We walked into this one carrying months of expectations. Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September 2025, and the buzz has not stopped since. South by Southwest picked it up. A bidding war over distribution rights reportedly went on for twenty-four hours. Focus Features eventually locked it down for over ten million dollars.
That kind of attention for a horror film from a first-time feature director is almost unheard of, and it set the stage for one of those rare screenings where the audience already knows something special is about to happen.
We were lucky enough to see it alongside our friend Stabbed and Bothered (go follow him if you haven’t), and all of us walked out with our jaws somewhere near the floor. As Arthur put it:
My mouth is on the floor in a sense, so there’s not much I can say. It’s fucked, man. Seriously, it’s fucked.
That about sums up the immediate reaction. We came home and sat down to record almost immediately, as always. Meaghan laughed at multiple parts, felt stressed out at multiple parts, and cried once. “I got the trifecta,” she said. That kind of emotional range from a single horror film tells you everything you need to know about what Curry Barker has built here.
Both of us landed at 9.5 digs. We don’t believe in perfect scores (Arthur’s words), and there’s always something to nitpick if you really want to. But this is as close to a flawless horror experience as we’ve encountered in recent memory.
From YouTube Sketches to Hollywood’s Most Wanted
Here is what makes the Obsession story even wilder. Curry Barker is 26 years old. He rose to prominence through a YouTube comedy channel called That’s a Bad Idea, which he co-created with his friend and longtime collaborator Cooper Tomlinson.
They were making sketches, short films, funny bits about awkward social situations. The comedy-to-horror pipeline is something that really needs to be studied at this point, because it just keeps producing results. Jordan Peele did it. Zach Cregger did it. Danny and Michael Philippou did it with Talk to Me. And now Barker has done it with Obsession.
In 2024, Barker wrote, directed, and starred in a micro-budget found-footage horror film called Milk & Serial, which he released for free on YouTube. That film, made for roughly $800, racked up millions of views and developed a cult following.
It was enough to get him signed and enough to land him a deal to make Obsession with a one-million-dollar budget. “This man is a genius,” Arthur said during the episode. Meaghan’s take was a little more measured:
It could be both. He’s either partially crazy or a genius. Could be both.
We’re leaning toward both.
Barker wrote the screenplay. He directed it. He edited the whole thing. There’s a cohesiveness that comes from having one person’s creative vision running through every layer of a project, and we’ve seen this work before. We had a conversation with James Kondelik, who wrote, directed, and edited Pitfall, and the same principle applied. When one person holds every thread, there’s a creative unity that just shows up on screen. Obsession has that in spades.
And Barker isn’t slowing down. His next film, Anything But Ghosts, is already in the can. Focus Features picked that one up, too. It stars Aaron Paul, Bryce Dallas Howard, Violet McGraw, and both Barker and Tomlinson.
The premise follows two fake paranormal investigators who have to deal with actual ghosts while confronting the fraudulent nature of their business. It sounds like it leans harder into horror-comedy territory. On top of all that, Barker has signed on to write and direct a reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24. The future for this guy is stacked.
A Wish You Can’t Take Back
The premise of Obsession is deceptively simple. Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is a directionless music store employee who has been hopelessly infatuated with his coworker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. After an awkward conversation where he can’t bring himself to tell her how he feels, he walks into one of those new-age crystal shop type places and picks up a novelty trinket called a One Wish Willow. You break the stick, make a wish. It’s gimmicky and silly. Nobody would ever take it seriously.
He wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. And then it works.
What follows is one of the best depictions of “be careful what you wish for” that we think has ever been put to film. Barker has cited an episode of The Simpsons (the Treehouse of Horror monkey’s paw episode) as a partial inspiration, and the idea was that this particular concept had been explored before, but never pushed to the place where it actually needed to go. “What happens if you actually do it?” was basically the question he wanted to answer.
The thing is, Bear had an out. There is a scene right before he breaks the stick where Nikki essentially asks him point-blank if he has feelings for her. He chickens out. “Goddamn it,” Arthur said. “If only you had the courage to say what you were trying to say.“
But Bear doesn’t do it because he doesn’t really want her honest answer. He wants the fantasy. He wants the version of Nikki that exists in his head, not the real person standing in front of him. That distinction between love and infatuation is something the film handles with surprising intelligence.
Once the wish kicks in, what starts off as seemingly sweet very quickly turns dark, toxic, and sinister. Nikki’s personality shifts. She becomes possessive, erratic, and deeply unstable, and the real Nikki is stuck somewhere underneath. We compared it to the sunken place from Get Out, where the victims have these brief moments of clarity where they try to break through but are shoved back down. Meaghan clocked it partway through:
Right, right, right. It’s like a sunken place thing.
The emotional weight of it is brutal. There is a scene where Nikki breaks down, crying and screaming at Bear: “I can’t be Nikki. I don’t know how to be Nikki.” She’s on overload, trying to figure out how to be someone she’s not to make him happy, and it cracked Meaghan open.
That’s when I cried…
The scene carries real resonance for anyone who has ever been in a toxic relationship and hit that point where you just don’t know what version of yourself the other person wants anymore.
Inde Navarrette Deserves Every Award
We cannot say this loudly enough. Inde Navarrette’s performance as Nikki is one of the most incredible things we have seen in a horror film in years. “Give her an Oscar right now,” Arthur said, and Meaghan co-signed immediately. If she’s not nominated for something major, something has gone very wrong with the awards conversation this year.
The physical performance alone is wild. There are scenes where Nikki moves in a jerky, unsettling way that feels almost inhuman. That moment where Bear wakes up at three in the morning, and she’s just standing in the corner of the room in the darkness, doing this weird little shuffle? Arthur was done. “Yo. I was fucked. I was freaking out.” The theater reacted to it, too. Meaghan could feel people in the audience shifting uncomfortably as they started to realize she was there. The whole vibe of the room changed.
Then there’s the way she’s lit throughout the film. There are scenes where her eyes seem to glow, where she’s shot in shadow in a way that feels demonic. One particular moment at the front door, where she’s playing coy but her eyes catch the light just so, is a chef’s kiss level of cinematography married to an incredible physical performance.
Every single frame with Navarrette in it carries this undercurrent of menace, even in the quieter moments. And that lingering shot after Bear leaves for work, where she just stands there smiling with that fucked-up grin for a solid thirty seconds? “It felt like an audition for Smile,” Meaghan said. “She would’ve been really good at it.“
The entire cast is strong, honestly. Michael Johnston brings real vulnerability and complexity to Bear. Cooper Tomlinson plays Ian, Bear’s best friend, and the friendship dynamic between those two feels completely organic. Megan Lawless plays Sarah, and her natural chemistry with Bear quietly highlights how forced his relationship with the cursed version of Nikki actually is. Even Andy Richter (yes, Andy from Conan) shows up as Carter, Sarah’s dad, who owns the music store, and is perfectly cast. But Navarrette is on another level entirely.
The Writing Holds Everything Together
One of the things that surprised us most about Obsession is how good the dialogue is. The conversations between the friend group feel real. Arthur said it threw him back a few years, to that feeling of being younger and talking with your friends about the person you have a crush on. The funny moments land. The serious conversations have weight. You completely believe that these people have known each other for years, and Meaghan pointed out that their body language around each other has that specific comfort level that only comes from long friendships.
The film also knows when to pull back. For something that runs at a pretty high intensity for most of its runtime, it spaces out these quieter, more human moments in a way that feels instinctive. “I think that’s fascinating,” Meaghan said, “that somebody going into a full feature was able to just sort of intrinsically know when to do that.” It keeps the audience from getting numb to the tension, and it gives the emotional beats room to breathe.
There’s also a scene involving a customer support hotline for the One Wish Willow that might be one of our favorite sequences in the entire film. Bear calls the number on the box, trying to undo the wish. The support agent is completely deadpan, almost blase about the fact that this man has basically put a curse on someone.
He fakes Bear out about the possibility of canceling the wish, then tells him it’s actually impossible. The only way out is for Bear’s life to end. “Didn’t it remind you of sometimes when you call customer support and they’re like, oh yeah, the only thing to do would be this, and then they say, oh no, we can’t do that?” Meaghan asked. The scene is hilarious and horrifying at the same time. It condenses everything the movie does well (the humor, the psychological dread, the physical horror) into about two minutes.
Bear is not a straightforward villain, and he’s not a straightforward victim either. He’s a well-meaning guy who made a selfish choice and is now watching the consequences spiral completely out of his control. His natural chemistry with Sarah’s character shows you what a healthy relationship could look like for him, and the contrast with his manufactured fantasy with Nikki is devastating.
The montage of Bear and the cursed Nikki together feels staged, like couples content that people post online that never feels particularly real. Two conversations with Sarah, and everything just flows. The film is smart enough to let you see that without hammering it home.
What Comes Next
We walked away from Obsession thinking about it in a way that doesn’t happen very often. May 2026 has already given us Hokum and At the Place of Ghosts, and now Obsession lands on top of all that.
It’s one of the craziest months of horror in most recent years.
Arthur said, and we have to agree. Obsession hits theaters on May 15, and if you have even a passing interest in horror, you owe it to yourself to see this one on a big screen with a crowd. The audience experience adds something real to this particular film.
We will be rewatching this one. We will notice things we missed the first time. And honestly, we’ll probably be even more impressed the second time around. Curry Barker made something special, and we think people are going to be talking about this film for a very long time.