Rating: 7.5/10
There is a moment, roughly five minutes into Curry Barker's Obsession, where a dead cat and a novelty toy called a "One Wish Willow" tell you exactly where the next ninety minutes are headed.
At forty, with a stack of horror flicks behind me over the years, I nearly closed the laptop right there. I have seen this opening before, in one shape or another, more times than I care to count.
I am glad I didn't!
Because underneath the genre furniture, Obsession is not really interested in scaring you. It is interested in indicting you, and everyone your age once was.
The Trope That Isn't the Point
Barker, directing his feature debut after a run of shorts and festival work, knows exactly what tropes he is deploying. The occult shop. The doomed pet. The cursed object that grants a wish nobody thinks through.
He deploys them anyway, because the trope was never the destination. It's the vehicle. What it's carrying is a study of four young adults who are, none of them, remotely equipped for the emotional terrain they're navigating.
Bear Bailey (Michael Johnston) cannot tell the woman he has loved for years that he loves her.
Instead of a word, he buys her a toy that promises to do the telling for him. That single substitution is the whole film in miniature.
Nice Guy Is Not a Compliment
Refinery29's review of the film landed on the sharpest one-line reading I've come across: we are meant to be afraid of what Nikki becomes, but Bear is the actual villain of this story. I agree with that assessment, and I'd go further.
Bear is the specific, recognisable type of young man who has convinced himself that quietness is the same thing as harmlessness. It isn't. It's often just cowardice with better manners, and this film understands that distinction with more precision than its marketing lets on.
He never asks Nikki how she feels. He never risks the discomfort of rejection. He takes a shortcut that removes her ability to choose him at all, and the horror of the film is really the horror of what happens once consent is taken off the table entirely.
That is not a subtle metaphor. TV Tropes' character breakdown makes the point explicitly: Bear's nickname casts him as cuddly and harmless, the way real bears are assumed to be right up until they aren't. The animal motif isn't decoration. It's the thesis.
Freaky Nikki, Freeman in Name Only
Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) carries a surname that becomes almost unbearably ironic once the wish takes hold. A woman named for freedom, enslaved by someone else's unspoken want.
Navarrette's performance is the one genuinely great thing in this film, and I don't say that lightly.
She has to play a young woman whose interior life was already complicated before any curse touched her, and whose real vulnerability is that complication, not her body.
There's a dysfunctional relationship with her father sitting under the surface of this character, one the script never fully excavates, and I found myself wishing it had. What we do see is enough to understand why she's such fertile ground for something else to take root in.
Because that's the sharper reading of the "possession" here. The wish doesn't create a flaw in Nikki. It finds one that was already there and feeds on it, the way any bad relationship, any bad year, any bad decision might have fed on it regardless of the supernatural machinery.
Before the wish, her free-spirited layers and her crystal necklace mark her as someone still assembling her own identity. After it, she's reduced to a single pendant and a costume of manufactured femininity, and that wardrobe shift alone tells you everything about what's actually been stolen from her.
She is, notably, aware for stretches of what's happening to her body while unable to stop it.
That's a rare and genuinely unsettling choice for a horror film to make, because it refuses you the comfort of imagining she's simply gone.
Ian and Sarah, or Cowardice Wears More Than One Face
Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) is Bear's supposed best friend, already entangled with Nikki behind his back, and willing to sabotage Bear's advances to protect a secret he isn't honest enough to just admit to.
Sarah Harper (Megan Lawless), meanwhile, is plainly drawn to Bear, plainly territorial about it, and just as plainly unable to say so directly. She and Bear are, in that sense, mirror images of the same paralysis, dressed differently.
None of these four young people can say the thing they mean. That is, I think, the film's real and most durable observation, and it's one that ages better than the blood does. Most of us were exactly this poorly equipped once, at that stage of life, even if the consequences we generated were smaller.
Tragedy Wearing a Horror Costume
By the time the credits roll, Bear does shoulder some responsibility for what his wish unleashed.
It doesn't come close to covering the damage, and it's Nikki alone who's left to live with what remains of it.
That imbalance is the film's real engine. Strip out the body horror and what's left is a story about a young man exploiting a woman's autonomy to force an outcome she never agreed to, then walking away comparatively unscathed. Framed like that, "horror" feels like the wrong genre label entirely. "Tragedy" fits considerably better.
It's worth saying, too, that the toxic masculinity running through Bear's character isn't loud. He isn't a shouting, aggressive archetype. He's the withdrawn one, and the film is quietly arguing that withdrawal, left unchecked, curdles into its own specific form of entitlement.
The Verdict
Obsession earned its box office the honest way, on genuine word of mouth rather than nostalgia or franchise machinery, and having sat with it, I understand why. It is not a film I'll actively return to. I got what I came for on the first watch.
But I won't talk anyone out of it either. Go in expecting a supernatural horror film, because that's what it's marketed as and what it delivers on the surface. Just don't be surprised if what stays with you afterward has nothing to do with the blood.