Film Review: Obsession

Spoilers!

Faustian bargains never work out for the one who initiated it, or often those around them, either, and yet, human desire overrides such long-term thinking. In the case of Curry Barker’s 2025 film (released theatrically this year), Obsession, Bear (played by Michael Johnston) does not seek wealth, fame, power, or even knowledge. Rather, he seeks something far more intangible and something access to the prior four can’t guarantee: love. As he ought to have known, love decreed by a wish was bound to unravel horrifically. Obsessed features arguably the best horror performance from Inde Navarrette, who plays Nikki, Bear’s love interest, since Toni Collette in 2018’s Hereditary (and there’s been incredible, notable horror performances since then!). For way of comparison on the movie itself, it’s spiritually similar to 2025’s Companion, with a heaping dose of 2022’s Talk to Me. Comparisons aside, Barker’s film, which he directed and wrote with a budget reportedly under $1 million, is an intense, unnerving ride that patiently, unflinchingly unmasks how desperate, pathetic, and even cowardly love can make us.

Bear and Nikki are childhood friends, although as alluded to, Bear pines for Nikki. The film opens with him practicing his big declaration of love to a waitress while his friend, Ian (played by Cooper Tomlinson), watches. Johnston plays a nervous Nellie quite well. His energy makes me uncomfortable and nervous. I know I just put aside the comparisons, but I couldn’t help but think Johnston is a cross between Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Pattinson — and it could be because I also saw The Drama this year, but Johnston’s performance reminded me of Pattinson’s in that, too, with its desperation to hold everything together even as it’s all falling irreparably apart. The other member of the friend group is Sarah (played by Megan Lawless). They all work together at a music store owned by Sarah’s dad (who is played by Andy Richter, funny enough). Upon returning home from the diner, Bear finds his cat, Sandy, dead. I actually thought it was going to be a fake-out from Barker and the cat was alive, but deeply sleeping. Nope, Sandy died after getting into Bear’s oxycodone pills. Not only does this set-up some future grotesquery with Sandy, but those pills are “Chekhov’s pills,” if you will.

After being pushed by Nikki to come out with the friend group for their usual trivia night, Bear intends to buy Nikki a necklace to replace the one she just said over the phone she lost down the drain. Instead, while at this bizarre shop, he buys a “One Wish Willow,” which grants the person one wish. They open the box, it plays weird music somehow, and you break the stick after making your wish. The plan is to give it to Nikki after he drops her off at her house after trivia. Instead, he fumbles with his pre-planned declaration of love (he actually insults her on the advice of Ian by referring to her by her bullying nickname thinking it would be cute!); she even outright asks him if he likes her and he denies it. Then he makes the wish using the “One Wish Willow” for Nikki to “love him more than anyone else in the world.” The camera pans out and a silhouette of Nikki is seen unmoving on the porch. She returns to his car and is acting super weird. As if the wish has already taken effect! Bear gives off his nervous energy, but rolls with it, especially when Nikki wants to go home with him. It also takes the edge off of the bizarre when Nikki says she’s acting erratically because her father is dying of cancer (although Bear should know better that Nikki doesn’t have a good relationship with her father). She then invites him to sleep with her in the same bed, whereupon she begins to kiss him. Then, she snaps it out of it, as if snapping out of the wish cast upon her. That freaks Bear out. They go to sleep and pretend nothing happened.

Everything up to that point you could have filed under the category of Nikki being “on something,” as Bear and Ian later do, but that would only be if what transpires in the morning didn’t transpire! Bear sort of forgets that part when relaying the events of the prior night to Ian. When Bear wakes up, he finds a shrine to Sandy in the kitchen with Sandy’s dead body. What the hell. But again, instead of Bear completely trying to reverse course, it’s like he gaslights himself into continuing whatever this is at this juncture with Nikki.

Later in the day, Nikki apologizes for her behavior, this time saying she’s been taking MDMA, and admits her feelings for him. Barker got me again because a montage occurs of Bear and Nikki together like a loving couple. I thought it was going to be a fake-out again! As in, Bear imagining what their coupling would be like now versus what it actually becomes. No, it was real, and they’re an item now. At a dinner together, Ian interrupts with a phone call to Bear to inform him that Nikki lied about her father being sick. Bear confronts her with it, and she loses her mind in the restaurant (although, to be honest, the other patrons didn’t seem to mind!). Bear calms her down and continues to roll with their “love.”

After they get home, Bear “makes love” to Nikki, and this is where two things came to mind. First, my comparison to Obsession because Nikki looks to the left while Bear is on top of her like she’s a robot. It’s disturbing. Second, I lost the remaining morsel of sympathy I had for Bear. He’s in the wrong to continue rolling with his Nikki coupling knowing everything about it seems off, but he’s especially wrong after she makes it so abundantly clear something is off at the restaurant and he goes home pretending nothing is wrong to “make love” to her. That’s gross.

The weirdness cranks up again later in the night when Bear awakes to Nikki watching him sleep, and she’s also moving in an unnatural manner. The next morning, when he has to go to work, he finds the entire front door has been taped with duct tape. What the hell again! He powers the door open and goes to work as if that didn’t just happen. Meanwhile, she stays standing in a frozen position, with a frozen look on her face, soiling herself.

At work, Bear and Sarah have a sweet moment after Sarah is rejected from another college (I think it was a college). She also tries to reason with Bear that his relationship to Nikki makes no sense. Meanwhile, he’s eating the sandwich prepared to him by Nikki. First, I said to myself, how could you possibly eat anything prepared by her at this point? Then, after he realizes he’s bitten into HIS DEAD CAT SANDY AS A SANDWICH, I then wondered, how did you not notice that it surely smelled awful, and how did you not even react repulsed after the first bite?! In true desperate, pathetic Bear mode, his plan is to go home and tell Nikki she can’t MAKE A SANDWICH OUT OF HIS DEAD CAT SANDY. This is incredible dark comedy (Barker and Tomlinson come from the comedy world, which that comedy-to-horror pipeline continues to fascinate me).

I started to say “to be fair to Bear,” as a segue here, but no … no. So, Bear calls the “One Wish Willow” “company” to figure out how to alter the wish. Not reverse it, as he explicitly emphasizes, but merely to “alter” it so that Nikki will truly love him. No fairness to Bear. Nonetheless, we learn the wish can only end if the expresser of the wish (Bear) or the person the wish was cast upon (Nikki) dies. As expected, when Bear reenters his home, Nikki is standing in the same position, this time with even more waste and excrement.

Ian invited Bear to a “guys-only” party and in that conversation, I thought Ian was actually being a good friend to Bear trying to reason with him, as Sarah had, about the weirdness involving Nikki. It was like talking to a brick wall (which funny enough, when Nikki was normal, she said talking to Bear was mostly unlike talking to a brick wall). Because Nikki started to freak out upon hearing about this “guys-only” party and that Sarah would be there, Bear brings her. This is especially where the film reminded me of Talk to Me. Everyone is playing a game of Jenga, where each block you pull has something to do. Bear draws a block daring him to kiss the person to his left, which is Sarah. Nikki quite literally drags Sarah from her seat and kisses Bear instead, proclaiming her love for him and everyone else there will die having not experienced such love. She then proceeds to scream and stab herself in the face with a broken bottle. I love, love when horror gives us these very public, crowded moments. In other words, when horror happens beyond the limited scope of the primary players (Bear and Nikki in this case), it’s particularly horrifying. It’s one thing for Bear to see it, it’s another thing for Bear to see it surrounded by his friends. Everyone experienced the same horror; it’s escaped those previously limited confines. It’s unleashed. What I just now realized is likely happening, too, especially given what the real Nikki implores of Bear later, is that the real Nikki snaps back, as if the wish cast upon her isn’t airtight, and at this point, she wants to die rather than be “possessed” by the wish, as it were. That’s ghastly. Also, it must be said, that Bear was a cowardly piece of crap in this moment of Nikki assaulting herself because he didn’t even try to stop her! He did nothing.

In the middle of the night, Sarah texts Bear, insisting they meet-up at the park; she has something she wants to tell him. As Bear gets out of bed to leave, this is when the previously alluded to moment with the real Nikki ostensibly occurs, where she begs for Bear to kill her. He doesn’t, obviously. While sitting in the car with Sarah, she reveals that Ian had been sleeping with Nikki intermittently (so much for him being a good friend!). It also seems obvious that Sarah has feelings for Bear. When she’s about to seek the kiss for the one she didn’t get through Jenga, Nikki barrels through the driver’s side window and bangs Sarah’s head against the steering wheel until she dies. Special effect-wise, this didn’t look great, but I give them a pass due to the budget, but also, it was still such a horrifying moment of brutality, the bad special effect didn’t detract. Again, Bear is a coward and doesn’t move. Worse still, he agrees to help Nikki get rid of the body!! I hate him.

Bear tries to use another “One Wish Willow” to wish everything would go back to how it was before the previous wish, but again, the rules are one wish per customer. So, then he tries to convince Ian to do it, but Ian doesn’t believe it works. He jokingly wishes for a billion dollars and breaks the stick. Billions of dollars begin flooding down. Brilliant dark comedy, I tell ya! Bear runs away, distraught. Coming home, he finds Nikki dressed like Sarah, replete with her chest tattoo. Instead of dealing with all that, Bear goes to the bathroom where he seems ready to kill himself with a gun (he got the gun from Nikki). He can’t go through with. So, he decides to down the oxycodone pills. Even then, it seems like he reneges on that by trying to induce vomiting. Right then, Nikki uses the One Wish Willow on Bear, presumably to make him love her given the way he lovingly comes out of the bathroom and embraces her. However, he overdoses and dies in her lap. Nikki then is ready to kill herself with the gun, but then the real Nikki regains her body and mind to see everything splayed before her. Could you imagine?!

It cannot be reiterated enough how tour-de-force remarkable Navarrette’s performance was in Obsession. Johnston brought the necessary nervous energy opposite her, and Barker had a great script, with some unnerving shots (I’m thinking about when Nikki was on Bear’s doorsteps professing her love for him and her eyes looked so damn menacing), but this film truly was a vehicle for Navarrette. The Nikki at the beginning of the film is drastically different from the Nikki under the wish, who is drastically different than the Nikki who intermittently snaps back, who is drastically different than the Nikki who is cosplaying as Sarah at the end in the peak of her derangement. From the quietest of moments to the quite literally loudest, screeching moments, Obsession needs to be seen to see Navarrette act. I was blown away.

Overall, Obsession is a great take on the Faustian bargain and how badly we want love to be real even when it’s so clearly not, buoyed immeasurably by Navarrette’s unbelievable performance.