The horror surprise of 2026 slipped out from under the hands of a 26-year-old former YouTuber, and it hits you in the chest like a mood lamp that’s been wound too tight and finally tipped over. At first glance, Curry Barker’s Obsession looks like one of those wish-fulfillment morality fables they used to mass-produce for early-2000s Goosebumps episodes — and then, five minutes in, you find yourself wanting to floor it home to make sure your cat is still in one piece. The film hit so hard at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (Midnight Madness, runner-up for the People’s Choice Award) that Focus Features paid $15 million for the rights to a movie that cost somewhere between $800,000 and $1 million to shoot. It’s now playing in 2,542 US theaters, with $2.6 million banked from Thursday previews alone.
Bear, Nikki, and the Sarah Nobody Notices
Bear (Michael Johnston) — yes, short for “Baron,” because his parents apparently didn’t believe in giving him a fighting chance — works at a record store, and has been quietly in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. He never gets around to telling her, because either “it’ll wreck the friendship” or things will get awkward with their mutual coworkers Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless). Then he wanders into a New Age shop — the kind where they sell crystals to people whose Instagram bios feature the word “manifesting” — and stumbles onto an old novelty trinket from the 1960s called the One Wish Willow. Six-ninety-nine. One wish. Snap the branch, boom. Bear wishes for Nikki to love him more than anything else in the world.
That’s exactly what he gets. Worth pausing on one thing before the carnage starts: Sarah (Megan Lawless) is standing right there the entire time, actually in love with Bear — except Bear can’t see her, because his Nikki fixation has him completely blinkered. The whole tragedy plays out next to an unseen alternative. It’s one of the film’s nastiest little knives.
Pygmalion Meets the Monkey’s Paw in the Manosphere Era
The monkey’s paw setup is as old and chewed-over as Aesop’s gym shoes — W.W. Jacobs’s 1902 short story, The Simpsons‘ “Treehouse of Horror II,” and a hundred Twilight Zone riffs in between have all wrung it dry. Barker turns that exhaustion into the point. He doesn’t pretend to reinvent the premise; he takes the simplest “be careful what you wish for” template, spikes it with a Pygmalion chaser (the man in love with his own sculpture), and reveals what’s lurking underneath: a very specific 2020s commentary on the male entitlement economy. The obsession is literal — Nikki’s soul gets effectively scooped out and replaced by a humming, glassy-eyed doppelgänger, while the real Nikki screams from somewhere offstage and occasionally claws her way back into her own body just long enough to beg Bear to kill her.
And Barker’s biggest trick is the perspective itself: he shoots the whole nightmare from the perpetrator’s POV. Bear is the “nice guy” who just got what he asked for, and is slowly realizing it’s a much darker thing than he can let himself admit.
Curry Barker came up on YouTube. Milk & Serial, the microbudget found-footage feature he and Cooper Tomlinson (his sketch partner on the “that’s a bad idea” channel) made for $800 — eight hundred actual dollars — got shot in four months and dumped onto YouTube for free in 2024, after a year of failing to land a distributor. It went viral. Now he writes, directs, and edits, and you can feel all three jobs pulling on the same rope. Obsession moves to the rhythm of a tightly cut sketch, which means it refuses to settle into comfortable horror grammar — there’s no steady drumbeat of jump scares, just a continuous, metallic pressure on the chest. Cinematographer Taylor Clemens shoots in a 1.50:1 aspect ratio — an unusually narrow, claustrophobic frame — and Bear’s inherited grandmother’s house gradually becomes the prison it always was.
Production designer Vivian Gray flips the usual horror logic: the New Age shop where the Willow lives is warm, mossy, inviting. The horror in this film doesn’t crawl out of the dark. It walks in through the front door, smiling.
And then there’s Inde Navarrette. Best known as Sarah Cushing on the CW’s Superman & Lois — with a smaller turn in the fourth season of 13 Reasons Why on her resume — she announces herself here as a major presence. She plays two people in one body: the real Nikki, who flashes in and out like a dying signal, and the Wish-Nikki, who looks at Bear as if there’s an open elevator shaft behind every gesture. Her performance carries the ghost of Isabelle Adjani’s Possession (1981) — that same total physical-emotional collapse, filtered through a Gen Z lens. She is the engine. Without her, the $800K–$1M budget would look exactly like its price tag, instead of the $15 million Focus Features paid to take it home.
Cregger, Peele, and the Wonder Woman 1984 Cousin Nobody’s Talking About
Obsession rides the wave of the 2020s horror renaissance — it borrows Zach Cregger’s pitch-black humor from Barbarian (2022) and last year’s Weapons, Jordan Peele’s high-concept moral indictment from Get Out (2017), and the slow, material dread of the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me (2023). The Cregger-style ironic needle drops are all over it. The closest cousin is probably Michael Shanks’s Together from last year — another stripped-down concept turned into a physically uncomfortable theatrical sit. The most surprising parallel, though, is Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). The same wish mechanic drives both films — except WW84 never seems to notice that its core premise is an ethical disaster, while Barker builds his entire movie on that exact awareness.
The difference: Obsession is openly not the “good guy’s” film. Here, it’s the male viewer staring back from the mirror, and he might not love what’s looking at him.
One Plot Hole, One Missing POV, and Still One of the Year’s Best
Obsession isn’t a perfect film. There’s an irritating plot hole — late in the film, it’s casually revealed that everyone can make a wish on the Willow, which retroactively unravels the entire premise on a second’s reflection. Barker himself admitted in interviews that the logic is “broken,” and has floated an anthology continuation. The characters outside the Bear–Nikki axis are paper-thin (Sarah’s subplot, in particular, exists in glimpses, when the script is practically begging to be opened up). And the biggest reservation: the film knows something horrifying is happening to a woman, but spends so much time in the perpetrator’s head that it never gives her real space to exist on her own terms. Navarrette’s brilliance is a rescue mission. The screenplay doesn’t meet her halfway.
Even so: this is a $1 million (per Barker, more like $750K) debut feature from a 26-year-old, and it works in a theater exactly the way Barbarian worked the first time. It’s funny, it’s cruel, it tightens the chest, and it’s actually about something. Barker has his next film already in the can — Anything But Ghosts with Aaron Paul, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Violet McGraw, also Focus/Blumhouse — and after that, A24 has him directing a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is a career worth getting in on at ground floor.
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.