Vague Visages’ Obsession review contains minor spoilers. Curry Barker’s 2025 movie features Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette and Cooper Tomlinson. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

For the past decade, it seems like every buzzy horror movie has cared more about heavy-handed allegories for grief and unprocessed trauma than actual scares. You could blame the paradigm-shifting success of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), but her film is effectively creepy at face value. It’s harder to view many of the horror directorial debuts which arrived in its wake, bearing an obvious influence, as anything more than belabored metaphors. Obsession, the feature directorial debut of YouTube sketch comedian Curry Barker, feels like a breath of fresh air in this regard, as the filmmaker doesn’t attempt to make an explicit thesis statement on a weighty topic. In a time where a horror movie needs to be about overcoming trauma to be taken seriously, a low-budget shocker like Obsession can be nasty and nihilistic on its own terms.

Obsession isn’t all guts and no brains, however, as Barker’s screenplay incorporates subtle satires of two dusty character tropes: the unwittingly toxic Nice Guy and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of his fantasies. In Obsession, Michael Johnson portrays Bear, a music store employee pining after his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), who seemingly views her admiring colleague as a little brother, rather than a potential beau. One day,  Bear purchases a “One Wish Willow,” a discontinued novelty product from the 1980s which grants a single wish to anybody who breaks it in half. That same night, he fails to ask Nikki out when driving her home, and then wishes that she would love him more than anyone in the world. Immediately, Navarrette’s character becomes co-dependent, often unable to leave her house due to an overwhelming need to please Bear. It’s a classic Twilight Zone-style premise about being careful what you wish for.

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Barker has admitted that The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” series directly inspired Obsession, specifically a season 3 segment in which Homer gets a monkey paw. However, Bear’s poor wish-making decision isn’t positioned as a cautionary tale, and the character is never let off the hook for wanting to exert control over a woman’s emotions. This is a depiction of a man who lacks the self-awareness to comprehend his domineering, misogynistic impulses, but it’s not an overbearing commentary on toxic masculinity, as Barker keeps any social views firmly in the background so the protagonist can gradually become aware of the havoc he’s created on his own terms. Bear isn’t given the chance to atone for his sins, and everybody in his orbit suffers a fallout from the emotional torture he unleashes. With a protagonist like that, Barker more than earns the right to succumb to his most mean-spirited impulses.

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There’s an admirable simplicity to Obsession’s high concept. The wish can’t easily be reversed — you only get one wish, even if you buy more — and the director even makes fun of the idea that there would be further lore behind the device, with a phone number on the back of each pack leading to an ominous dead end. During a first watch, my mind went back to Richard Kelly’s The Box (2009), another modern riff on The Twilight Zone, where a married couple learns they’ll be given $1 million if they press a button in a mysterious box, even it will kill two strangers. The director lapses into full conspiracy thriller territory by revealing that the protagonists could eventually be the next victims, thus building out lore that connects their fates to various shadowy government agencies. A weaker iteration of Obsession would have followed those same impulses, refusing to accept the characters’ fates as granted and bending over backwards to develop convenient plot loopholes to save them. Barker’s screenplay is effective because it stays true to established rules, never deviating from Bear’s self-imposed path.

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Johnston and Navarrette are both excellent in the lead roles, with the latter performer standing out for sustaining an intense caricature of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, highlighting how an Annie Wilkes-style sociopath (see the 1990 film Misery) lurks just below the surface of a romantically idealized trope. This is also aided by a plot which never lets viewers forget that Nikki acts against her will, as she momentarily snaps back to reality before being dragged back to her sunken place of servitude. Navarrette’s character is drawn far richer than any trope, simplified to aid a man’s power fantasy. The cruelest, most mean-spirited action emerges when Nikki’s agency is robbed, ensuring she still receives punishment alongside the man who wished for it. But every toxic, coercive relationship has collateral damage, and Barker paints this in stark extremes without pausing the horror to reflect and make his commentary overt and overbearing.

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Obsession refuses to underestimate the emotional intelligence of the audience and refrains from spoon-feeding viewers monologues about abuse and trauma. These themes have always been inherent within the horror genre, but the past decade of over-explaining them has proved a hindrance to anything which could be positively shocking. Obsession reminds moviegoers that the most effective way to approach dark topics is to experience them on your own terms.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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