R3alKrispy’s Obsession Review

RIP Tim Curry

What’s up, guys? My name’s Why Don’t You Love Me, Crispy, and this is my review of Obsession. It’s directed by Curry Barker, the latest in a prestigious and hopefully long line of YouTubers to jump into the world of film. From my boys the Racka twins with Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, to Markiplier’s Iron Lung, to Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, we’ve been seeing kick-ass horror films from creators who got their start on the website for you… prioritized way below brands, celebrities, and advertisers, but still a little for you.

Now Curry Barker’s in this lineup. Why? Before this movie, I’d never watched any of his videos. In fact, I’m such an asshole, I’d never even heard of him before this movie got hyped up. But thankfully, every algorithm of mine from YouTube to Instagram started showing me this guy’s videos, which is great, because his skits are hilarious. It’s amazing that he managed to go from those to this, because this shit horrified me, dude.

I was hesitant to even put this review together, because everyone and their wish-demon boo has already talked about it. But a movie that hit me like this is one I need to talk about for at least one review. You’ve heard the hype.

The movie stars the Timmy Turner of your worst nightmares, Bear, played by Michael Johnston. He’s shy and he’s guarded. A closed book he may be, but his heart is open and burning for his coworker Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette.

It’s trivia night. He’s going to see her. He stops by a mystic shop to get her a gift and comes across the funnest, most wholesome, no-strings-attached toy you’ll ever see. Enter the One Wish Willow. Snap it in half, and it’ll make your deepest desires come true. He buys her a necklace and the stick — because we need a movie — and gets a chance to tell her how he feels. But, sigh, he just can’t do it. Frustrated with himself and acting on impulse, he snaps the bone. He wishes for Nikki to love him more than anything in the world.

There’s been a lot of debate as to whether she reciprocated his feelings. Here’s my personal read: Nikki wanted to get out of that town. She wanted to leave it all behind to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. To do that, she wanted to find out what real love was. Whatever she had in that town wasn’t satisfying her. As someone who professed a deep belief in a difference between love and romance, she definitely wouldn’t have had what Bear was offering on her mind.

Saving some of this for later, we hear from her own words — and see from the so-called friends she thought she had — that she knew she didn’t have real love in this town. What’s worse, she thought she probably had that in the brother she never had, with Bear. That makes what follows, when the wish works in the worst possible way, that much more horrifying and heartbreaking. The wish does more than flip a switch on her feelings; her entire code is rewritten.

It starts off seemingly well enough. Sudden affection straight out of a whimsical romantasy quickly escalates into aggression and completely unpredictable violence. You’d think in a movie called Obsession things would be more chill, but there’s the transition, and the movie is masterful in its management. For the first half hour, it walks a tightrope between things being alright and then the exact opposite. One moment Nikki is weirdly intense, and the next we’re watching montages of the two of them making pancakes in domestic heaven. It feels fine, then deeply unsettling, then lather, rinse, repeat. The movie always knows how long to let you sit with each mode of operation before sweeping the rug out from under you.

We’ve seen the “careful what you wish for” type of story before, often played for laughs. But what makes it fresh with Obsession is its emotional intelligence and precision. It’s a silly premise, and the movie knows it, knowing when to crank that absurdity up and when to pull you so deep into the tension that you’re breathing into a bag. I’d say this movie has a secret weapon, but we all know who it is by now: Inde Navarrette as Nikki.

And before you get up in arms, wait a little bit, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. This isn’t just one of the best performances of the year. If she’s not in the conversation come Oscar season, we fucking riot, because this is an extraordinary horror performance, one of the best. She’s right up there with Jack Nicholson in The Shining and Toni Collette in Hereditary. Barker gives her an almost impossible task, one that very few performers could ever achieve. The whole time she’s on screen, she has to walk the line between comedy and horror. It would have been easy to fall straight into camp, but she keeps the performance grounded. She keeps it real. What we get is genuinely scary. I’m a hard scare, and even without the creepy rewind effects they give her whenever she walks backward, there’s always something uncanny about her. The way she moves, the way she talks? Maybe it’s because of my own personal experiences with people with bipolar disorder, but a lot of the scares come from the way her emotions are all over the place. One moment she’s lovely and loving; the next, she’s jealous to the point of violence. Then she does something so out of pocket it’s almost funny. Then she snaps back to being a sweetie pie like nothing happened. She nails every single beat, from her dialogue to her facial expressions. When she needs to be funny, she’s just the right amount of funny. When she needs to be terrifying, she’s just the right amount of terrifying. When she needs to be tragic? Oh my god, she breaks your heart.

There are fleeting moments where the real Nikki breaks out of the curse. She screams for help. She begs to be freed. Those moments are tiny, but they’re some of the most anxiety-inducing in the movie, because they keep the focus on the real horror. That horror is the extent of Nikki’s violation. The Nikki we get for most of the movie is the avatar of Bear’s wish. The actual Nikki is trapped inside this person, trapped inside this avatar. The whole time, she is being forced to watch. She is fully aware of everything that Bear is doing to her — and I mean everything. It’s deeply disturbing writing, backed by the kind of performance that will be studied in acting classes for years, maybe decades, to come. I’m so happy Inde’s name is soaring because of it. She deserves all the hype and more.

But I also have to give my flowers to Michael Johnston as Bear

who I’m really hoping is doing okay after this movie, because this is the kind of performance that reminds me of when Jack Gleeson did such a good job as Joffrey that he got death threats from fans. This is that kind of performance all over again. Bear is one of the most loathsome characters I have ever seen in a movie, and Johnston’s ability to commit to the bit is wonderful. He starts off as a character who is sympathetic enough. At some point in our lives, we have either known a guy like this or been a guy like this. His flaws are pretty obvious from the start, but he’s sympathetic enough that at least part of us might root for him. The writing is very smart in how it handles his character. Not only does it gradually show us just how evil, selfish, needy, and cowardly he really is, but it lays the breadcrumbs from the start with a very subtle yet telling opening scene. He finds his cat Sandy OD’d on painkillers, and instead of giving her a proper burial, he stuffs her in a garbage bag, cries, and then immediately starts Instagram-stalking Nikki with a dopey smile on his face like nothing happened. It raises red flags without you even needing to ask how the hell the cat even got into the pills in the first place. No matter how much you might find yourself relating to certain parts of this guy’s plight, there is clearly something wrong with him even before he makes the wish. The movie trusts you to figure that out, leaving the when up to the individual while also catching the creeps who still sympathize with him despite everything he does.

Giving these guys the opportunity to self-report so women can steer clear of them? I love that kind of writing. It makes the audience an active participant in the experience. As the movie goes on, his decisions get worse and worse, and so do the consequences of them. Even when it’s clear that something is wrong with Nikki, even when it becomes clear that Nikki is very much not okay, he keeps the relationship going. He lies to his friends about what she’s going through. When he calls the One Wish Willow’s customer service line, the guy makes him think he might be able to cancel the wish, but he asks if it can be altered instead. And here’s the kicker: when the real Nikki breaks through the spell in her sleep, begging him to mercy-kill her, he fixes her with this empty, vacant stare and asks, “Is it really so bad being with me?” The horror of the whole film is condensed into that one shot and that one line. Like I said earlier, Nikki is the monster, but Bear is Frankenstein. What Frankenstein did with life and death, and what Prometheus did with fire before him, Bear does here with a person’s free will and autonomy. The scariest take on the old myth, with a straight-up villain as the perpetrator. This movie does not let him off the hook for it.

Focusing on the atmosphere for a minute: this movie is proof of what a filmmaker can do with smart compositions and strong artistic direction. The production budget was $750,000, yet it looks so good that you’d be forgiven for thinking it cost ten times that. It builds tension through restraint instead of relying on jump scares or having Nikki transform into a monster. In fact, one thing that surprised me was that there’s not even any violence in the movie until very late into the third act. By that point, the anxiety and tension the movie ingrains in you already has such a grip that it doesn’t feel like escalation; it’s just the endgame. You can see it coming from a mile away while dreading it all the same. When it hits, it’s made absolutely horrifying by the atmosphere, the performances, and the violation of the human dynamics. The cinematography is also exceptional, using darkness and empty space. There are scenes where Nikki is obscured by shadows; you can barely see her face or any of her other features. You have to strain your eyes to even read her expression. You have no read on her and what she’s about to do, and it’s terrifying. They reverse footage to make her move in an uncanny way that looks like something out of a nightmare. It makes her look like this possessed ragdoll, or the shadow of who she used to be…because Bear’s wish turned Nikki into a shadow of the person-oh my fuck, I just got the metaphor. The sound design is also amazing. No bombastic scoring, no loud noises. The scariest scenes are almost completely quiet. The visual compositions and the performances do the heavy lifting, and the movie trusts them with the win. The silence makes the moments where the score swells and gives you a jump scare feel earned, and far from cheap.

Now we have to talk about the themes. I know I’m obsessed with themes, but trust me, they add something here that the mechanics alone wouldn’t be able to do on their own. Obsession is a surprisingly empathetic and thoughtful movie. It’s not just schlock horror; it’s a story about codependency, about consent, about lust. If you could make someone love you with a snap of your fingers, what would happen? That person would be unmade, destroyed. The person you’d want to be with would go away, and you’d end up with this inhuman id, this stack of impulses not even resembling a person. You turned your crush into a puppet. That’s a fate worse than death, straight out of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

But what makes the movie special? What makes it more than just some kooky trauma piece? What makes it the hard hitter that it is? The empathy it has for its characters, especially Nikki. The movie is always reminding you that this is a person trapped in a shell, who has lost all of her autonomy, who is watching and feeling and experiencing this whole nightmare while it happens to her, unable to do anything about it. While what Nikki does when she’s possessed is scary, the real horror is Bear seeing this happen to a real person right in front of him and choosing the fantasy anyway. What makes it even more horrifying, I think, is the performance from an unsung heroine in this movie: Megan Lawless as Sarah. She’s one of Bear and Nikki’s coworkers who genuinely has a crush on Bear, no One Wish Willow required. She likes him for who she thinks he is, or at least who she thinks he is. Megan Lawless captures this beautifully in her performance. My friend Tommy and I were talking about this; she acts like someone who thinks she’s the main character of a wholesome rom-com, which means that with the rose-tinted glasses she’s viewing Bear through, all of the red flags just look like flags to the point where she’s basically playing pick-me girl with him. Ignoring the signs that Nikki is in danger, she’s essentially trying to snag her boyfriend away from her while the poor woman is clearly suffering.

Any lesser film from decades ago would have had these two run away together while Nikki chases them with a knife or something. They kill her in self-defense, and then Sarah finds the One Wish Willow just when we think they’re about to live happily ever after. Roll credits. I know this movie’s been out for a while now, but what they actually do with it is so effective. Without giving too much away, the ending focuses on Nikki, on her perspective, on her realization of what was done to her, and what is about to happen to her because of all of this. It’s such a gut punch that, besides the first time I saw this movie and the second outing I made for its Backrooms/Obsession double feature, I’m not sure I can ever watch this movie again. That’s how badly this movie devastated me. It’s a commentary on modern relationship dynamics that actually manages to be really clever. Take away the supernatural elements, and what you get are patterns that you’d recognize in the real world. As unsympathetic as Ian ends up being, it turns out he has feelings for Nikki too, which means he’s watching helplessly from the outside as someone he cares about uncharacteristically falls into this clearly unhealthy, codependent relationship, and he doesn’t know what to do to help her. We see Nikki’s erratic behavior rationalized as, “Oh, she’s just going through a lot. She just needs to chill.” Then we have Sarah directing all of her concern to Bear, to the point where she becomes complacent and complicit. These are the kinds of movies that get talked about decades after they’re made. When people look back at time capsules of the 2020s, this movie is going to be part of the conversation. It’s a disturbing study of emotional manipulation, entitlement, and gender dynamics. It’s a hell of an impression, and a fresh spin on the whole demon-possession formula. You’ve seen these beats before: someone you know starts acting differently. At first the differences are subtle, but then it escalates into all-out horror. Here it gets recontextualized from a supernatural entity messing with people’s lives, to a wish that looks like romance but is actually obse- read the damn title of the film.

See what this movie’s cooking here? Old formula, whole new emotional texture. It also throws a little bit of the erotic thriller genre in there too. Imagine Fatal Attraction if they’d actually spent more time holding the man responsible instead of just saying, “Oh, this woman’s obsessive and evil, here’s a hero.”

That being said, the movie is also surprisingly funny. Barker puts his comedy background to good use, and Moist Critical put it beautifully when he called this movie’s specific brand of comedy “tactical cringe.” There are so many moments that are absurd and purposefully awkward. They’re self-aware, but they don’t wink to the audience; they’re not pretentious about it. You have a possessed Nikki ruining a dinner date by throwing a creepy tantrum in front of the whole restaurant. There’s a scene at a party where she erupts into maniacal laughter and shifts the vibe off-kilter before reading a disturbing bit of prose that just kills the room. There’s a scene where Bear finds out she cooked the corpse of his cat into a sandwich and then flips open his car mirror to practice saying, “You can’t cook the cat,” with a dead serious look on his face. The One Wish Willow’s customer support sounds like a stoner, even as he’s casually explaining that the only way to cancel the wish is to commit seppuku. It’s funny, but never in a way that undermines the horror. It just makes the movie that much more unpredictable, because you never know if the scene you’re about to get is going to be funny or if it’s going to make you shit bricks.

That being said, it’s a very rare thing to have a movie without tiny flaws. I get that the movie is told from Bear’s perspective and he couldn’t care less about Nikki as a person, but I still wish we’d gotten more scenes with the real Nikki, just because the Nikki we get at the beginning of the movie is such a likable character. It’s a horror I feel like they could have gone even deeper on if they’d wanted to. Also, when everything’s gotten messed up beyond repair and Bear has already failed to make one wish to reverse everything, instead of taking the last remaining One Wish Willow to a stranger, or even just calling the police, he goes back to Nikki even when he knows she’s gotten more dangerous.

On top of that, I kind of don’t completely get the logic of the One Wish Willow.

If the wish is supposed to erase Nikki and replace her with an entity that exists to love Bear and nothing else, how would she be stuck in there at all? Wouldn’t Nikki just be bye-bye, deader than dead? But that one’s just a minor quibble. I think the decision to have her trapped in the avatar makes it so much more horrifying than it would have been otherwise, so I can forgive it.

As far as my issues with the movie’s craft go, that’s all I can really think of. Obsession really is just that good, almost perfect. That being said, I have to talk about the numbers here, because the business side of things is dumbfounding. Again, the production budget was about $750,000. It’s grossed hundreds of millions, north of $488 million worldwide as of mid-August 2026, and still climbing. That means it’s made over 600 times its budget. For an indie production, Hollywood’s got to be quaking in their boots. The optimist in me is beyond happy, because we’ve almost definitely opened some floodgates with this. Smaller movies willing to take weird risks with lower budgets, with directors and actors coming out of obscurity, are going to be so much more commonplace now, with a movie like this as proof of concept. It makes me excited for filmmaking in general, and for horror, one of my favorite genres, in particular.

But I have a hard time celebrating when I look at the downside of this. The art director of this film, Sally Choi, put in weeks of backbreaking work and was paid $6,741. I know what you’re going to say: that’s how the business works. “Labor gets paid, but risk is what gets rewarded. If she really wanted more money from this movie, she should have taken the risk and negotiated for stock options instead of a straight paycheck. It’s over $6,000 for less than a month of work. It’s business; that’s just how it is.”

From that point of view, I get it. But smarter people than me have done the math on the hours. She barely made minimum wage. And that’s not even counting the fact that Inde Navarrette reportedly only made around $20,000 from this film (a figure that hasn’t been officially confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt). Considering the money she must have put into helping market the thing, among so many other things she must have done for this film, if the rumors are true, she probably lost money making it.

Yes, I know she’s a big name now. She’s Rogue (she would’ve made an even better Mystique, me thinks, but fuck the haters, she’s got this). She’s going to be making so much more money, and she has creative job security. It’s a net win, I know. But Sally and Inde are almost definitely far from the only people who weren’t paid what they were really worth. This movie made hundreds of times its budget, and it was not reflected in the rewards for the people who helped create it.

Again, Barker is under no business obligation to pay these people more. But when you compare that with Markiplier paying bonuses to the people who helped him make Iron Lung when that movie made more than expected, it’s really kind of disappointing.

In the future, I hope we see more examples like Iron Lung and fewer like this movie. Profit sharing is just the right thing to do, and the gap between the box office returns and talent compensation is hard to ignore.

That all being said, conclusion time. Obsession is one of the best horror movies I have ever seen. It’s one of my new favorite horror films and one of my new favorite films, period. It played the game on hard mode to earn its scares. It’s a masterclass in atmosphere, in performances, and in a slow burn of dread as people worse than we originally thought make horrible choices with even worse consequences. It’s genuinely scary. It’s a textbook case of wonderful dark humor. The themes are rich. It’s such an emotional gut punch that, again, I don’t even know if I can watch this film again. And it often manages to be all of those things in the same scene.

Preaching to the choir, but Inde Navarrette really did carry this film. No CGI, no prosthetics, just pure terror pulled off with pure skill. Academy, I’m talking to you. You better be etching her name into an award RIGHT NOW.

That being said, go into this with a content warning. This movie is heavy, and you will need to consume something lighter to brighten your day afterward. Great movie though it is, it’s far from a pleasant one. It’s intense, and it covers upsetting subject matter. For viewers who’ve dealt with real-life cases of the things it covers, particularly sexual assault, comfortable it ain’t gonna be. It knows when not to take itself too seriously with its premise, especially with moments in the final act that get completely absurd and silly in the best ways. But it’ll hit you where it hurts. There were people walking out of both of my theaters in tears, and my own girlfriend straight up refuses to ever see it again. Valid reactions across the board. But if you’re a fan of horror, this movie is required viewing, and easily one of the best films we’ve gotten this year. Curry Barker’s already got his next film, Anything But Ghosts, on the way, and he’s lined up to reimagine The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24 after that, and while I hope he compensates his talent much better next time, I’ll be in the audience rooting for him all the way through. A magnificent film, and the beginning of more than one promising career.

9.5 out of 10.