Obsession (2025)
Curry Barker’s Obsession — made for a reported one million dollars under the Blumhouse banner — is among the sharper horror releases of 2026. It is also one of the more discomfiting films you are likely to sit through this year, which, given the genre, is very much a compliment.
Bear (Michael Johnston) is a music store employee: shy, gentle, and silently devoted to his childhood friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Rather than tell her how he feels, he wanders into a crystal shop and buys a One Wish Willow — a novelty antique toy from the 1960s, allegedly capable of granting a single wish when its branch is snapped. The cashier warns him, and he snaps it anyway. The film that follows is, in my opinion, the most socially mortifying horror of recent memory — a close examination of the gap between wanting someone and genuinely caring for them, rendered in scenes of escalating, deeply unpleasant discomfort.
Faustian bargain narratives are as old as storytelling, and the “be careful what you wish for” horror film has been a genre staple since long before monkey’s paw stories frightened anyone around a campfire. Barker’s point of difference is his decision to keep the camera fixed on the wisher. Bear is no conventional villain — he is a person who sincerely believes himself to be decent, and the film watches, with some patience, for the moment that belief becomes untenable.
Johnston carries the role across a difficult emotional arc: credible early sympathy giving way to incremental complicity, and finally to a reckoning that feels earned. Barker’s screenplay is precisely calibrated to keep the audience just close enough to Bear to make that reckoning count.
Navarrette’s performance is the film’s most physically demanding element and its single greatest asset. The version of Nikki that emerges after the wish is communicated through gesture, stillness, and expression — projecting something wrong beneath a surface of compulsive devotion, in ways that produce uneasy laughter and genuine dread within the same scene. It is a demanding piece of work, and she does not drop it once.
Barker, directing from his own script, shows a sharp instinct for timing. The film builds deliberately, allowing the social pressure around Bear to accumulate before it breaks. The horror works through the specific discomfort of watching someone make a series of avoidable choices — the audience waiting, each time, to see whether Bear will stop before he makes the next one. Rock Burwell’s score and Taylor Clemons’s cinematography hold to the same discipline; both are spare, and neither draws attention to itself.
The final act is where the film’s commitment to bleakness becomes, at times, genuinely punishing. Barker refuses to soften his premise, which is in my opinion the right call artistically, but some viewers may find the accumulated emotional cost tips the film from affecting into wearing. A narrower margin than it sounds, and not always avoided.
Barker has made a film about self-deception and the specific damage done by confusing fixation with affection — and he has made it using genre conventions as a means rather than an end. For a one-million-dollar production, Obsession does considerably more than the budget might lead you to expect.