There is a version of Obsession that could have been made a hundred times before. A lovelorn young man. A mysterious artifact with dangerous power. A wish gone wrong.

The “monkey’s paw” subgenre has been a fixture of horror since W.W. Jacobs wrote the original short story in 1902, and it has been visited so frequently in the century-plus since — in film, in television, in animation, in video games that the mere announcement of a “be careful what you wish for” premise risks triggering a yawn before the first frame.

Curry Barker has admitted to being inspired by a version of this story: The Simpsons episode “Treehouse of Horror II.” That is a specific and confident inspiration to cite publicly — a comedy sketch that weaponized the monkey’s paw as satire, played entirely for laughs.

What Barker does with that comic DNA is strip it of all comedy, fold it back into the most earnest possible emotional terrain, and then use it to make a film about something that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with what it looks like when a man treats a woman’s interiority as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than a reality to be respected.

Along with The Drama, it appears that this year is a banner one for thinly-disguised films about feckless men unable to deal with the interiority and agency of the women upon which they fixate.

The parallel is apt and pointed. Obsession is, beneath its supernatural machinery, a film about consent about the specific violence of deciding, unilaterally, that someone else should feel something for you, and the specific horror of what it looks like when that decision is actually enforced.

The film premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival as part of its Midnight Madness block and received a theatrical release in the United States on May 15, 2026 by Focus Features. It holds a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — one of the year’s highest scores for any horror film and it has earned that rating by doing the hardest thing a genre film can do: making you feel, under the visceral horror, the weight of a genuinely moral argument.

Bear, Nikki, and the Specific Trap of the Friendzone

Bear is a music store employee who works alongside his childhood friend and co-worker Nikki. He has strong feelings for her but is unable to voice them, particularly as she does not seem to feel the same way.

Michael Johnston plays Bear with a very specific kind of recognizable male awkwardness — the kind that presents as sweet and harmless and is, on close examination, something more concerning. Bear is not a villain at the film’s opening. He is a young man with genuine feelings, genuine social anxiety, and a genuine inability to accept that the object of those feelings does not reciprocate them.

It’s clear that Bear at least has a chance with Nikki, although he makes a hash of it. Moreover, Nikki has been having a sporadic relationship with Ian that Bear doesn’t know about, while Sarah — their mutual friend — appears to have feelings for Bear that he doesn’t notice or acknowledge.

But rather than actually try to ask Nikki out, or, failing that, accept trying to find love with someone else, Bear uses the One Wish Willow, which ends in utter disaster.

This setup is the film’s most precise and underrated piece of characterization. Bear has options. He has a genuine shot at a conversation with Nikki, however uncertain the outcome.

He has Sarah, who clearly cares about him, quietly present in his peripheral vision. He has the basic adult choice of accepting that the person he wants does not want him back, and building a life around that reality. These are not exotic or demanding options. They are the normal instruments of human romantic navigation.

He does not use any of them. He uses a wish.

Bear decides to purchase Nikki a gift and while browsing in a new age shop he discovers the mysterious “One Wish Willow,” which promises to grant one wish.

He originally picked it out as a gag gift for Nikki at an occult shop. The gift framing is important: he was going to give it to her. But standing outside her house after a night out with friends, unable to say what he wants to say, he keeps it. And he uses it.

Bear is desperate enough to make a wish on a “One Wish Willow” when he drops Nikki off at her house following a night out with friends. He wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the f**king world.”

The specificity of the phrasing is everything. Not “I wish Nikki liked me back.” Not “I wish I had the courage to tell Nikki how I feel.” He wishes for a totality — more than anyone in the world — that is not love in any recognizable sense. It is possession. It is the elimination of every competing claim on her attention, affection, and selfhood. He wished not for love but for monopoly, and the One Wish Willow, with the terrible literalism of all cursed objects across the history of horror, gives him exactly that.

The Wish Granted

The wish is quickly granted. However, Nikki’s affections soon become twisted as she grows increasingly clingy and obsessive. Any attempt by Bear to dissuade her only increases these emotions. Nikki also begins to act erratic in other ways, such as screaming at things that only she can see.

The first hours of the wish feel like a fantasy come true. Nikki is suddenly interested in Bear — genuinely, warmly, physically. For a brief window, this is exactly what he wanted. Then the edges begin to show.

Several times throughout the film, Bear sees Nikki suddenly interrupt herself, often screaming in terror, before snapping back to her lovey-dovey persona. In one scene at a party, Nikki starts screaming, “It’s not me!” before repeatedly smashing herself in the face. As the film goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Bear’s wish has in some way displaced Nikki, leaving a monstrous and violent entity in her place.

This is the film’s most important revelation, and it arrives gradually enough to be genuinely horrifying.

The One Wish Willow acts as a monkey’s paw, granting Bear’s wish but in a horrifying, tragic way. In the case of Nikki, the wish doesn’t actually change her personality or feelings. Rather, Nikki is replaced by a completely different, cursed version of herself that is obsessed with Bear to the point of self-mutilation and murder. The real Nikki breaks through periodically and regains control, although less frequently over time as the cursed Nikki takes over.

The distinction the film draws here is the most philosophically precise horror concept in recent genre cinema: Bear did not make Nikki love him. The Nikki who loves him is not Nikki. The wish did not alter an existing person’s feelings. It erased that person and replaced her with an entity built entirely from the wish’s specification — a being whose sole defining characteristic is the obsessive, total, violent love Bear asked for.

The real Nikki is still in there, watching. She surfaces in those screams. She surfaces in the moments of self-harm, which are not the cursed entity’s behavior but the real Nikki’s desperate attempts to communicate through the only mechanism available to her. She is a prisoner in her own body, and the man who put her there is sleeping in the next room.

Inde Navarrette’s performance in these dual-consciousness scenes is totally credible as both a teasing coquette and a full-blown psychotic — a performance by an actress in a horror film that you can’t recall being touched by another. She is playing two completely distinct people in the same body, and the transitions between them are so precise that you can see the exact moment the real Nikki surfaces and the exact moment she is suppressed again. It is a career-making performance in a film that had no right to produce one.

What Bear Does With What He Knows

The film’s most uncomfortable section is not the horror sequences. It is the extended period during which Bear knows — or suspects, and then knows — that the person with him is not Nikki, that the real Nikki is in pain, that the entity in her body is dangerous, and that he continues to enjoy the relationship anyway.

The most pointed example occurs when Bear knocks Nikki out with sleeping pills, and despite her body appearing to be asleep, the real Nikki takes over and asks Bear to kill her as opposed to remaining trapped inside her own body.

This is the scene that separates Obsession from every other wish-gone-wrong horror film — the moment where the true horror is not what the curse is doing to Nikki but what Bear is choosing to do with that information. The real Nikki, conscious and terrified, begging for death rather than continued captivity in her own body, is telling him in the most unambiguous possible terms what his wish actually cost. And Bear — who genuinely loves her, who is genuinely distressed, who is not a monster in any simple sense — does not kill her.

He also does not immediately do everything in his power to end the curse. He investigates, yes. But he investigates while continuing to live with the entity that replaced his friend, and the film is honest enough to name what that is.

Bear knew that the real Nikki was in pain, and still chose to stay with the version of her that wanted to be his girlfriend, despite the danger she posed to herself and others. His love was selfish, and he avoided accountability for his actions until the very end.

The film does not make this explicit through dialogue or authorial commentary. It simply shows you what Bear does and trusts you to understand what it means. It is the most sophisticated moral argument Obsession makes, and it makes it in images: Bear, knowing what the wish took from Nikki, choosing comfort over accountability because the version of Nikki he is living with is, in most ways, exactly what he wanted.

Ian, Sarah, and the Social Circle

Ian is the character with a sporadic relationship with Nikki that Bear didn’t know about. When Bear, desperate for solutions, tries to bring Ian into his confidence about the One Wish Willow and the possibility of using another wish to cancel his own, the exchange illuminates something important: Ian, refusing to believe the One Wish Willows were really magic, uses one to wish for a billion dollars — and the cash starts falling from the sky, prompting Ian to run to Bear’s house to tell him about his bizarre good fortune.

The Ian billion-dollar subplot is the film’s dark comedy valve — a moment of absurdist relief that also functions as a commentary on the One Wish Willow’s fundamental indifference to human wellbeing. The wish granted Ian what he asked for. It also, in the film’s moral accounting, placed Ian in the same position as Bear: a person who made a selfish wish on a cursed object and is going to pay for it.

Sarah — played by Megan Lawless with the specific bittersweet warmth of a character the audience can see deserves better than the attention she’s receiving — is Bear’s genuinely caring friend whose quiet feelings for him are the film’s most painful background note. Sarah appears to have no romantic attachments, and has obvious feelings for Bear that he completely misses because he is entirely focused on Nikki.

The cruelty of Sarah’s position is not that Bear doesn’t like her back. It is that he literally cannot see her. She is standing in the light of his attention and he is looking straight through her at the person behind her. This is not malice. It is the specific blindness of obsession, which the film understands to be just as supernatural in its own way as anything the One Wish Willow produces.

Sarah’s Death and the Point of No Return

Until Obsession nears its conclusion, this horror film hardly had a body count. That changes when Bear sneaks out to meet up with his friend Sarah.

The decision to keep the explicit violence minimal through most of the film’s runtime is one of Curry Barker’s most effective choices. The horror of the early and middle acts is psychological — the wrongness of Nikki’s behavior, the real Nikki surfacing in screams, the moral horror of Bear’s choices. When physical violence finally erupts, it hits with the force of everything that has been contained.

Sarah’s fairly obvious feelings for Bear have already come up between Bear and Nikki, and their warm, friendly heart-to-heart ends in vicious violence when Nikki breaks through her car window to smash her head against the steering wheel into an unrecognizable, gory pulp. The knowledge that Sarah’s dream of attending art school was about to come true is just the cherry on top.

The art school detail is the film’s most deliberately cruel narrative choice. Sarah, who has been the film’s quiet emblem of everything Bear overlooked — a person with genuine feelings, genuine dreams, a genuine future — dies in a moment of spectacular violence immediately after we learn something specific and wonderful about her future. The timing is not accidental. It is the film’s indictment of Bear’s wish made flesh: Sarah did not die because she did anything wrong. She died because Bear asked for something that had no room for her.

The cursed Nikki does not kill because she is evil. She kills because the wish specified that Nikki would love Bear more than anyone else in the world. Sarah is, by definition and by the wish’s own terms, competition. The One Wish Willow is not malfunctioning when it produces this outcome. It is functioning exactly as designed.

Multiple Willows and the Customer Service Call

Bear becomes hell-bent on getting out of this tragic situation. He purchases more One-Wish Willows but is unable to break any of them — turns out, they were really serious about the whole “one wish” thing.

Bear calls a customer service number on the One Wish Willow, asking a representative if there’s a way to undo the wish. The operator tells him the wish is impossible to reverse — unless, you know, Bear dies.

The customer service call is the film’s most darkly comedic scene — a genuinely funny piece of mundane horror that treats the supernatural bureaucracy of the One Wish Willow company as a kind of evil corporate entity with a phone line, hold music, and a very clear terms-of-service. The operator is not cruel. She is simply factual. The product does what it says. Bear made a wish. The wish cannot be unmade. The only exit clause is Bear’s death.

Previously told that only his death could end the wish, Bear pursues one last loophole: another person’s wish could cancel his out. But his attempt to convince Ian to be that person fails.

Ian has already used his wish on the billion dollars. He cannot use another. The film has closed every door Bear can find: the willows are unbreakable, the company is unreachable in any meaningful sense, and the only remaining person who could theoretically cancel his wish has already spent theirs on cash falling from the sky.

The Ending Explained: Two Wishes, One Overdose, and What Nikki Wakes Up To

The film’s final sequence is where Obsession earns its TIFF acclaim and its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score — a conclusion of such concentrated despair that it operates simultaneously as genre horror, moral fable, and character tragedy without sacrificing any of the three.

Bear, feeling very stuck in this codependent relationship and having exhausted his options, decides to attempt an overdose — the only exit clause the One Wish Willow company offered him. He takes a significant quantity of pills intending to end the wish through his own death.

In the critical moment, as Bear actually goes to throw all the pills up, Nikki makes a wish that he would be more in love with her — a wish on a One Wish Willow she finds nearby. That’s the reason why he dies: he actually doesn’t have time to throw them all up, because then a wish is in process.

This is the film’s cruelest and most precisely engineered plot mechanism. Bear, in the act of attempting to free Nikki from the curse by dying, is killed not by the curse but by Nikki’s own wish — the cursed entity in Nikki’s body, sensing his intention, using the same object that started everything to ensure her continued hold on him. The wish-that-kills-him is an act of love, in the entity’s logic. It is, in every other logic, the final consequence of what Bear set in motion.

Bear quickly dies from the overdose, and his death breaks the spell on Nikki. Before pulling the trigger on her own escape attempt, she “wakes up” — the real Nikki returns to her body, the full horror of her experience dawning on her face. Her scream-cries haunt the film’s final moments.

The awakening is the most gutting scene in the film, and Navarrette plays it without a single false note. The real Nikki — the person who has been trapped, conscious, screaming from inside her own body for the film’s entire runtime — opens her eyes into a room full of death and destruction that she did not cause and cannot fully account for. She is surrounded by the consequences of someone else’s wish. She is holding an object she made a wish on. And Bear is dead.

He walks out to his living room — in the moment before his death — to discover that Nikki seemingly made a similar wish on him: that Bear would love her more than anyone in the world, or at least as much as she loves him.

The symmetry of the ending is the film’s final moral statement: Bear’s wish turned Nikki into something monstrous. Nikki’s counter-wish — made by the entity in her body, intended to bind Bear to her permanently — killed him. Two wishes, both rooted in a version of love that had no interest in the other person’s freedom, producing a final tableau of bodies and a surviving woman who has to live with the wreckage.

The tragedy of Bear’s wish is that the real Nikki — the version he was infatuated with despite not seeming to actually know all that well on a personal level since childhood — essentially disappeared. She was replaced by the cursed entity.

This is the film’s central horror, stated precisely: Bear wished for Nikki, but Nikki is not what he got. He got a projection — a being built from the specifications of his desire, wearing Nikki’s face, possessing Nikki’s body, with the real Nikki trapped underneath. He fell in love with the idea of Nikki, made a wish based on that idea, and the One Wish Willow built him exactly the idea. The actual person never entered into it.

The person who is truly responsible for all of this is Bear, who took away Nikki’s autonomy when he wished for her to “love him more than anything in the world.” But Bear knew that the real Nikki was in pain, and still chose to stay with the version of her that wanted to be his girlfriend, despite the danger she posed to herself and others. His love was selfish, and he avoided accountability for his actions until the very end. Now he’s left Nikki to clean up his mess.

The film does not let Bear be simply a villain. He is a person with genuine feeling who made a catastrophically wrong choice, then made a series of smaller catastrophically wrong choices in its wake, and ended up dead — leaving the person he claimed to love to face the aftermath of everything he did. That is not the trajectory of a monster. It is the trajectory of someone who loved selfishly enough that the love itself became the instrument of destruction.

“Just because you chose this for her doesn’t make it right,” the film implies through every sequence after the wish — in the real Nikki’s screams, in her midnight plea for death, in Sarah’s violence, in the customer service call that tells Bear the only escape is through him. Every element of the narrative is designed to tell Bear — and the audience — what he did and what it cost.

The Question the Film Leaves Open: What Happens to Nikki Now?

After all the suffering this character has endured, Nikki is left to take the fall. She is surrounded by death, holding a wish-object, in a room with a dead man who died from a self-administered overdose that she did not directly cause but whose timing was influenced by the cursed entity in her body. The legal, social, and psychological aftermath of that position is not pretty.

According to writer-director Curry Barker in a post-release interview, Ian’s billion dollars did not disappear when Ian perished. “No, it’s there,” Barker confirms. “So is there a world where Nikki finds the billion dollars before the cops get there, and actually gets something out of this horrible experience? ‘Maybe so,’ Barker says. ‘I never thought about that.'”

It is a strange, darkly funny grace note from a filmmaker who has otherwise given his surviving protagonist absolutely nothing to celebrate. The money is still falling, somewhere. Nikki, who was imprisoned, violated, forced to commit violence she had no knowledge of or consent to, and who now faces the likely prospect of criminal investigation for the deaths around her — Nikki, who is the film’s only true innocent — might find a billion dollars before the police arrive.

That is not an ending. It is the suggestion of a possible future, and it is as much as the film’s moral universe is willing to offer.

Curry Barker: The Filmmaker the Horror Community Needed

Obsession was made for $1 million. The film was picked up by Focus Features after its TIFF premiere and scheduled for a May release. The Blumhouse involvement — Jason Blum executive producing — gives the film the institutional credibility of a genre titan without the creative interference that larger budgets sometimes bring.

What Barker has made with that million dollars is a film that sits alongside Jordan Peele’s early Blumhouse output — Get Out, Us — in its use of genre mechanics to carry a genuinely coherent social argument. It’s somewhat similar to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Oscar-winner Get Out in its use of a displaced consciousness as the vehicle for its horror. The comparison is not overreach. Both films use their supernatural premises to externalize something that is entirely real: the violence of having your identity, agency, and consciousness subordinated to another person’s desire.

The directing makes you feel the tension throughout and immediately creates excitement for what Barker brings next. A really well-crafted movie that will absolutely be gaining a lot of praise from horror and movie fans alike.

The critical community has responded accordingly. The 97% Rotten Tomatoes score is the number, but what it represents is a film that managed to be simultaneously entertaining as a horror film — genuinely scary, genuinely propulsive, genuinely disturbing — and rigorous as a moral argument. That combination, at any budget level, is rare. At a million dollars, it is remarkable.

Obsession is the best horror film of 2025 that most people haven’t seen yet, and one of the best pure horror films of the decade so far. It takes a premise that could have been played a hundred times for laughs or cheap scares and uses it to make something genuinely uncomfortable about the specific violence of unrequited obsession — the kind that doesn’t require a supernatural object because it is already, in its human form, an act of erasure against the person it claims to love.

The real revelation is Inde Navarrette as Nikki. She’s totally credible as both a teasing coquette and a full-blown psychotic. It’s hard to recall a performance by an actress in a horror film that can touch this one.

Navarrette, Johnston, and Barker have made a film that will be discussed in horror circles for years — not just for its effective scares, its committed performances, or its lean, efficient 109-minute runtime, but for the specific, unresolved question it leaves hanging in the air after the credits roll:

Bear wished for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world.

He got exactly what he asked for.

And the real Nikki — the one who never asked for any of this — is still sitting in that room, screaming.

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