Obsession: Movie Review

Cast: Michael Johnson, Inde Navarrette, Megan Lawless
Director: Curry Barker

Meshing together the Monkey's Paw idea, Companion's social commentary and ethos along with Pearl and Smile's unsettling edges proves to be extremely fertile ground for Milk & Serial director Curry Barker's fresh and bracing horror movie.

Bear (Johnson, Teen Wolf) is hopelessly in love with his co-worker Nikki (Navarrette, the film's MVP) - their long-term friendship dips into playful banter, finishing each other's sentences and crossing boundaries. But Bear's unable to tell Nikki how he feels, leading him to be permanently friend-zoned.

When she loses a necklace she adores, he seizes on the chance to buy her a gift, then confess his affection. But while shopping in an old antique store, he finds a "One Wish Willow" artefact which can grant the holder the wish of their dreams. After failing to reveal the depth of his adoration when Nikki directly asks him, he uses the artefact to wish she loved him as much as he does...

Trading in both dysfunctional romances and commentary on adoration and co-dependency in relationships, Obsession is a deeply unsettling movie that traffics as much horror from its uncomfortable moments as it possibly can muster.

It helps that Navarrette delivers a truly upsetting performance, one that wildly swings from outright adoration to utter incredulity as to what just happened with ease - and her screams in the moments of her character's swing are just stomach-curdling.

But it's Barker who makes the leap here from a 62-minute found footage short on YouTube to something that's genuinely distressing to behold. With the film's suspense dragged out as much as possible and the brutal jolts delivered with aplomb, Obsession becomes something devilishly nightmarish as it plays out. Drenched in the kind of muted aesthetic which was deployed in It Follows, the film delights in its dour darkness.

It's a film that plays with horrific extremes and does so with glee - and by keeping the cast list small, the shocks are even more upsetting than you'd expect - or hope - them to be. 

Along with the two power performances, Obsession is the horror film you'd least have imagined to leave you reeling - it's 2026's most twisted love story.