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(SXSW) Curry Barker's Breakout Horror Film OBSESSION is a Shattering Look at Desire, Consent and What We Do to the People We "Love". 

By. Professor Horror 

If you have been paying attention to the horror world over the past year, the name Curry Barker has come up more than once. The 25-year-old YouTube comedian and filmmaker broke through with his $800 found-footage short Milk & Serial, which racked up millions of views and landed him a representation deal seemingly overnight. He has not slowed down since: OBSESSION was acquired by Focus Features out of TIFF for over $15 million following a bidding war, his follow-up Anything but Ghosts (starring Aaron Paul) is already wrapped, and he was just tapped to helm A24's reimagining of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. What makes his ascent unusual is how little distance there is between his scrappiest instincts and his most polished work, and OBSESSION is the clearest proof of that yet. I caught it at SXSW, and the audience (a theatre full of horror fans who came ready for it) gasped, groaned, and shuddered in unison at moments I did not see coming. It is rare for a horror film to make you complicit in its own horror, to make you realize partway through that you were nodding along with the wrong person, but by the time OBSESSION arrives at its most disturbing passages, you understand that the real horror was never the supernatural element at all. It was the perfectly ordinary thinking that got Bear to the wish in the first place.

The film opens on a long take of Bear (Michael Johnston) rehearsing a confession of his feelings for Nikki (Inde Navarrette) with a friend, running through it like lines in a play, asking for notes and tweaks. It's a quietly devastating setup because the intensity of his emotions is met with the blank, coaching stare of someone helping him perform affection rather than actually feel it. The film is already, in its first minutes, telling you something about Bear: that his love is less about Nikki as a person and more about Nikki as an object of longing, a role he has cast her in without her knowledge or consent. Bear is awkward and socially stilted, and while the film gives us enough to feel some sympathy for him, it pointedly refuses to make him endearing. There's something darker under the surface, highlighted by Barker's deliberate close-ups of Bear's face and the grim texture of his apartment (complete with a medicine cabinet stocked with prescription bottles). He is a man held together with patches. Nikki, for her part, genuinely enjoys Bear's company within the safety of a group, but there's no ambiguity about how she sees him (as a friend, nothing more). With her leaving their shared workplace in two weeks, Bear's fear isn't just rejection, it's erasure. Without the forced proximity of a shared space, he worries the architecture of their relationship will simply collapse, because it was never a real relationship to begin with. It was a proximity. A routine. A wish he hadn't yet made. What Barker is probing here (quietly but deliberately) is a kind of emotional entitlement that pop culture has long romanticized: the idea that persistence, devotion, and longing are themselves a form of love that deserves reciprocation. Bear doesn't see Nikki; he sees the idea of Nikki, and the film subtly implicates every rom-com that ever told us the quiet, awkward guy just needed the right moment.

Desperate for connection, Bear sets out to buy Nikki a gift after losing her favorite necklace. He ends up in a new age shop (crystals, herbs, incense, the kind of place that smells like intentions and cedar) where he discovers a small item called the "One Wish Willow." The film's Monkey's Paw DNA is worn openly here, but where that classic trope usually punishes greed or selfishness with ironic consequences, OBSESSION does something more precise and more disturbing: it punishes the hyperbole of romantic fantasy. Bear doesn't just wish Nikki liked him. He wishes she loved him more than anyone else in the entire world, and the horror is that the wish works exactly as stated. What sounds like the ultimate romantic dream (to be someone's whole world) becomes, in execution, a kind of psychological demolition of the person being wished upon. The film asks a question that sounds almost philosophical: what does it actually mean to need someone that completely, and who bears the cost of that need? The Monkey's Paw tradition has always been about the gap between what we ask for and what we actually want, but OBSESSION locates that gap not in the wording of the wish but in the wisher's failure to see Nikki as someone who has her own interior life, her own wants, her own right to feel something real. After the wish, Nikki's feelings for Bear arrive fast and total. They go from coworkers to cohabitants almost immediately, the relationship accelerating past every natural speed bump as though someone has cut the brakes.

This film has been making the festival rounds since its TIFF premiere last September and it finally arrives in wide release on May 15, 2026, but one of the more impressive things about its journey through the circuit is how thoroughly audiences have protected its most shocking moments. People stay quiet (not because there's nothing to talk about, but because part of the gift of this film is not knowing what's coming). What I will say is that the moments that make theatres go silent are not the ones you'd predict, and they tend to arrive right when you think the film has already shown you its worst. It is worth noting that one violent moment had to be trimmed by several hits just to avoid an NC-17 rating, which should give you some sense of where Barker's instincts live and how hard the film originally pushed. The fact that what remains still produces audible audience reactions tells you everything you need to know. Go in as cold as you can

I want to warn audiences (and yes, I mean even seasoned horror fans) that this film does not ease up. Just when you land on what you're sure is the film's most disturbing moment, another one is waiting behind it, and then another one behind that. It escalates with the patience and precision of a filmmaker who knows exactly where he's taking you and is in no rush to get there. Navarrette, as the wish-afflicted Nikki, delivers one of the performances of the year in any genre, full stop. She is terrifying (there are sequences where she is barely visible in the dark corners of the frame and yet utterly commands the scene) but she is also heartbreaking in a way that catches you completely off guard. Navarrette never lets you forget that Nikki is a victim of something she didn't choose and cannot name, that what looks like obsession from the outside is experienced by her as an unbearable compulsion, a love that feels like drowning. Her physical performance communicates a person at war with herself, and it's that dimension (the suffering of the wished-upon, not just the wisher) that elevates the film beyond its premise and into something genuinely affecting. Cinematographer Taylor Clemon's approach to night sequences deserves a mention too: in a film landscape where dark scenes are often frustratingly murky, the darkness here is deployed with purpose, turning shadows into something the audience actively fears rather than simply squints through.

This is also where OBSESSION goes further than most reviewers are crediting it for. Yes, it's a film about consent violation (Bear's wish removes Nikki's ability to choose, to feel, to be herself) but it is also a film about the dehumanization that precedes that violation. Bear doesn't reach for the wish because he's a monster, but he reaches for it because he has spent so long viewing Nikki as a destination rather than a person that the wish feels, to him, like closing a gap rather than crossing a line. The horror of the film isn't just the supernatural, it's the recognition that the logic Bear uses to justify his wish is the same logic that underwrites a thousand "nice guy" narratives we have been asked to find charming. The film is also (albeit quietly) a film about parasocial entitlement: the way we construct intimate relationships in our own minds with people who have no idea they are in one. Bear's love story exists almost entirely in his head, and the wish simply forces Nikki to star in it. There is a further layer worth naming too: the film functions as a dark inversion of the manic pixie dream girl trope, because Nikki (pre-wish) is a real person with her own interiority, and post-wish she is remade into exactly the devoted, obsessive, you-are-my-everything partner that a certain kind of romantic fantasy demands. The film shows us, without flinching, how monstrous that fantasy actually is when made flesh, and it does so without ever letting the supernatural mechanics become an excuse to look away from the very human ugliness underneath them.

Is OBSESSION a good first date movie? Only if you want a very honest conversation afterward (or if you want to end the date immediately). Some viewers (particularly those with personal histories around controlling relationships or coerced affection) may find this film genuinely difficult to sit through, and that is not a criticism. It means the film is doing its job. Barker pulls nothing, and the film's commitment to following its own logic all the way to its darkest conclusions is exactly what makes it remarkable. It is brilliantly acted, precisely shot, and directed with a confidence that is almost offensive for a feature debut at this level. The violation of autonomy and the traumatizing depictions of what it looks like to have your consent stripped away will genuinely unsettle some audience members, and they deserve to know that going in. But for those who can meet the film on its own terms, OBSESSION is one shocking, masterfully constructed moment after another. Curry Barker knows how to get under your skin, and with two more films on the horizon, I am already uneasy about what he does next.

OBSESSION opens in wide release on May 15, 2026.

For more SXSW coverage check out reviews for They Will Kill You and Over Your Dead Body