Nikki’s body to fester and ooze into horrifying new shapes. Bear’s cowardice and callousness don’t take the familiar shape of a run-of-the-mill bad guy with obvious ill intentions. That’s part of what makes him so uncomfortable. His wish has real consequences, and as he begins to understand what he’s done – what he’s actually inflicted upon Nikki – we watch him wrestle with what it means to keep what he’s gained, and what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to keep it. That tension speaks to the movie’s central ideas about control within relationships, and how abuse can manifest not just as violence, but as the even more coercive act of forcing someone into a mold that is not themselves in order to please a partner. Of disappearing inside themselves. It’s just a bit more extreme here.

Though Obsession is not a message masquerading as a movie by any means, it does speak to those concerns in a funny, thematically rich way, communicating the horrors of disappearing inside a controlling relationship through a genre lens much the same way last year’s Together explored toxic codependency through the scope of body horror and was all the richer for it. Barker’s script is terrifically assembled, perfectly paced, and expertly dialed into when to crank things all the way up, but the technical craftsmanship is just as impressive. Barker, who also edits, gives the movie a vicious comic snap without rushing past the dread, knowing exactly when to cut away, when to linger, and when to let an uncomfortable silence stay just a bit longer than you’d expect. Composer Rock Burwell is equally dialed in, swelling the individual elements when the movie needs to tighten its grip and, just as crucially, letting the silence breathe when the absence of sound is scarier than any stinger.

Barker’s direction is a masterclass in genre workmanship, wringing each element with impressive precision and somehow making this very difficult tonal balancing act look easy. This is not a movie that’s restrained exactly, but nor does it tilt into full hardcore bloodletting or excessive gore mode just for the hell of it. That said, when the violence does arrive, it is striking enough to rattle even seasoned gore hounds, landing with real force because it feels tied to character, consequence, and a mounting sense of dread rather than empty shock value. Obsession has moments that are legitimately chilling, moments that are brutally funny, and moments that are just plain nasty in the best possible way. By the time it hits its climaxes, you’re shaken, laughing, and horrified – often all in the same scene.

CONCLUSION: ‘Obsession’ feels like a dark-magic witch’s brew of Together, Fede Álvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead, and Big: a horrifying black comedy that takes big swings and somehow pulls them off, masterfully achieving that rare blend of being actually scary and actually funny. Inde Navarrette is fantastic as a possessed lover desperate to win the affections of her cursed beau, while Curry Barker proves himself a genre craftsman with a wicked sense of humor, a mean little visual streak, and an unnerving command of tone.