‘Obsession’ Review: Love Turns Into a Living Nightmare

The remarkable back-to-back success of two original horror films from twenty-something directors who got their start on YouTube began with Obsession, a movie that cost just $750,000 to make and has already grossed more than $500 million worldwide (the other film is Backrooms). With what may go down as one of the greatest cost-to-profit ratios in movie history, the film announced the arrival of writer-director Curry Barker, who took a simple premise and, through sheer ingenuity, managed to capture the attention of millions of Gen Z viewers. Perhaps that’s because he tapped into a subject that resonates deeply with his generation while remaining universal enough to speak to everyone else.

After all, impossible love stories are nothing new. That familiar premise serves as the launching point for a film that begins as a comedy, gradually evolves into a drama, and only fully embraces horror in its final stretch. The protagonist is Bear (Michael Johnston), a painfully shy young man hopelessly in love with Nikki (Inde Navarrette), a coworker at a musical instrument store. Nikki is warm, friendly, and clearly seems to think of him as a close friend rather than a potential romantic partner.

Too timid to confess his feelings, Bear ends up buying a mysterious talisman called the One Wish Willow from a curiosity shop that specializes in strange gifts and antique oddities. The object inevitably recalls the magical fortune-telling machine from Big. The shopkeeper explains that all Bear has to do is make a wish, snap the willow wand in half, and it will come true—with one important caveat: no complaints afterward. One night, after driving Nikki home following an evening out with their coworkers Ian and Sarah, Bear makes the obvious wish: that Nikki will love him more than anything else in the world. Almost immediately, she steps back outside, looks him straight in the eye, and asks him to spend the night with her.

For a while, it feels like a dream come true. But little by little, Bear begins to notice unsettling changes. Nikki stares at him for uncomfortably long stretches, swings wildly between emotional extremes, becomes unexpectedly aggressive, and grows so dependent on him that she can’t bear to be apart from him. Through lies, increasingly awkward situations, and conversations with Ian and Sarah—both of whom offer opinions shaped by their own personal agendas—Obsession steadily grows darker, heavier, and more violent. Eventually, there’s no doubt left: Bear hasn’t made his way into a fantasy, but into a nightmare.

The film seems simple, and in many ways it is. What makes it more compelling is that it isn’t merely another story about a woman driven dangerously insane by obsessive love. Bear is the true architect of everything that happens. He created the situation, and for a long time he willingly takes advantage of it. Yet even once he recognizes his own responsibility, there appears to be no easy way out. Barker builds scene after scene of mounting discomfort and escalating violence, all anchored by Nikki’s increasingly erratic behavior as she flips in an instant from tenderness to brutality, from complete devotion to explosive rage, from screaming accusations to crushing guilt.

It’s the kind of role actors dream of, and Navarrette—virtually unknown before this film—makes the most of it. In the wake of Obsession, she’s suddenly being courted by everyone from Marvel to Michael Mann. She shifts from sweetness to violence in the blink of an eye, from adoration to barely contained fury without missing a beat, and gives Nikki a frightening unpredictability that makes her feel genuinely impossible to control. Although the film gradually settles into more familiar horror territory, its first hour could easily be mistaken for a romantic drama about a man trapped in a deeply unhealthy relationship with a woman whose emotional collapse he himself has caused.

If you momentarily set aside the scares and bursts of violence—which are carefully paced and emerge organically from the story—you could just as easily view Obsession as a bleak tale of devotion and mutual destruction. Nikki may appear to be the unstable, emotionally dependent one, but Bear is the person who chooses to keep the relationship alive, fully aware that it exists only because he magically manipulated her feelings. In that sense, his behavior is fundamentally exploitative. In fact, several of their friends assume Nikki must be abusing drugs because they can’t make sense of the way she acts. Bear knows exactly why she’s behaving so strangely, yet he remains silent until her obsession finally starts making his life uncomfortable.

Obsession is likely to be remembered alongside films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity—movies that seemingly came out of nowhere before exploding into cultural phenomena. Or, to use today’s terminology, they went viral. Barker himself came from making comedy videos on YouTube, and it’s immediately obvious from watching the film that he has a natural gift for comic timing and for creating scenes that are simultaneously funny and painfully awkward.

What no one expected was that he could successfully make the leap to feature filmmaking, a transition that doesn’t always come easily to creators raised on short-form content. Here, however, he pulls it off with remarkable confidence. Perhaps because he looked closely at the world around him and recognized a problem that defines so much of his generation: the inability to express affection, the fear of rejection, and the deeply complicated relationship they have with that strange thing we call love.