105 min | R | May 15, 2026 | Focus Features
A sharp premise about male entitlement that never figures out what it wants to say. Strong performances and clean craft cannot save a confused thesis.
Curry Barker built a following making horror shorts on YouTube, and Obsession is his sophomore feature. Bear is a music store clerk and a self-described hopeless romantic, which the film correctly identifies as a warning sign. He breaks a magic talisman called the One Wish Willow and wishes his longtime crush Nikki would love him. The wish comes true. Nikki becomes devoted, anxious, and incapable of leaving his side, and Bear gets to watch what he actually asked for. The premise is a sharp metaphor for male entitlement aimed straight at the nice-guy delusion. The execution never lives up to it.
Inde Navarrette is the best thing in the film. As Nikki she starts as a specific, lively, slightly bossy person with her own ambitions, and then the curse hollows her out. Navarrette plays the transformation with her whole body, trading confidence for a pleading anxiety that is genuinely disturbing to watch. Michael Johnston plays Bear as pathetic in the right ways, though the film is less sure than he is about how much to indict him. There are strong moments scattered throughout. A look, a silence, a scene that lands cold. They never accumulate into something larger.
Barker shot the film for almost nothing and the resourcefulness shows in good ways. Cinematographer Taylor Clemons frames shots center-composed with too much head space, a small choice that keeps every image faintly uncomfortable. The horror beats are staged with real control, figures resolving out of shadow at the wrong moment. The comedy and the horror mostly coexist without tripping over each other. For a micro-budget feature the filmmaking is confident. The problem is not the camera. It is the script’s confused relationship to its own thesis.
The film wants to say something about entitlement and the way men write women into their own fantasies, and it has the perfect machine to say it with. But it never decides whether Bear is a monster, a casualty of his own loneliness, or a punchline, and the message blurs in the indecision. A horror-comedy about the violence of male wish-fulfillment should leave a mark. This one gestures at the idea and then backs away from it. The performances and the clean craft keep it watchable. The thinking underneath is not as sharp as the premise promised.