Movies & TV Obsession Obsession Makes an Old Story New Again With Astonishing Acting This new take on a “be careful what you wish for” premise is dark as it gets. By Reuben Baron | Published on May 15, 2026 Image: Focus Features Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Focus Features Can a story idea be so obvious that it loops back around to being original? The new horror movie Obsession is, in essence, a “be careful what you wish for” story in the vein of W.W. Jacobs’ 1902 short story The Monkey’s Paw—a formula that became such a cliché that today it’s usually played for laughs. Curry Barker got the inspiration for Obsession by watching one of those Monkey’s Paw parodies, the first segment of The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror II,” and realizing he could make this old archetype feel fresh again by taking it seriously for maximum horror. Which isn’t to say that Obsession lacks a sense of humor. Like Jordan Peele and Zack Cregger before him, Barker started off as a comedian before becoming a horror auteur. As half of the YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea,” he’s made numerous silly sketches, many parodying the horror genre, alongside award-winning spooky short films and the hour-long found footage feature Milk and Serial. If I had to guess why going from comedy to horror has become such a common and successful career path, it’s because the skill sets for those two genres are more similar than you might think. Both operate on the build up and release of tension, seeking to get loud reactions from the audience, and minor adjustments in framing or mindset can be all it takes to shift a strange or uncomfortable situation from hilarious to horrifying or vice versa. Obsession, Barker’s first movie with a budget and a theatrical release, sets itself up akin to a rom-com, though the dark and shadowy cinematography prepares you for the movie it’s going to become. Protagonist Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston) has a desperate crush on his music store co-worker and trivia teammate Nikki (Inde Navarette) but can’t bring himself to tell her that he likes her that way. In the opening scene, he rehearses asking her out in front of mutual Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, the other half of “that’s a bad idea”). Bear’s bad at it, and Ian’s advice to neg her with her childhood nickname “Freaky Nikki” is sure to make it even worse. It’s hard for Bear to find time alone with Nikki away from Ian and Sarah (Megan Lawless), but even when they are alone and Nikki asks him directly if he likes her, he can’t bring himself to answer honestly. While trying to find Nikki a necklace at a new age shop, Bear comes across a bunch of “One Wish Willows” on sale. The internet can’t agree on whether these are kitschy collectors items or actual magic capable of making any single wish come true (side note: the filmmakers must have had a lot of fun designing its various fake websites). Bear finds out for himself, using a One Wish Willow to wish for Nikki to love him more than anyone else in the world. It works all too well—depending on how you define “Nikki” and how you define “love.” Image: Focus Features After making this wish, Nikki is not the same person she once was—or rather, the real Nikki is still present in her body but being controlled 99% of the time by another entity. This entity is manipulative, codependent, and terrifyingly obsessed with Bear. She lies about her dad dying to convince Bear to sleep with her, watches him sleep from the corner of the room, makes a shrine out of his recently deceased cat, and that’s just the start of it! When the real Nikki does arrest control of her body for brief moments, she makes it obvious that this is hell for her. Even if you didn’t buy the supernatural explanation for Nikki’s sudden change, she would at best come off as deeply traumatized and not in a good place for a relationship—but Bear chooses to take advantage of her in this state, and he’s going to pay the consequences for it. Obsession is a terrifying movie from any angle, though I can already sense there are going to be arguments based on which angles different audience members respond to. Since Bear is the viewpoint character and the suffering he goes through gets so perverse and cruel, many viewers will have at least some sympathy for him, but some will have a bit too much. The guy sitting next to me at the preview screening kept shouting “Crazy bitch” whenever things escalated with Nikki, and with the state of media literacy these days especially surrounding any story with a villain protagonist, I worry that too many viewers will reduce Obsession to a misogynist “crazy bitch tortures Nice Guy” read. But it’s unfair to hold the shallowest possible reading of a movie against it when said movie makes it emphatically clear that not only is Bear the architect of his own misery, but that Nikki’s misery at his hands is even worse. It’s not entirely clear when or how she’s able to break through from the entity possessing her—for all it matters, the trigger is “whatever time would be scariest or most dramatic”—but those bursts of sudden consciousness crystalize the horror of her violation. At one point, she pleads for Bear to put her out of her misery before the entity reawakens. Bear’s selfish incel-like response—something along the lines of “What’s so horrible about being with me?”—should kill any further temptation to make excuses for his bad decisions. Image: Focus Features All the leads in Obsession are good, but Inde Navarette’s performance is unbelievably great. She completely sells Nikki’s sudden supernatural change; her facial expressions reach extremes that feel almost impossible. There’s a moment of her saying the word “no” a bunch of times in a row with different intonations that’s as chilling as when Betty Gabriel did the same in Get Out. Amazingly, Navarette has said that she doesn’t really watch horror movies, so it’s as if she’s gone all in giving the performance she’d be too scared to watch herself in other circumstances. For all geeks tend to talk about wanting the people who make our favorite movies to be fans like us, there’s something to be said for the gifts someone outside our genre world can bring to it. In one conversation before her possession, Nikki clarifies that the book she’s writing is a “love story” but not a “romance.” The distinction between the terms, left unstated, is that “romance” implies a happy ending where “love story” does not. Obsession is, in a twisted way, a “love story.” It is not a “romance.” Forget about couples ending up together—here, it’s a wonder if any character makes it out of this mess alive, and if they do, they’re facing a fate worse than death. While the horror is primarily psychological for most of the build-up, the final act gets extremely violent; it’s a mercy that the area the film’s low budget shows the most is that the corpses are so visibly props. Curry Barker already has another original horror project, Anything But Ghosts, lined up with Focus Features and Blumhouse, but the big headline leading up to Obsession’s release is that he’s attached to direct yet another reboot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for A24. Given how the last few Texas Chain Saw reboots have gone, I’d normally consider this a waste of time, but after watching Obsession, I think I see the vision there. Tobe Hooper’s 1974 slasher remains legendary over half a century later because of just how unrelentingly nasty it all feels, and while Obsession has enough dark comedy to it to entertain, it’s a similar nastiness that leaves you haunted as the credits roll.[end-mark] The post <i>Obsession</i> Makes an Old Story New Again With Astonishing Acting appeared first on Reactor.