OBSESSION Review

A guy buys a wish granting toy from a crystal shop because he is too scared to tell his friend he likes her. She starts loving him unconditionally. He thinks this is great. It is not great.

This is the premise of one of the most unsettling horror films I have seen in years and I have not stopped thinking about it.

Curry Barker is a YouTuber. A prankster. This is his debut feature. I am as surprised as you are.

What makes Obsession so genuinely disturbing is not the broken glass or the dead car or the duct tape sealing the doors, though all of that is deeply unpleasant in the best possible way. It is the face that Bear, our protagonist, is not a monster. He is just a guy. A sensitive, frustrated, romantically hopeless guy who makes one catastrophically selfish decision and then has to watch it consume everything around him including the person he claimed to love. Michael Johnston plays him with this specific squirming guilt that makes you uncomfortable in a way that pure evil never could, because pure evil is easy to dismiss and Bear is not easy to dismiss.

Inde Navarrette as the hollowed out version of Nikki is doing something genuinely brilliant, performing a character whose real self is essentially imprisoned while this psychotic love bombed replica takes her place. The way she oscillates between terrifying devotion and sudden screaming lucidity is the kind of performance that should be talked about a lot more than it probably will be.

Obsession sits squarely in the lineage of Zach Cregger, all sadistic violence and needle drop and people responding to horror in the most pathetically self-serving ways imaginable, and wears that influence openly. But Barker has his own specific angle and it is a sharp one. The scariest question this film asks is not whether you could end up like Nikki. It is whether you or someone you know could be tempted to do what Bear did.

Men and women will lie awake after this film for entirely different reasons and both of them are valid.

A horror film about the social consequences of being the guy everyone knows took advantage of someone. In 2026. From a YouTuber. Genuinely did not see that coming.

🍿 SCORE = 83/100