By Curry Barker’s micro-budget OBSESSION (an effects-heavy theatrical debut shot in California’s Burbank suburbs for a reported $750k) is transparently, if not cynically, cyclical; though smart enough for the nature of its repetitions to be part of OBSESSION’s central joke. If OBSESSION is too viscerally upsetting to live on as a sleepover classic, surely it can prosper as a drinking game where everyone steals a swig of Dad’s private whiskey stash every time a character utters, “So, can we talk about last night?” It’s a spooky flick about actively ignoring heightening red flags; in protagonist Bear’s case, OBSESSION is about intentionally clogging your piping then panicking once the apartment floods—and being blindly led through the rising brown water by both yearning delusions of affection and increasingly hare-brained attempts to maintain a status quo that best serves yourself. It’s structured not so much like a TikTok, but more so a lunch break’s scroll through a user’s full page of content … spurts and stops, patterns, repeated gags that can identify as auteurist motifs, react faces, perfect loops, retention bait, thumbnail-farming, and a couple really effective posts you don’t find yourself 2x’ing through. Apologies if that description triggers your fight-or-flight (it should), but it makes sense for a couple of YouTube creators who didn’t find career-making success until they started formatting their sketches into vertical content. There’s a relentless economy to the film’s style that extends to faulty economical storytelling: This is a rip-roaringly brutal declaration of arrival that is subconsciously governed by viewer retention, proven formula, and digestibility.
Despite its red-dot precision, OBSESSION is homegrown indie horror. Though acquired by Focus Features and Blumhouse in 2025 for a sum north of $15 million, Barker’s box office surprise is decorated with DIY production quirks; every background actor in the same “my barista roommate is crowd-funding their next short” age-range, even when it doesn’t make sense, like for a dusty instrument shop to be staffed by four(?!) faces better found in a content house, or for a diner to be exclusively serving and be served by fresh post-grads. In true young gun fashion, it also steals from bigger (and better) movies; the object of Bear’s desire, Nikki (played by, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Inde Navarrette), quite literally snaps into a new gear like she’s been charmed by WEAPONS’ Gladys, while Bear traps himself in a gauntlet of customer service complaints out of THE SUBSTANCE. Nikki is BEING JOHN MALKOVICH’d into herself, and here’s this dipshit Bear who’s more frustrated by the decentralization of the production of goods, where calling the company directly will not aid you in any way, but oh, hey, by the way, they have Nikki’s soul on the other line if you wanted to speak to her. Nikki’s horror story is the agency stripped from her directly by a trusted friend; Bear is priming himself to scribe a scathing Yelp review where he rails against the companies we submit all of our information to ultimately having total agency over us, while selling the idea that they’ve none over themselves. It’s a fucking funny pitch-black hook.
Curry Barker gears the film as a horror-comedy (at times a self-loathing one, the languid first act so parodically reminiscent of a Netflix YA adaptation that you expect to watch another “that’s a bad idea” sketch unfold), a tonal direction that plays to his pre-established strengths but lends zero gravity to the coercive horrors he’s intent on unleashing. Characters don’t have senses of humor, they’re vessels for a demonic force: dating comedy by a straight guy in his mid-20s. Sketch comics thrive in horror because while we most remember the shock and awe of a pay-off, the fundamentals of both are built off playing the hits. OBSESSION isn’t so much novel as it is well-studied. Curry likes Ari Aster, so here’s some blunt-force head trauma in a vehicle. How about some ritualistic bodily violation to get in on the MIDSOMMAR action, too, not to mention the aggressive grinning and frowning of one Miss Florence Pugh. On the house, here’s a bratty drone about how men suffer when they’re surrounded by suffering women for the BEAU IS AFRAID heads. There’s zero humane grounding (this could stand to undergo a Phillipou Brothers coaching session to land the gut-punches), so all the scenes of Nikki freaking out in public don’t make you want to crawl out of your skin. Hell, during the first outburst in a crowded restaurant, the background diners aren’t even being directed to react to Nikki. Instead, the showstopping moments see Navarrette shredding prog rock guitar solos—chords switching mid-riff, luxuriously awash in the freedom of knowing that if they wanted to make a scene last 23 minutes, then Barker would have no choice but to let her cook. Barker mistakes the spectacle of her performance for depth, and in typical 25-year-old-makes-a-feature-length-theatrical-debut fashion, is so consumed by his own cleverness that he accidentally exposes his base disinterest in his female lead. We’re force-fed a center-framed “Curry’s Pub” director’s cameo in the first act, meanwhile we learn little else about Nikki beyond what’s established on that very same trivia night. She’s a writer, she’s quitting her job, and, also, prior to the revelation that she’s been casually hooking up with Bear’s friend, we learn once again that she’s a writer. Also, her last name is Freeman. Ha! This would all be fine if a puppeteer hauled out a Crypt Keeper animatronic to slang a naughty moral over the mic drop of a final shot, but alas.
Bear offhandedly purchases a One-Wish Willow at an adult toy store—not a dildo emporium, but rather a patchouli-scented Wiccan boutique stocked with $150 chunks of amethyst, penis candles, and 1930s curio reproductions in collectible packaging—and just as offhandedly wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone in the world,” delivered with bated breath indistinguishable from any Rivers Cuomo line in “Falling for You.” The more Bear realizes he’s responsible for Nikki’s dysfunctions, the more he chooses to let it rip, because the alternative is both unknowable and sexless. When he bears witness to the trapped Nikki’s sorrow, he in turn tunes it out or viciously inverts the sorrow as his own: What’s so bad about being with me? This sophisticatedly savage framing of Bear’s “little brother” masculinity as a slaver who recites PINKERTON lyrics as witchy incantations peters off into a 12:50 AM SNL crazy ex-girlfriend sketch where the joke quickly becomes “my psycho girlfriend is way more invested in us than I am.” Jokes about a needy woman pinning you to the mattress during a late-night cuddle, having a monstrously jealous girlfriend freak out over a spin-the-bottle party game, her going postal over the suggestion of attending a boys’ night … Atop cheapening the ghoulish tragedy of the story, it’s just some boomer-ass recyclable shit that’s not much more emotionally intelligent than any of what Bear’s committing throughout the course of OBSESSION.
The Nikki of it all is kinda crazy. Every choice in depicting her presence doesn’t register as traditional moviemaking, but instead an act of collaging where performance, editing, lighting, and music are clipped and pasted over one another to produce a singular live-wire nightmare. A sequence where Nikki’s possessed body idles in the corner of the dark bedroom—until she skitters across the screen so grotesquely that it affects the frame rate—is like watching ALIEN’s chest-burster scene for the first time. And then again, and again, and again. It’s a full symphony, her eerie shrieking nothing without Rock Burwell’s directly accompanying score, and neither come together without Barker’s incisive eyes and ears in the editing bay. Her glassy eyes emit a fluorescent glow under the thick darkness of cinematographer Taylor Clemons’ oppressive lighting, the wails from her unsuspecting petite frame so guttural, and her Jim Carrey-rivaling facial elasticity a playground for the macabre (incredible what the new class of actors is capable of when they allow their cheeks and foreheads to crease). More than the whole of the movie itself, the compilation of crafts that went into this single performance displays such a commanding feat of the totality of moviemaking that I’m not sure how Barker—whose previous feature, the shoddy YouTube-published MILK & SERIAL, couldn’t even convincingly convey a gunshot—did it. Now, these components individually garner memorable scares, but “the horror movie about all the things that happen around Bear” is simply not as frightening as “the horror movie about all the things that happen to Nikki, the up-and-comer sexually imprisoned by her childhood confidante and sentenced to an existential prison for the price of a few bucks.”
This lack of dimensionality lets Barker lead us to a poisoned watering hole that implicates the viewer in Bear’s full-bodied infatuation: as Bear enjoys the carnal fruits of her disembodied soul—and possesses her interiority with a doting, loneliness-assuaging adoration—we too are using what little we know of Nikki for our entertainment purposes. Nikki is designed to be used. That reading really struggles treading afloat. I don’t buy it. We are unbeknownst to the specifics, but we know Bear and Nikki have founded their friendship on total emotional availability. They have shared secrets, passions, and heartaches. OBSESSION intends for these two characters to know each other quite well; it’s unclear if the relationship between these two is even of interest to Barker. This is a movie obsessed with cravenly putting words in a woman’s mouth, but from a screenwriter who is lowkey scared to put words in the woman’s mouth! For Barker, Nikki is a vector for every gizmo in his trench coat, but Navarette is the only member of the production treating her predicament with a degree of seriousness.
Its immaturities are unsurprising considering how youthful OBSESSION is, which is to construe how casually triggering it is; like TALK TO ME, the frankness shown towards depression, suicide, consent, and drug use is portrayed with a callousness that only comes from an intimate knowingness. The kids have always had it rough, but the school shooter generation—who live each day on the gallows custom-built for them—has swiftly pioneered the grammar of its narrative fiction. Nikki threatens to slit her wrists in front of Bear at the first sign of his displeasure with her demonic ways (shoutout to the BPD girlies); rather than use the moment to disarm or kill Bear, every time The Real Nikki returns to her body, she instinctively rushes to the nearest suicide attempt. A shot of Bear raping a technically unconscious Nikki is treated as both jump-scare and punchline. A frightened, bloodied Bear returns to the store that started it all, and the nonchalant shopkeeper coolly recommends that he just kill himself. This is all serious stuff, but also, kill urself lmao. The film’s chewiest mystery isn’t the origin of the One-Wish Willow, but the inclusion of two opposing lines of dialogue. From his pal Ian, Bear is told that all we have is time during the film’s cold-open, but later, a forlorn Nikki (still herself), who’s pining for a total shift in her career and aspirations, confides in Bear that there’s not much time left. I’m hard-pressed to find a dialectical that defines Gen Z better.
And yet, OBSESSION is not a desperate exploration of love, nor a bleeding manifesto, or portrait of the generationally damned. It’s an algorithm, which, though it has become a boogeyman of a term, isn’t necessarily the worst thing to be. They achieve results. [Nikki does something fucked up] + [11 minutes of “Why did Nikki do (fucked up thing)?”] + [two minutes of “Women, right?”], repeat until a great ending where, in summation, two pussies overdose on oxycodone.
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