Obsession goes super hard for shock and repulse. It wants to terrify, disturb and disgust you. And it accomplishes all of it. Written, edited, and directed by Curry Barker—who first built an audience on YouTube—it was remarkably made for roughly $750,000. Impressive and inspiring.
The basic premise is deceptively simple:
What if your greatest wish came true… and became the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Bear (Michael Johnston) has spent years quietly obsessing over his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrete). He’s convinced she’s the perfect girl, despite the fact that she’s made it abundantly clear she only sees him as a friend. At one point she even asks him outright if he has feelings for her. Which he denies.
Desperate and emotionally butt-hurt, Bear wanders into a novelty shop and purchases a mystical artifact known as the One Wish Willow, a trinket that promises to grant a single wish to the user. After another failed attempt at winning Nikki over, he finally uses it. His wish is simple. He wants Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world….but be careful what you wish for.
From that moment, the film descends into absolute madness. Nikki’s affection mutates into something monstrous. She becomes obsessively possessive, terrifyingly dependent, and emotionally feral. She barricades Bear inside his apartment with duct tape so he can’t leave for work. She watches him sleep from the darkest corner of the room. She completely abandons basic human needs, urinates and defecates on herself rather than risk leaving his side, and eventually turns to murder simply to eliminate anyone she perceives as a threat to their relationship.
The curse can’t be reversed. The woman Bear claimed to love is slowly erased. What’s left is something trapped between devotion and possession. Inde Navarrete is phenomenal. This feels like a genuine breakout, and star-making performance. She throws herself into the role without vanity, transforming Nikki from an ordinary young woman into one of the most unsettling horror characters in recent memory. Every stage of her psychological collapse feels believable because it’s rooted in something fundamentally tragic.
However, The real horror isn’t what’s happening to Bear. It’s what’s happening to Nikki. The perspective is most horrific aspect to this story, because everything is filtered through Bear. At first, you assume he is the victim. By the end, you realize he is the monster.
She’s the one whose identity is systematically destroyed because of someone else’s selfish desire. Bear gets exactly what he wished for, and when the consequences become unbearable, he still refuses to make the difficult moral choice. And even if the cursed could be reversed, Nikki’s life is now totally ruined, and psycologically damaged forever.
The conversation between Bear and Sara (Megan Lawless) inside the car is the emotional centerpiece of the film. It’s the moment where everything clicks into place, forcing both Bear, and the audience to confront the horrifying consequences.
Obsession plays like a twisted, deeply darker version of Penny Marshall’s Big (1988). This is a horror-fantasy movie, where getting exactly what you want slowly destroys the very thing you thought you loved. It also feels like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror—the kind of morality tale where the supernatural is merely exposing something that was already established. By the end, the evil isn’t the curse. It’s the entitlement that made someone believe they had the right to use it in the first place.
OBSESSION (2025). FOUR OUT OF FIVE POPCORN BAGS🍿🍿🍿🍿
Rod Rioja 