Obsession (2025)

Nikki, pursued by a Bear

Beware the buzzy horror breakthrough. It’s one of my moviegoing mantras, and it rarely steers me wrong. I guess I just don’t react to fresh voices in horror the way many movie lovers do. But Obsession, the first theatrical feature from YouTuber Curry Barker and the surprise horror movie sensation of the year, made me cautiously optimistic anyway. First, it’s centered on a dynamic performance from Inde Navarrette as Nikki Freeman, and cast-forward horror tends to be my favorite kind. Second, it has penetrated audiences not normally receptive to horror movies, suggesting something more universal in its appeal than jump scares, structural puckishness, or gnarly gore.

I wish I could hand you a definitive rave or takedown, but my reaction to Obsession is extremely ambivalent. The highest praise I can give the film: I wish there were more horror stories like it, with a great hook you can explain in a sentence, a darkly comic tone that sacrifices none of the danger, and confidence in its cast to carry the material. As all movies should, it has a human core inside its genre wrapper that reels you in. The logline is great: Bear (Michael Johnston), a lonely music store clerk, makes a wish upon an enchanted curio that his coworker Nikki will love him more than anything else in the world, and it immediately comes true. Her “obsession” with him gets pushed to frightening extremes. He can’t undo the wish, and he’s not entirely sure he wants to. This concept executed at a baseline level with some charisma, mainly Navarrette’s, is enough for the movie’s claws to sink in and pull you along.

And yet I have plenty of heartburn about the film. Some comes from strange choices in the writing and craft, but mainly, I don’t trust the film’s voice. Obsession depicts a beautiful woman enslaved to the lustful whims of a lonely man pining from afar, throwing her body and soul at him until it breaks her down into terrible, humiliating acts. Her agency lies buried deep inside her, surfacing only in brief and haunted glimmers. The problem is that the story is told entirely from Bear’s perspective: Even before the wish, the movie is about his experience of longing for her rather than who she is or even what their relationship is. The result is a film that has its cake and eats it too. Textually, it villainizes Bear and breaks down his gaze. Experientially, it revels in the fantasy of the beautiful Nikki being slavishly worshipful, obedient, and horny towards you, even to the point of self-degradation. From what I’ve heard anecdotally, young women find this movie scarier than any other demographic, and that makes sense: The film is so thorough about depicting a woman surrendering all her agency to a man who doesn’t have her best interests at heart. But you can see why men might find perverse appeal in the same fantasy. I suspect that’s a big part of the movie’s crossover appeal, and that rubs me the wrong way.

As a story, Obsession suffers from some odd choices that reveal the inexperience of the 26-year-old Barker. The film’s sense of escalation is out of whack. Once the premise is properly introduced, Nikki’s degrading faculties and social behavior get parceled out in incoherent chunks, like the movie is a series of sketches. Sure enough, like many rising names in horror, Barker has a background in sketch comedy (his YouTube partner Cooper Tomlinson even plays Bear’s buddy Ian). This profile for a horror director has reached a market saturation intense enough (Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, etc.) that I’m starting to wonder if it will have ramifications for good old-fashioned horror mood-making and long-form storytelling. Given Barker’s background, it’s no surprise the movie often lacks a cohesive sense of flow and is quite episodic and uneven.

Barker and his crew make a deliberate choice to shoot most of the movie in low, desaturated light. I simply do not like this, aesthetically. It cuts against the grain of the film’s ambition to structure itself as a curdled romantic comedy, where a more colorful and poisoned look might have drawn out more sides of the story Barker is telling. Still, it’s undoubtedly effective and story-driven whenever Nikki is framed as a shadowy silhouette, her body in commune with sinister forces.

On the plus side, the cast is good, and most of that weight falls on Navarrette’s shoulders. I wish the movie had given her more to do before her possession, because, like the rest of the film, her performance is a bit too unmodulated once the premise kicks in. Obsession offers perfect fodder for the TikToks and YouTube clips that highlight her most commanding moments, and she is indeed a lightning bolt on screen for the entire runtime. But I wouldn’t put this in the hall of fame of horror movie performances, and anyone who suggests she’s better than Mia Goth was in Pearl is probably just attracted to Navarrette. Which, fair.

The buzz around Obsession has been cacophonous, and its ROI at the box office is truly bananas (shot for under a million dollars, it’s now Focus Features’ highest-grossing release ever at $400m+ in receipts). But I still see Obsession as something of a muted success, rickety enough in its storytelling and dubious enough in its point of view that my reservations pile up. Beware the buzzy horror breakthrough, even the ones that mostly work.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.