Bear (Michael Johnston) is a music store employee who harbours romantic feelings for childhood friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), but is finding it difficult to articulate his affection. Mutual friend and workmate Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) thinks that Bear shouldn’t risk jeopardising the current, comfortable situation between members of their easy-going social group, which also includes yet another music store staff member in the form of Sarah (Megan Lawless).
When Nikki loses a favourite crystal necklace of hers, Bear finds himself at a local mystic store with the intention of looking for a replacement. Deciding that presenting someone with jewellery is possibly too much of a statement and possibly too much money, he ends up buying a supposedly supernatural item called a One Wish Willow, with the intention of gifting it to Nikki as a fun but still thoughtful present. Instead, after a little deliberation and self-reflection, Bear decides to take the long shot of using the novelty toy to wish that Nikki loves him more than anyone else.
Bear initially thinks the One Wish Willow’s powers are nonsense, but the shortcut to Nikki’s heart appears to work as she asks Bear if she can sleep at his house, because she doesn’t want to be alone after receiving some bad news about her father. Reluctant to do so at first, Bear agrees, but the fact that she hasn’t exercised a choice in choosing Bear over the bear is about to backfire on our hitherto lovelorn fella in ways he would never have predicted.
Writer/director Curry Barker’s previous project, the micro-budgeted, found footage chiller Milk & Serial, made its home on YouTube and garnered a number of positive notices which made Barker’s move to the big screen both inevitable and more than welcome. Milk & Serial landed in a well-established, arguably tired subgenre and still managed to introduce freshness and unexpected shocks. Obsession takes classic tale The Monkey’s Paw as its base and skews it into an unforgettable, suffocating nightmare of a dependent relationship taken to the extreme, short on jump scares but long on gripping, inescapable terror and fuel for discussion long after you’ve left the cinema.
The film opens with Bear stumbling over his words as he attempts to explain how he sees Nikki as more than just a friend and colleague, but this is soon revealed to be a practice run in a diner, with a waitress acting as stand in for the object of Bear’s affection and Ian supplying less than constructive feedback on the sidelines. Arguably, the death of Bear’s cat Sandy does not help with any kind of preparation for revealing his long-suppressed yearning, but the option to remove any chance of rejection proves too tempting.
Here lies Obsession’s complexity and straightforward genius. Bear suddenly finds himself trapped in a situation where any thoughts of redefining the partnership are met with increasingly unhinged behaviour, but it’s Bear who removed Nikki’s ability to consent. He only has himself to blame when he wakes to find that he’s being watched from the shadows of the bedroom and when his girlfriend doesn’t even want him to leave her in order to go to work (watch for the reveal with the door). I won’t even mention how Nikki chooses to memorialise Bear’s cat.
Barker’s background in comedy plays perfectly into Obsession. As an example, if you’re a fan of the Tim Robinson series I Think You Should Leave, many of the uncomfortable set-ups in that show could easily tilt into unfiltered horror if they were taken to their disturbing apogee. Here, there are sequences that could be mined for their coal black humour, but almost all of the laughs I heard in the screening I attended were of the nervous variety. Barker himself provides an effective voice cameo as a disinterested customer helpline operator, but even those uneasy chuckles generated by Bear’s latest, increasingly desperate bid to find a way out hit an abrupt, ghastly dead end.
Rather than have Nikki launch into Fatal Attraction-style mania from the start, her outbursts and changes in behaviour are sufficiently tempered to cause concern, but also keep Bear thinking that somehow, someway, he will be able to fix all of this, because he’s being worshipped by the woman he thinks was always out of his reach. For different reasons, Ian and Sarah don’t buy the sudden lurch from friend zone to devotion, but neither can quite work out why and, for very different reasons, don’t want to ask too many questions.
Obsession’s sly screenplay is full of loaded lines and astute observations, but ultimately this stands or falls on its performances and Barker is incredibly well-served by a brilliant cast. Johnston’s Bear is described at one point as a “closed book”, suggesting hidden depths, but his portrayal of the character immediately reveals a mass of insecurities, a built-in unwillingness to confront the truth and a bewilderment that nothing is ever his fault, while also skilfully suggesting that maybe this guy has no ambition whatsoever, other than working a job that requires minimal effort as long as he can bask in the glory of having an amazing wife waiting for him at home.
Tomlinson puts in a satisfying shift as the kind of low-key douche we’ve all known, Ian being the sort of guy who’s unproportionally inconvenienced by the slightest thing that doesn’t fit with him being the centre of the universe, whilst Lawless brings a sense of worry for the viewer as a genuinely caring sort who generally ends up as the collateral damage when a group with a close bond comes under unnatural stress (and there’s little more unnatural than the particular type of stress that’s caused by Bear’s actions).
Bouquets, of course, must go to the astounding Inde Navarrette – obviously, the biggest bouquets you can find with a note on each making sure you tell Nikki that you love her so, so, so, so much. Her “disappointed” face is next level unnerving; her smiley face is one of the most alarming things I have ever seen. I was petrified on a molecular level. The unpredictable, mercurial nature of Navarrette in almost every single scene will put the audience in a state of constant agitation, and yet there are fascinating moments at which Nikki seems to get a glimpse of just how worryingly fixated she is without ever being able to control it. Again, we have a showstopping performance in a horror movie and it’s about time the genre gets the respect it deserves. None of this “elevated” bullshit either.
I plan to head back and rewatch Obsession a number of times, because I’m almost certain I missed a number of clever details the first time around due to the fact that I was genuinely terrified for a large proportion of it. What with this and Undertone, 2026 is shaping up to be a year in which I wander out of a screening shaken and, as a veteran horror hound, that’s an uncommonly delightful place to be. Once you catch your breath and level out, of course. It may have a fantastical premise, but you should brace yourselves for some real, grounded fear.
Obsession (2026) is in cinemas now.