Believe the hype. I liked Obsession so much that I immediately went home and burned through everything Curry Barker has ever made. Some directors announce themselves quietly. Barker grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go.
Seeing this at SXSW felt like watching a switch flip in real time. This is the kind of Midnight Madness crowd discovery that sticks with you, that people won’t shut up about for years. And for good reason. Obsession is uncomfortable in every possible meaning of the word, and it is genuinely terrifying.
The premise feels almost stupid on paper. A guy makes a wish to win the girl he has an obsession with. It is Goosebumps logic. A cursed object. A wish with consequences. But Barker elevates that idea so far beyond its pulpy roots that it becomes something meaner, darker, and way more personal. There is a line, paraphrased from memory, that hits like a brick: “Just because you choose this for her doesn’t make it less real.” That realization lands not only for Bear, but for the audience. You can feel the room sink when it hits.
Michael Johnston’s Bear is one of the most successfully uncomfortable protagonists I’ve seen in a horror movie in a long time. He is timid. Soft spoken. His voice is basically butter, which makes sense given his background in voice work. That gentleness is what makes everything worse. He feels like every guy who thinks he deserves love just for wanting it badly enough. Watching his dream slowly curdle into a nightmare produces some serious secondhand embarrassment. There were multiple moments I genuinely struggled to sit through. But this movie belongs to Inde Navarrette.
I had only ever seen her in one prior film, and this performance is a complete arrival. This is range. This is control. She conveys massive emotional shifts with the smallest changes in her face. Even her voice changes. It goes strange in a way that feels deeply wrong, like something pretending to be human and just barely nailing it. The score wraps itself around her in a way that’s almost symbiotic. Together, they become unshakable.
This is a career making performance. I would be shocked if she does not win awards and I would be even more shocked if this doesn’t launch her into an entirely different tier of stardom.
The score itself deserves special mention because it does something insidious. It pulses. It hums. At times it feels like the kind of ambient tones I put on for my kid to fall asleep to, if those tones secretly wanted you dead. When it needs to hit, it absolutely bangs. Even more effective are the moments where it cuts hard to silence. Those stops are violent. The movie keeps snapping you out of its trance like it’s yelling at you to wake up, to look at what’s happening, to look at what Bear has done.
There are a few indie rock needle drops scattered throughout that ground the film and give you a false sense of calm before everything goes to hell. The standout is “Kids” by Current Joys. It is used perfectly. It comforts you. It feels familiar. Most of us have heard it floating around TikTok. You relax. And then everything collapses. That song is ruined forever in the best possible way. It is going to haunt me.
Visually, Barker is operating with terrifying confidence. The brown and yellow color palette gives the whole film a sickly, decayed warmth. Shadows are everywhere, used so effectively that silhouettes become deeply threatening. Framing, spacing, and blocking are meticulous. Every frame feels thought out. Every shot with Navarrette is horrifying, whether she’s centered or barely present in the background. The film understands how scary negative space can be.
The horror taps into something ugly and real. Old relationship trauma bubbled up watching this. Loss of agency. The slow realization that something is very wrong and no one is listening. I was dug into my armrest, white-knuckling through entire sequences. The third act is brutal. Truly brutal. Fun, wild, horrifying brutality that does not blink.
Obsession is nasty. It is mean. It delights in punishing its protagonist. It deploys a manic cruelty that cuts straight through the sugar-coated fantasy of romantic comedies where the cool girl is just a prize waiting to be earned. There are parallels to Talk to Me, but this somehow goes even darker, especially in how it weaponizes desire itself.
The only bad thing about Obsession is that it ends. And what an ending. What a finale. I was caught off guard multiple times, and I honestly can’t remember the last time a horror movie pulled that off so consistently.
I have already recommended this to more people than I can count. I will be seeing it again. I usually only rewatch movies to fall asleep or to show someone a specific moment. This is different. This is one I’ll chase that first viewing feeling for a long time. I could easily see this becoming a franchise if they ever want it to be. All you need is the wish element. New characters. New nightmare. That said, this first entry will be incredibly hard to top.
The combination of Curry Barker’s filmmaking and Inde Navarrette’s performance pushes Obsession so far beyond the tropes it toys with that it’s almost a relief. The next big thing has arrived, and it’s enough to make you never date again.
Jessie Hobson