Director: Curry Barker Screenplay: Curry Barker Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, and others Year: 2026
Be careful what you wish for — the old saying that warns us the curse is almost always in how the wish gets granted. Wish horror isn't a new sub-genre; films like "Wishmaster" and "The Final Wish" have built their entire premise on this very idea. But few recent films have captured it with the raw, uncomfortable efficiency of "Obsession" — a low-budget production that has quietly become one of the year's biggest box office surprises.
In "Obsession" we follow Bear (Michael Johnston; "Teen Wolf"), a young introvert who quietly loves a girl he barely knows. Without the courage to confess what he feels, he ends up buying an unusual object that, he's told, can grant any wish. He asks for the only one that matters: for her to fall in love with him, to love him more than anything in the world. The wish is granted almost immediately — but the girl starts behaving strangely, and what looked like a romance quickly becomes something the protagonist doesn't understand and can't stop.
The most interesting thing about the film is how uncomfortable it feels. It doesn't scare you so much as it disturbs you — and that discomfort is the horror. You know almost immediately that the wish came true, but the mechanism behind it never resolves: sometimes it plays like possession, sometimes like something older and harder to name. That ambiguity sustains the tension across the full 108 minutes, because there's no predicting where the next shot is going.
Inde Navarrette's ("13 Reasons Why") performance as Nikki is what carries it all. She makes every tonal shift believable — and the shifts are brutal: she'll move from a scene of extreme darkness and tension to a line delivery that lands as genuinely funny, without ever losing the uncomfortable atmosphere surrounding her. That's not easy to pull off in a film this uneasy, and it's probably what separates "Obsession" from any other recent entry in the sub-genre. Her performance is what sells the mechanism's ambiguity: when you watch her, you don't know if she's possessed, fighting the wish, or simply herself trying to escape something that's trapped her.
Visual and sound work is the film's other pillar. The use of light and shadow is deliberate and precise, and the sound design becomes its own character, amplifying every choice the protagonist makes. Practical effects close the loop: when violence or the grotesque shows up, it feels real. It's striking that all of this comes from Curry Barker, who spent years uploading shorts to his YouTube channel and only debuted in features in 2024 with "Milk & Serial". "Obsession" is his second feature, and it carries the aesthetic confidence of someone who understands his craft far beyond his résumé. Everything points to the fact that the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" reboot already lined up as his next project wasn't an accidental hire. The one real complaint: there are continuity errors that are obvious and easily avoidable — the only serious slips in a production that otherwise feels significantly more expensive than it is.
Where "Obsession" elevates itself is in its philosophical question. Nikki reaches moments where it feels like her real self is trapped, trying to get out — to the point of wishing for death just to end it. Bear, for his part, realizes that his seemingly harmless wish has destroyed lives, and the only solution he can find demands the ultimate sacrifice. It works like a modern "Babadook": the horror comes from inside him, and there's no way to put it back. And the question hangs in the air: did his innocent wish really deserve a punishment this big? Wanting someone to love you is almost universal — it's not a crime — but the consequences here are devastating. The real-world analogy is obvious: sometimes terrible things happen to people who don't deserve them, simply because that's how life works.
The film stays focused on building atmosphere and uncomfortable visuals rather than on grotesque shock — though when it decides to be explicit, it's very well executed. The ending is explosive and stays with you. It's one of those films that doesn't end when the credits roll, and one of the few this year that combines craft, plot, and philosophical question with this much ease.
Fans of uncomfortable, psychological horror are going to eat this up — anyone who loved "The Babadook" or any reinvention of the monkey's paw tale will find something both familiar and new here. "Obsession" operates on a different plane — one that asks for patience but rewards you with a discomfort that crawls right under your skin.
Rating: 10/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers ahead)
The most devastating thing about the ending isn't what the protagonist does — it's what it costs him to do it. He knows the love he's receiving isn't real. He knows Nikki didn't choose him, that the affection she shows him is the product of the granted wish. And even so, he can't let her go. The film is explicit about that discomfort: even in the moments where she asks him for help to escape, he hesitates. The part of him that wanted to be loved still wants to be loved, even though the "love" he's receiving is an artifact of his own selfishness. It's the most honest horror the film offers — the proof that the part of us that longs to be wanted doesn't switch off just because we discover the love being shown isn't really reciprocated.
The collateral damage is what expands the guilt. Bear didn't just destroy Nikki's life; he dragged along the friends who tried to help him, those who worried about his sudden change, those who were left scarred trying to understand what was happening to him. Every person in his circle who intervened became collateral damage to a wish that was formulated in secret and in solitude. And worst of all, the actions and their consequences are irreversible. The film refuses to let us hold on to the fantasy that the wish was "private" — because that is exactly the myth that makes these horrors possible: the idea that what one desires in private stays contained in private. It never does.
The protagonist's final turn is the only way the film allows itself to remain morally coherent. As long as he lives, the wish stays anchored to his existence — no matter how much he regrets it, no matter how much he recognizes the monstrousness of what he did. The only action that returns Nikki to herself is his complete absence. And the cruelty of the ending sits in the fact that he has to choose that consciously, in full awareness that surviving would mean continuing to inflict the damage. The instinct for self-preservation — the most basic force keeping us alive — becomes, in the film's logic, the final moral obstacle to overcome. The only way to truly love her was to disappear entirely. That's the verdict "Obsession" delivers without appeal.
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