Obsession (2026) Film Review: Crush Hour

A wish goes horribly right in Curry Barker’s debut Obsession, a smart, mean, breakout-fueled horror you’ll be talking about all summer.

Bear (Michael Johnston, of Teen Wolf) works at a music store in Los Angeles next to his childhood friend and longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette, of Trap House). He cannot bring himself to tell her how he feels, in part because she has never given him an opening, and in part because he is not the kind of guy who knows how to make one. After Bear’s cat dies, he doesn’t even tell Nikki. She calls him upset over a lost necklace and he just listens, tries to cheer her up, lets her drag him to their usual trivia night. On the way, he stops by a curio shop hoping to find her a replacement. He leaves instead with a wooden trinket called a One Wish Willow.

The instructions are simple. Spark the middle. Snap it in half. Make your wish. Later that evening, Bear, alone in his car after another aborted confession, wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. She does. Fast. Way too fast.

What follows is a slow-tightening noose of a movie. Nikki goes from oblivious coworker to devoted girlfriend overnight, and the friend group around them notices immediately. Their best friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, of Milk & Serial) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) are the cynical Greek chorus, watching this overnight romance with raised eyebrows that gradually become genuine concern. Barker has a sharp ear for how a friend group actually talks, the inside jokes and easy ribbing that only land when the actors trust each other, and the trivia nights, diner chats, and basement hangouts feel pulled from real life rather than written for one.

Then the temperature shifts. Nikki’s affection curdles into surveillance, then territoriality, then something much worse. She does not just love Bear. She owns him. And anyone she perceives as standing between them, particularly other women, becomes a problem she is willing to solve. Barker times this turn beautifully. The first 45 minutes lean into nervous laughs and observational humor, the kind of stuff you would expect from a guy who came up doing sketch comedy on YouTube with Tomlinson under their That’s a Bad Idea banner. Then the laughs stop, and you realize you have been holding your breath and covering your face for ten minutes without noticing.

Johnston is exactly right as Bear. He is not movie-star handsome, and that is the point. You believe he works at a record shop, plays trivia with the same four people every Tuesday, and has spent years convincing himself that pining counts as effort. He is also the moral engine of the film, and the trick of his performance is that he understands Bear is the villain of his own story long before Bear does.

There is a moment, late in the movie, where Bear has to decide whether to keep the wish going for his own benefit or find a way to release Nikki from it, and Johnston plays the cowardice of that choice with a clarity that is genuinely uncomfortable to watch. He sees the proverbial monster under the bed. He just cannot stop wanting it to be his to snuggle with.

But it is Inde Navarrette who will walk out of this movie a star. The role demands two distinct registers: the relaxed warmth of a young woman who has a strong sense of self and is loved by her friends, and the airless devotion of someone whose interior life has been hollowed out and replaced with a single fixation. Navarrette nails both, but the second gear is something else. There is a party scene where everything goes spectacularly off the rails, and she plays it with full physical commitment, the kind of disturbed precision that joins her with Naomi Scott in Smile 2 and Nell Tiger Free in The First Omen on a very short list of recent horror leads who threw themselves entirely into a role.

Tomlinson and Lawless never get the showy scenes, but they fill in the friend dynamic with the kind of specificity that only works when actors actually know each other. Haley Fitzgerald, in maybe two minutes of screen time as the shop employee who sells Bear the One Wish Willow, makes a meal of every second she has.

It is almost shocking that Obsession was made for around a million dollars on a 20-day shoot. Cinematographer Taylor Clemons has a real feel for darkness, the productive kind, where figures resolve out of shadow at exactly the wrong moment. (One small note: see this at a theater you trust to keep its bulbs bright. Obsession is dark literally and figuratively, and you want to see what Clemons is doing.) Production designer Vivian Gray turned a Burbank house into Bear’s recently deceased grandmother’s home, and the clash of his gaming setup against her seafoam wallpaper and floral couches works as visual shorthand for a guy who is a stranger in his own life.

Composer Rock Burwell, making his feature debut, leans synth-driven and uncanny without ever overplaying his hand. Barker, who also edited the film, knows when to hold a shot until it hurts. He uses long takes the way other directors use cuts, and a few practical in-camera effects in the back half deliver some of the year’s most memorable horror imagery.

There are bigger conversations to have about Obsession, and the smartest thing Barker does is leave room for them. The film is a clean parable about the transactional rot at the bottom of modern dating, a pointed bit about how easily a person can mistake their fantasy of someone for the actual person standing in front of them, and a genuinely scary movie about what happens when one party in a relationship is not making free choices.

It also functions as evidence of a generational handoff in horror. Barker is the latest filmmaker to come up through YouTube and land a wide theatrical release, following a path being trod by Markiplier with Iron Lung and Kane Parsons with The Backrooms. The audience for this kind of movie is being built on a different infrastructure than the one studios used to rely on, and Obsession will find its people fast.

Focus Features paid $15 million for this at TIFF, and a lot of people scoffed. They are going to look silly by the end of opening weekend. Obsession is patient, mean, funny when it wants to be, and absolutely unsparing when it stops wanting to be. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

Obsession will be now available to watch in U.S. theaters, in U.K. and Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters on May 15, 2026.