Just walked out of Obsession and wow. Curry Baker’s new horror movie is deeply disturbing, skin-crawling, anxiety-inducing, stomach-turning filmmaking in the absolute best way possible. This is right up there with some of the best horror movies I’ve seen this decade alongside Nope, It Follows, and honestly, movies like Hereditary that have become modern horror classics. Obsession deserves to be in that conversation.
What I love about modern horror right now is how many filmmakers are working on a smaller, more intimate scale while still making movies that hit like a truck emotionally. We’ve gone from the franchise slashers of the 80s like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and Halloween, to this new generation of horror that’s rooted in dread, psychology, loneliness, relationships, and emotional damage. Obsession absolutely understands that.
The premise is simple: boy likes girl, boy is too scared to tell girl how he feels, boy makes a wish for her to love him more than anything else in the world. And then he gets exactly what he asked for.
Michael Johnston plays Bear, a guy so desperate for emotional validation and love that when he finally gets it, he ignores the biggest red flags imaginable. Normally, one of my least favorite horror tropes is when characters refuse to leave obviously dangerous situations, but this movie completely earns it. Bear doesn’t run because this is the thing he’s always wanted. He finally has the girl he’s been longing for feeling the exact same way about him, and he’s willing to overlook absolutely insane behavior just to hold onto that feeling a little longer. It’s uncomfortable because it feels emotionally honest.
And then there’s Inde Navarette as Nikki. My God.
This is one of the best horror performances I’ve seen in years. Not just because of the acting, but because of the physicality she brings to the role. The way she moves, the way she flips from calm and vulnerable to completely unhinged, the body language, the unpredictability — that’s the stuff that got under my skin. That’s the stuff I’ll remember from this movie months from now. She makes you laugh, squirm, panic, and feel genuinely unsafe all at the same time. Horror performances rarely get awards recognition, but she deserves all the praise in the world for what she’s doing here.
What makes Obsession work so well is that it’s not really relying on jump scares or some unstoppable slasher villain. The horror comes from dread. It slowly builds and builds and builds like a flood that keeps rising until the movie completely suffocates you with anxiety. There’s this constant feeling that something terrible is coming, and when the final stretch hits, it’s just misery, panic, and emotional collapse. The last ten minutes are absolutely brutal in the best way possible. The ending is sad, dreadful, uncomfortable, and completely sticks the landing.
There’s also a surprising amount of humor throughout the movie. The packed theater I saw it with was losing their minds. People were laughing, yelling, squirming, reacting to every insane thing happening onscreen. Cooper Tomlinson as Bear’s frat-bro best friend Ian is hilarious, and Megan Lawless also does great work as Sarah. The movie understands tonal balance perfectly. It can be genuinely funny one second and make your stomach drop the next.
Technically, the movie is incredible too. The editing is sharp, the score constantly keeps the tension simmering beneath the surface, and Curry Baker’s direction is remarkable. There’s a confidence to the filmmaking here that feels insane for someone working on this scale. Every scene feels purposeful, every uncomfortable pause lingers exactly as long as it should, and there are a couple sequences — especially one phone call scene and one particular kill — that had my entire theater freaking out.
At its core, Obsession feels like a horror movie about emotional repression, loneliness, and the dangers of idealizing love. It’s about what happens when you spend so much time obsessing over the fantasy of someone loving you back that you ignore the reality standing right in front of you. There’s this underlying message throughout the movie about just telling people how you feel, accepting rejection, and not holding onto fantasies so tightly that they destroy you.
I can’t say enough good things about this movie. It’s funny, disturbing, twisted, emotionally exhausting, and unbelievably tense. More than anything, this is one of those horror movies that reminds you why seeing movies in a packed theater is such a special experience. You could feel the entire audience reacting together.
One of the most interesting things about Obsession is that it really messes with the idea of who the “villain” actually is. On paper, people are obviously going to point at Nikki because she’s the one doing horrific, violent, completely unhinged things throughout the movie. But the more I sat with it after leaving the theater, the more I realized Bear is kind of the one who creates this entire nightmare in the first place.
He’s the one who makes the wish. He’s the one who puts everyone around him — especially Nicky — into this situation because he’s too scared to simply tell someone how he feels at the beginning of the movie. And even after things start going horribly wrong, he still spends so much of the movie refusing to confront the reality of what’s happening because he’s addicted to finally feeling loved back in the same way he loves someone else. He has multiple chances to try and stop things, and he just… doesn’t.
But that’s also what makes the movie so interesting emotionally, because I never really walked away thinking, “Bear is evil.” He’s not some slasher villain or mastermind. He’s lonely, emotionally repressed, desperate for validation, and ultimately too weak to deal with the consequences of the thing he wanted most. That’s what makes the movie tragic instead of just cruel. That said, he does unspeakably bad things in this movie, makes piss-poor choices over and over again, and hurts the one person he truly loved. The movie isn’t about Nikki’s obsession after the wish, it’s about Bears obsession with Nikki.
And with Nikki, the movie does something really fascinating where it still feels like the real version of her is trapped somewhere underneath all the obsession and madness. She’s not fully “herself” anymore, but pieces of her still feel present throughout the movie, which somehow makes everything even sadder and more uncomfortable. It stops the movie from feeling black-and-white morally, and that complexity is a huge reason why the ending hits so hard.
Obsession is one of the best films I’ve seen this year and easily one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in the last decade. Remarkable filmmaking. Curry Baker deserves all the flowers for this one.
Obsession = 93/100
