Curry Barker’s Obsession arrived in American theaters on May 15, 2026, carrying the kind of pre-release expectation that usually crushes small horror films. It came out of TIFF’s Midnight Madness block the previous September with strong word of mouth, sold to Focus Features for a reported fifteen million dollars after being made for about one million, and rode an unusually patient marketing campaign into a summer release window. By the second weekend it had already made many times its budget back. None of that, on its own, would mean the film is good. What makes the case worth taking seriously is that the movie holds up under examination, even where it stumbles.
The premise and what it actually does
The plot is familiar to anyone who has read “The Monkey’s Paw” or seen any of the dozens of films built on the same scaffold. Bear, a music store employee played by Michael Johnston, has been in love with his coworker Nikki for years. He cannot tell her. After a final humiliating attempt to confess, he breaks a novelty toy called the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. She does. The film is about what that looks like.
The premise is not the achievement. The achievement is the angle of attack. Most “wish gone wrong” stories treat the magical object as the antagonist and the wisher as the victim of bad luck. Barker treats the wisher as the antagonist of his own story. Bear knows, in some part of himself, what he has done. The film does not let him off the hook by making the wish unintentional or the consequences unforeseeable. He wanted this, and he gets it, and the horror is that getting it ruins the person he claimed to love.
This is the choice that separates Obsession from the genre exercises it superficially resembles. The film puts us inside the perspective of a person who has done something wrong and is unable to admit it. Nikki, once the wish takes hold, is no longer a character so much as a symptom. The film knows this. Several critics have pointed out that the movie might have been even better if it had spent more time inside her experience rather than his, and that critique has weight. But Barker’s commitment to Bear’s point of view is also the source of the film’s discomfort. We are watching the world from inside the head of someone whose friends are slowly realizing what he is.
The performances
Michael Johnston carries the film. Bear is a difficult role because he has to be sympathetic enough that the audience does not check out in the first act, and unsettling enough that the third act lands. Johnston plays him as a person who has spent his whole life being the sweet guy, the safe guy, the friend, and who has built an entire identity around the idea that this entitles him to something. When the wish takes effect, his face does the work the script trusts him to do. There is relief, then guilt, then a kind of quiet panic, and then a stillness that suggests he has decided not to think about it.
Inde Navarrette has the harder job. She has to play Nikki as a full person in the early scenes so that the later scenes have something to mourn, and then she has to play the hollowed-out version without tipping into camp. She mostly succeeds, though the script asks her for a few outbursts that lean toward the shrill, and these are the moments the film’s detractors keep flagging. Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless, as the friends who start to suspect what Bear has done, give the film its moral center. They are the audience surrogates, and the script is smart enough to make them neither omniscient nor stupid.
What the film is actually about
A surface reading would call Obsession a film about consent. That is true but incomplete. The deeper subject is the gap between how a person sees himself and how he behaves. Bear is not a predator in the conventional horror sense. He is a person who has been told his whole life that he is one of the good ones, and who, when given the opportunity to take something he has not earned, takes it. The film is interested in the rationalizations that follow. He tells himself she is happy. He tells himself this is what she wanted underneath. He tells himself the friends who are pulling away from him are misunderstanding the situation.
This is why the film cuts. It is not asking the audience to identify with a monster. It is asking the audience to recognize a pattern of self-deception that is not exotic. The horror is domestic. The horror is the small lie a person tells himself in order to keep liking himself after he has done something he should not have done.
The Sight and Sound review placed the film in a lineage of monkey’s paw stories, and the comparison is fair. But the films Obsession most resembles in spirit are the ones that use a supernatural premise to surface something the realist mode cannot quite reach. Get Out did this for racial paranoia. The Babadook did it for grief. Obsession does it for the particular self-pity of a certain kind of lonely young man, the kind who has read enough discourse about himself to know all the right words and still cannot find his way out of the trap.
Where the film stumbles
The film is not flawless. The runtime, at one hour and forty-eight minutes, feels about ten minutes too long in the middle, where the film settles into a rhythm of escalation that becomes predictable before it pays off. The comic register, which most reviewers have praised, occasionally undercuts the dread. There is a version of this film that trusts the audience to sit in the discomfort without a release valve, and that version might have been even more powerful, though probably less commercially successful.
The other significant weakness is the ending, which arrives more quickly than the careful setup deserves. Bear’s comeuppance, when it comes, feels like a genre obligation rather than a moral reckoning. This is the place where the film’s commitment to his point of view starts to work against it. We have spent so long inside his rationalizations that we need to see them collapse from the outside, and the script does not quite give us that scene.
What it means
Barker came to features from a YouTube comedy channel and a found-footage horror short made for eight hundred dollars. He is part of a generation of filmmakers who built their craft outside the festival pipeline and arrived in Hollywood already knowing what they wanted to do. Obsession is the work of a filmmaker who has watched a lot of horror and has thought carefully about what the genre is for. He has been signed to direct A24’s next pass at The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and on the evidence of this film, that is a good bet.
The reason Obsession matters, beyond its commercial success, is that it is a horror film with an argument. The argument is unfashionable in a culture that prefers villains to be obvious. Bear is not obvious. He is the version of the bad guy who would have passed every test his friends gave him, until the moment he was given the chance to do something he could get away with. The film does not let him get away with it. It does not let the audience get away with it either. That is what good horror does, and Obsession, for all its imperfections, is good horror.