“Obsession”

by  Chris Stewart 06.2026

In Curry Barker's social parable Obsession, a young man acts in haste and commits a spiritual faux-pas:  the age-old sin of wanting to make someone love you without the fuss of vulnerability. Fair enough: dating is a chancy business at best. Love? An utter risk. In this bloody tale, the result of cosmic overreach is a tidy procession of escalations which may scare those who don't watch horror films. With that said, it is a very confident product. 

In 1902, W.W. Jacobs published The Monkey's Paw, in which a man is granted wishes, though each causes an unforeseen imbalance in the universe. As in: you wish for more time off from work, which is granted when you wake up with no spleen. That sort of thing. In Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush on coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette, convincingly hexable, emotionally flexible). Rather than come clean, he makes a wish on a Monkey's Paw type item. A bad, bad wish.

Granted instantly, this magic renders Nikki's attraction and neediness for Bear overwhelming, Writer-director Barker, who will deservedly have his pick of future projects, lays out a familiar morality play, rather than fleshing out particularly interesting characters. Sure, they're more naturalistically portrayed than the “written by a 40 year old” goofballs in Scream or Final Destination, but they also lose the gift of those film's broad caricatures: dynamic types with individual needs, personas, and flaws, rather than a general bunch of nice-enough folks.

Barker has an economic eye for horror, and conjures a few fresh, lasting images (the best of which involves a door). Admirably, there is no fear of female sexuality that would have been present even ten or twenty years ago: Nikki is ravenously needy but not in a cheaply ogled way. In a fairly bravura central sequence, a party is the public site of much simmering (and fun) menace. But in an era of tolerance and broad acceptance, what does Bear have to lose? Michael Douglas had the (shallow) American dream of domestic and financial stability at stake. For Bridget Fonda in Single White Female: the great fear that moving out the city on our own, someone might simply decide to take from us, or to outright take us. 

The film will strike a chord with the societal debate of who has it worse in today's dating world: men or women. In that sense, pair it with last year's Materialists rather than its current comrade in discussion, Backrooms. Celine Song's film is weirder and, in its way, spookier. Like Obsession, it also has both more and less to say about modern love than it thinks it does. In Barker's defense, his film doesn't necessarily claim to.

We have here a strong hour of television fleshed out to a slick, atmospheric film. Like his protagonist, may Barker also find the ability to dig deep and open up in the future. When he finds something that truly scares or disturbs him, he'll still have the toolkit.

“Obsession”

Run time:108 minutes

Director: Curry Barker