Curry Barker’s Obsession, both as an installment in a new cycle of internet-native horror and as a threshold object for the YouTube-to-theatrical pipeline, arrives with a charge that exceeds the usual marquee-debut ballyhoo. It’s out for night-before showings in theaters as of this writing, with an official May 15, 2026 nationwide release.
My full review is below, with not-insignificant spoilers.
Obsession: full review
The cure to male loneliness, as it happens, is neither novelty toys nor wishes upon them. It’s also—as Bear (Michael Johnston) will discover throughout this riotous, cacophonous, claustrophobic, and bloody-fun love story—consequentially not the myopic attention of your fiercest crush.
The premise is simple, the ensemble tight: Bear has a crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette, the film’s breakout star), and they both work at a music store with their friends Ian and Sarah. Sarah’s father (Andy Richter!) owns the music store. Bear has had a crush on Nikki for years. He is an introvert, and he has trouble expressing his feelings. Which is all fine until Nikki gives her two weeks because she wants to go full-tilt be a writer. Bear, who thought he had all the time in the world to hit the opportune moment, now must accelerate his plan to profess his love. He’ll do anything. He thus employs the promise of a silly toy, the One Wish Willow, which he finds at a novelty gifts store (hello, Monkey’s Paw!) to help make Nikki love him “more than anyone in the world.” After a bit of ambiguous rejection from Nikki one night, he reaches for the Willow and treats the wish as a throwaway moment of frustration.
And then: the immediate horror of something having registered too literally. Cue up 90 minutes of psychosexual terror, body horror, possession cinema, male entitlement, Nice Guy pathology, stalker-thriller dread, Monkey’s Paw folklore, and the terrible realization that getting the girl might be the most monstrous thing that can happen, especially when the getting, per se, was never any good at all.
The film is wildly kinetic for one that lets its camera be still so often and deliberately. Its frenzied motion is in the way it manipulates sound—voice volume, vocal distortions—and movement, especially with its grotesquerie and the way its characters navigate the frame. Move normally Willow-Nikki does not. There’s a constant interplay of Nikki’s body between shadow and light, silhouette and empty smile. It’s a manic vacillation in sensory style which mimics the terrible fate of Nikki’s soul.
And everything moves toward the climax, sure. But there are scenes, even early on, that get to peak outrageous levels as contained units outside the film’s narrative structure. Rather than creating a fractured experience for the sake of gratuitous terror, these are careful beats that shed themselves of the constraints of narrative demand in the interest of morbid curiosity. Glorious, untethered moments in which it felt like director, actors, camera, and story all were just thrilled to explore a spasm of the sorcery. Which is to say: the film is, to its great advantage, obsessed with itself at every turn.
As such, Barker’s mind and Navarrette’s performance are the what make Obsession such a standout. This lethal combination is at its best when it’s exploring perhaps the most disturbing part of the whole story: what dark magic would look like if it hiccups. If the sticking power of the spell is just a little crude. A fine comparison, here—so as to not spoil the best parts of in the film—would be imagining if any of the entranced, vegetative-state students and townsfolk in Zach Cregger’s Weapons ever came back online for, say, ten seconds. Echoes here, too, of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and its Sunken Place into which the cast-outs are exiled. The haunting moment when the camera flash shocks LaKeith Stanfield’s character back into his body.
What would the souls of the exiled howl, if given one gasp? What say the ventriloquized, if returned their voice for just one utterance?
“Get out!” in Peele’s case. Friends, you hear the cries of the damned in Barker’s Obsession, too. They are often and varied, but always from the diaphragm of Navarrette’s Nikki. You’d think the loudest cries would be what linger, but, instead, Barker builds Nikki a quiet moment or two in which Bear has an opportunity to do the right thing for his pleading, condemned friend. In a film where noise is so often used as a vehicle for confused terror—the score leans heavily into the music-store element, with transitions often sounding like high school bands failing to tune their instruments—these beats are devastating and sober. They throttle down to a torturous volume, pace. Bear witness, indeed (pun intended). And, of course, they are a fantastic showcase of Navarrette’s range, which is on full-spectrum display throughout the 109-minute runtime, here.
Sarah, Ian, and Nikki’s other acquaintances are swift to chalk up Nikki’s post-Willow erraticism to mood swings, perhaps the onset of a manageable mental illness. Did none of them, like, text her? She stabs herself with a broken bottle; she showstops parties with horrific poetry readings in which she waxes rhapsodic about flaying the forearm of her lover and inserting the ribbon of skin vaginally as a romantic gesture; she tattoos herself with a knife so as to copy the body art of someone Bear finds beautiful. Not even characters we learn had been more intimate with Nikki than was previously made aware to Bear make too much an effort to intervene when things are obviously concerning. They are concerned, but, apparently, not too much. At one point, Ian simply asks Nikki, “Are you okay?” But Nikki wasn’t home to answer. And everyone but Bear is in mortal danger if they dare question Nikki’s behaviors.
So, of course, it all comes back to Bear, as it should. As his resolve weakens—all around him indeed becomes the gory detritus of Nikki’s searing love—a terrifying customer service agent from One Wish Willow offers him this even-more-terrifying sentiment over the phone: Just because you chose this for her doesn’t mean it’s not real. And then, behind the voice, you start to hear Navarrette screaming. Do you want to talk to her? To Nikki? says the voice.
Bear hangs up. Bear, you’ll notice, does not once fully commit to anything in the film—a wonderful (and hilarious) detail for someone who represses his way into conjuring the literally-undying romantic commitment of another human being. About the only knock on the story I have is Bear’s weakness as a protagonist; he’s a little too Nice-Guy™-flat most of the time. I can see why Nikki didn’t have a crush on him. I had trouble seeing what made him such a pillar in this group of friends to begin with, or why he’d ever get invited to a direly consequential boys’ night. He’s not compelling, but Obsession gets away with that. Bear’s only supposed to be compelling to one person. Even then, he’s only so after a crackle of antimatter magic.
As for Barker, I’m delighted to have had so much fun with his big-screen debut. Especially because the visibility of one’s path from YouTube phenom to indie auteur has reached the magnitude of celebrity. We’ve seen the way this has changed fandom, in the way that it’s altogether altered the exercise of discovering an artist. Anymore, it feels like the foregrounded thrill is bearing witness to a hopeful artist’s—in this case, Barker’s—transformation, departure, and crystallization into a confident creative on a bigger stage. And Barker’s trajectory, like Zach Cregger before him, has the flourish of a pivot: a modern horror story from the mind of a former sketch-comedy artist.
The term prisoner of the moment gets thrown around a lot. Almost as much as changing of the guard does. Were Barbarian and Weapons not such innovative hits for the today’s expression of the genre, I’d imagine much more superficial skepticism for Obsession. You can hear people tossing gimmick around, then. Internet celebrity as casting/marketing ploy.
It’s just that the current authorship economy for the genre is expanding, and the genre with it. And the success rate in YouTube-to-theater proof of concept has been undeniably encouraging and innovative. Toss out any grand ideas of authorship- and genre-at-large, and still: Obsession had me delightfully, raucously tortured for its entire runtime. Navarrette’s a wonder.
Obsession FAQ
When does Obsession come out?
Obsession opens in theaters Friday, May 15. This is a theatrical-first release from Focus Features, positioned as a late-spring horror arrival for a filmmaker whose internet-native grammar has suddenly been blown up to studio scale. The movie comes in with festival heat, strong reviews and the charge of a debut that already feels like part of a larger horror-cycle shift.
How long is Obsession?
The film runs 1 hour, 48 minutes.
Who’s starring?
The film is led by Michael Johnston as Bear, the music-store romantic whose wish detonates the whole nightmare, and Inde Navarrette as Nikki, the childhood friend and co-worker whose affection becomes the film’s most horrifying object. Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless and Andy Richter round out the main cast, with Richter playing Carter.
Who made Obsession?
Obsession is written and directed by Curry Barker, the YouTube-born filmmaker whose microbudget horror breakout Milk & Serial turned into a full industrial launchpad. Barker also edited the film, which matters because the movie’s early reception keeps circling his control of rhythm: comic discomfort, romantic humiliation, sudden violence, the hold-a-beat-too-long tension that lets embarrassment curdle into dread.
What kind of horror movie is it?
Obsession is supernatural romance-horror with a cursed-object skeleton and a very contemporary rot underneath. Bear uses a mysterious One Wish Willow to make Nikki love him more than anyone in the world, and the wish grants him the shape of romance while stripping out the soul of it. The movie turns desire into possession, affection into agency theft, intimacy into bodily panic and co-dependence into nightmare logic. It sits somewhere between Monkey’s Paw fable, incel-horror pressure chamber and crowd-ready midnight movie.
