Curry Barker’s Obsession earns its hype with a star-making Inde Navarrette performance and a vicious sense of where to point the camera.
Obsession, the second feature from the 1.12-million-subscriber sketch duo “that’s a bad idea,” arrives in theaters this week with a sort of TIFF-anointed advance hype that usually crumples on contact with a paying audience. But it earns the hype. It earns the hype so completely that by the closing shot you start to wonder whether the people who saw it at Midnight Madness were undershooting.
It also, with the breezy confidence of a young filmmaker who has been editing his own work since age 11, walks straight into the loudest cultural argument of the decade, gestures politely, and proceeds to set it on fire.
Misery, but the stalker is the crush.
Bear (Michael Johnston, doing the best work of his post-Teen Wolf life) clerks at an Atlanta music store with his childhood-friend-turned-secret-crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette, about to become very famous) and their friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless, quietly heartbreaking as the woman pining for the guy too busy pining for someone else to notice).
Nikki loses a necklace. Bear, instead of saying any of several sentences a functioning adult might say, wanders into a crystal-and-tarot novelty shop and emerges with a $6.99 plastic stick called the One Wish Willow. You can feel Barker grinning behind the camera. He knows exactly which decade’s anxieties he plans to remix.
Bear snaps the stick. He makes the wish. Nikki, who in the previous scene was a real person with a real life, performs a tonal pivot so violent it deserves its own credit. Suddenly she is radiant. Suddenly she is voracious. And now Bear is the luckiest man in Georgia, and the audience, which has been here before, settles in to watch his Monkey’s Paw comeuppance arrive on schedule.
Barker, mercifully, refuses to deliver it on schedule. The genius of Obsession’s middle hour is how long it lets Bear enjoy himself. How patiently it watches him fail to notice the cracks. And how completely it implicates the audience in his pleasure. We root for him. Then we feel uneasy about rooting for him. Then we wonder what, exactly, we just rooted for.
Inde Navarrette is our new obsession.
Let me say this plainly because someone should: Inde Navarrette gives the best horror performance of 2026 so far. And the only reason her name remains absent from awards conversations is because awards conversations remain allergic to anything with a body count above four.
The role asks her to play two Nikkis at once. There is spell-Nikki, the besotted dream-girl version Bear ordered up by mail, who performs adoration with the unblinking intensity of a person who has forgotten she has needs. And there is real-Nikki, who keeps surfacing in tiny involuntary flashes. A flicker of confusion mid-kiss. A half-second of horror in a bathroom mirror. The way her voice catches when she says she loves him and almost, for an instant, hears herself say it.
Navarrette plays both versions with the same warmth, which is the move. The spell does no such thing as turn Nikki into a monster, per se. The spell turns Nikki into exactly the woman Bear thought he wanted. Which is its own kind of horror, and the film knows it. Every time real-Nikki briefly resurfaces, the camera catches her trying to understand what is happening to her body. And the scene lands like a slap. Long after the credits, those moments are what stay.
Johnston has the easier job and deserves nearly as much credit for refusing the easy way out. Plenty of leading men, handed a role this pathetic, would wink at the camera the whole time. Johnston plays Bear straight, though. He’s a self-described nice guy making the worst available choice in every scene and narrating it to himself, in real time, as the brave one. Watching him is like watching a man explain, with great earnestness, why he had to read someone’s diary.
Cregger-coded with Stephen King DNA.
Zach Cregger is certainly the lineage call, and the comparison earns its keep. Barker is, demonstrably, the latest stop on the comedy-to-horror conveyor belt that gave us Get Out, Talk to Me, Barbarian, and Weapons. He has Cregger’s instinct for ironic needle drops. The structural rupture move, the willingness to pivot tones inside a single cut. He has the sketch comic’s preternatural sense of which beat to hold one second longer than the audience can stand.
But the actual creative seed is clearly Misery. Annie Wilkes wants to wear Paul Sheldon’s skin. The fan loves the object so hard she wants to occupy it. Obsession is Misery flipped along two axes: the obsessive becomes a young woman, the object becomes a young man.
And — here is the part that makes the movie hum — the man set the curse in motion himself. Annie Wilkes happens upon Paul Sheldon. Bear summons Nikki. The horror originates with the person the genre usually wants us to root for, and it’s a small brilliance.
The camera loves it some Bear.
And then there is the single most disciplined choice in the movie. The camera locks to Bear and refuses to leave. Even in scenes where another character receives important emotional information — Sarah opening a letter from her father, for instance — we stay on Bear, mooning at Nikki across the store, oblivious, planning his next move. We hear nothing. We see only what he sees. Get only what he gets.
By locking us inside Bear’s perspective, Barker traps us inside the romance-genre grammar Bear keeps narrating about his own life. We watch Nikki the way Bear watches Nikki. We notice what he notices. Then, when the spell takes and the perspective curdles, the camera has already made us complicit. We sat in his head, his gaze, for an hour. The film, with a cheeky little smile, asks what we plan to do about it.
It’s fair to wonder if Obsession intentionally represents commentary on incel culture or the so-called male loneliness epidemic. But either way, it’s still a relatable premise because of how honestly the writing comes forth. After all, it’s a horror movie about a self-described nice guy who uses a magical artifact to override a woman’s consent and then watches in real time as the universe charges him interest. There’s really no other way to read a text like that in 2026.
Where Obsession loosens its grip.
The 110-minute runtime asks more of the conceit than the conceit always delivers, and the middle stretch wobbles. Roughly fifteen minutes after the spell takes and well before the third act arrives, Obsession seems to mark time, recycling its possessive-girlfriend beats with diminishing returns. A leaner cut would tighten the screws the way the screws tighten on Bear, sure. But if anything, the film is lean as is. It’s simply missing a few extra beats to liven up the proceedings.
Barker edits his own work and hopefully plans to keep doing so. The instinct likely comes from a decade of YouTube and most of the time it serves him beautifully. The tension-and-release rhythm of the opening hour moves the way the best horror comedy moves. Still, a trusted outside editor might catch the slack in the middle. Self-editing remains a virtue and a tax. Obsession pays both.
The ending, meanwhile, lands hard, lands clean, and produces a final image you’ll regret to see. It also forecloses a moral ambiguity Barker spent the previous 95 minutes earning. Bear made his bed. Bear lies in it. Hereditary ended with an open question. Barbarian ended with a smirk. Obsession ends with a verdict. A verdict that is undeniable. A movie this sharp could probably afford to leave the jury out anyway.
The bottom line.
Obsession is the one of those horror debuts that resets expectations for an entire pipeline. The comedy-to-horror conveyor belt has been pumping out efficient genre product for a decade, after all. And Barker has made the rare entry that manages to cut through the noise. Mainly because the craft holds. The performances hold. The basic argument about who the camera serves and what the camera implicates holds harder than anything in the festival horror conversation since Talk to Me.
Focus Features releases Obsession this weekend. Anything But Ghosts, Barker’s next Blumhouse feature, is already in production. A24 has handed him the keys to a Texas Chain Saw Massacre reimagining for 2027. The man who made his first movie for pocket change now holds the future of three franchises in his hands and a $15 million sale in his pocket. On the evidence of Obsession, the future of horror looks bright. It also looks, for a certain kind of man in the audience, deeply personal.
