‘Obsession’ doesn’t deserve the hype
When Curry Barker’s film Obsession reached fever pitch, I became curious about the film, but not curious enough to watch it. I finally succumbed ten months after its September 2025 debut at the Toronto International Film Festival and decided to see what the hype was all about. Besides, a movie that grossed over $400 million worldwide—a box office record for an independent film—and received a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes can’t possibly be bad, right? Still, I wasn’t convinced that a movie touted by TikTokers was going to live up to the hype.
My skepticism was well-founded. Obsession is not a great movie.
The plot of Obsession is based on well-trodden material. Our protagonist is a shy, socially awkward, passive-aggressive Millennial named Bear who embodies the credo ”nice guys finish last.” He works at a music store with three of his friends: Ian, Sarah, and Nikki. The three of them enjoy trivia night at the local pub and don’t seem to know many people outside of their friend group. Bear (played by Michael Johnston) is in love with Nikki (Inde Navarette) but doesn’t have the courage to tell her.
The film’s opening scene has Bear and Ian at a diner, where Bear is practicing opening up to Nikki by sharing his feelings about her with the waitress. Bear’s saccharine drivel (“I think about you all the time, Nikki”) underwhelms Ian, who calls Bear’s performance “cringey” and persuades him to try flirting with Nikki and stop being so sappy and sentimental. The scene immediately shows us who Bear is: a bland and milquetoast adolescent with idealized fantasies of what a woman should be.
When Bear arrives home he finds his cat, Sandy, dead on the floor after overdosing on prescription pills belonging to his deceased grandmother. Despite being filled with despair, he is talked into joining the group for trivia night after Nikki calls and persuades him. Thus, even before Nikki makes a physical appearance onscreen, her voice betrays a personality that contrasts sharply with Bear’s; she sounds confident and extroverted.
Before going to the bar, Bear visits an occult shop to look for a crystal necklace for Nikki after learning she lost hers. He ends up purchasing a “One Wish Willow”—a trinket that supposedly grants a wish to the person who snaps it in half upon hearing the toy’s jingle. This alludes to the film’s tagline, “Be careful who you wish for.”
At the bar, we see Nikki for the first time, where she teases Bear for ordering a piña colada and pays the tab herself. These actions imply both Nikki’s social comfort and platonic relationship with Bear. At the end of the night, Bear drives Nikki home and misses the opportunity to tell Nikki how he feels when she asks him, “Do you like me? ‘Cause if you do, now’s the time to tell me.” Bear denies any feelings for Nikki, and her curt and ambiguous response—“Okay…good. Goodnight”—leads us to speculate whether Nikki actually has a crush on Bear. When Nikki walks to her front door, Bear is so disgusted in himself that he childishly utters, “I wish Nikki Freeman love me more than anyone in the fucking world” and snaps the One Wish Willow he purchased for Nikki. If we haven’t already been convinced that Bear is a pathetic, spineless coward, we are now.
The moment Bear hears the eerie jingle, makes his wish and snaps the trinket is what sets off a chain of escalating disturbing events. Nikki’s black silhouette ominously appears outside her front door, and she becomes obsessed with Bear, needing to spend every waking moment with him and never letting him out of her sight. At first, Bear finds this cute, but as Nikki’s behaviour gradually becomes more weird and erratic, Bear becomes concerned.
Nikki is sort of a mangled take on the ”Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope. While she is not overly girlish, from Bear’s perspective, she is one-dimensional and exists as a fantasy to make his life more complete. The problem is that Barker doesn’t do much with Nikki’s character other than to have her act increasingly strange and unusual until she eventually becomes another trope, the “insane girlfriend.” In one scene, Nikki pees on the floor after Bear leaves for work; in another, she soils herself. These serve as a metaphor for Nikki marking her territory and behaving like a pet who is angry at its owner. The reduction of Nikki to an animalistic state has been called misogynistic by some critics (similar to the nameless female lead played by Charlotte Gainsbourg in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist), but whereas Gainsbourg’s character’s violence is a product of guilt and self-hatred, Nikki’s violence is a creation of some malevolent force that has taken over her. Bear soon comes to the realization that the One Wish Willow has indeed granted his wish, and his desire for Nikki to fall in love with him has robbed her of agency. She is lost inside a ‘fake’ version of herself, and both she and Bear know it. In one scene, where Bear is attempting to sneak out of the house while Nikki is sleeping, the “real” Nikki appeals to Bear to kill her. Bear, who recognizes that this is indeed Nikki and not the possessed version, can only muster, “What’s so bad about being with me?” This makes Bear complicit in Nikki’s agony. The only way to free Nikki of the cursed spell is for him to die, and he would rather try to live with Nikki, knowing she is no longer her own person. In this sense, the title of the film refers to Bear’s obsession, not Nikki’s.
Obsession pulls from a variety of films, including Deadgirl (where a girl in a zombie-like state is sexually objectified and repeatedly raped by two high school outcasts), High Tension (the idea of obsessive love leading to psychopathic brutality) and Fatal Attraction (the femme fatal). But Obsession delivers no tension whatsoever. Despite an unsettling score, Obsession follows a formula where scenes become more and more predictable. When Sarah is sitting in the driver’s seat of the car talking to Bear, we know from experience that Nikki will soon appear out of nowhere to smash the driver’s side window and kill Sarah. And so she does.
I suffered from second-hand embarrassment watching Nikki’s outburst during dinner (the “No, no, no” scene) that fans of the film cite as evidence of Navarette’s acting skills. In the scene, Bear and Nikki are at a restaurant when Bear implies that Nikki lied about her father having cancer. Nikki responds by robotically repeating the word “no” and getting up from her seat and whining, “I thought we were having a nice date!” The scene is just not believable and comes off as cliché. When Bear makes his first selfless decision of the film and overdoses on his grandmother’s pills, thereby freeing Nikki of the curse, we know that the moment Bear dies Nikki will be released from the curse and her fawning, obsessive behaviour will immediately cease. And it does.
I went into Obsession expecting a psychological horror film and instead got a black comedy with jump scares standing in for suspense and dramatic tension. I quickly realized that there would be no twist ending, and what I thought would happen is what happened. I am not suggesting that Navarette is untalented, but fans obsessed over the various creepy facial expressions she makes in the film as if these are a substitute for a good film.
Maybe Millennials and Gen Z love Obsession because it resonates with them and their experience with dating. Perhaps young women identify with the challenges of dating in the social media age, an age of incels and entitled young men. Angelica Jade Bastién of New York Magazine observes, “[Obsession] is very aware of the conversations we’re having around young people and younger generations and how they function in relationships and how certain…not great dynamics in dating have been supercharged and heightened by online dating and just how we relate to each other in the modern time.”
It is possible that Obsession functions as a social commentary on the contemporary dating scene. It just doesn’t function well as a horror movie, nor does it measure up to the movies that inspired it.
6.6/10