Obsession - Movie Review (Non-Spoiler & Spoiler)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]What if you could make a wish and have the girl of your dreams fall in love with you? That's the plot of the new movie Obsession and also the topic of my high school journal. Don't judge me, it was the late '90s, Dawson's Creek was very popular at the time, and Katie Holmes ended up falling for Tom Cruise anyway.

[00:00:24]Hello everybody, I'm Dan Murrell here with my review of Obsession, which is in theaters now. You might think it's kind of an off week in the summer season, but this is a really interesting movie that I wanted to talk about, and I'm going to say right up front that there are some things that that really kind of get to the core of my thoughts of this movie that go into spoiler territory. So, I'm going to do this review sort of like I did my review for the drama. I'm going to do a full non-spoiler review first, then at the end I'm going to go into some spoiler talk. So, get ready to tune out after the regular review if you don't want to know heavy spoilers, but beyond that let's charge ahead.

[00:00:57]Obsession is the second feature and breakout project for writer-director Curry Barker, who's the latest in a series of YouTube creators who have moved to feature films. He and Cooper Tomlinson, who also is a co-star in this movie, created the YouTube comedy channel That's a Bad Idea. Obsession stars Michael Johnson as Bear, a single mid-20s guy who's fallen for his co-worker Nikki, played by India Navarrette. When he fears that Nikki doesn't feel the same way, Bear uses a mysterious object called a One Wish Willow, which grants the user, well, one wish, to wish that Nikki would love him more than anybody else on the planet.

[00:01:32]And while his wish does technically come true, it comes with a ton of horrifying side effects that soon make Bear regret his decision. And the first thing I want to say about the movie is this, India Navarrette's performance in this film should be a breakout role for her. I know that she's been on series like 13 Reasons Why and Superman and Lois, but watching this film reminded me of watching Smile 2 and Naomi Scott's performance in that movie. I'd seen her in stuff before, but this is on another level. That's how I felt about Indiana Everard in this film. She transcends the movie itself to put in one of the best horror lead performances that I've seen in quite a while, maybe since Naomi Scott in Smile 2. Luckily, the film itself also mostly works, so Neverard's performance isn't let down by the material. Obsession is an effective combination of actual horror and situational horror. And on the actual one thing I was relieved about is that we didn't really go too far into the supernatural side of things, other than the conceit that magic exists in this world with the one wish willow. I was expecting to get into possessions and ghosts and all that kind of stuff, because the genre has been saturated with that kind of stuff, and it was refreshing that the movie didn't go in that direction. Instead, the horror mostly comes via the striking changes that we see Nikki go through in the movie. She goes from your average buddy from work to an alarmingly obsessed girlfriend in literally a split second, and some of her behavioral changes are extreme, to say the least. While Nikki's not possessed, she's also definitely not herself, and I loved how Barker shows the uncanny and often surreal changes in her behavior, including a great reveal that one of the characters gets before the audience does, which only enhances the effect. But as great as the more common horror elements in the movie are, I think the situational horror is even more disturbing, because by making this wish, Bear is basically making Nikki do things that she wouldn't normally do, which essentially means that Bear is turning Nikki into somebody that she isn't, and that is very disturbingly portrayed. At first, we only get glimpses of the struggle inside of Nikki, which are effective, but they mostly remain glimpses, and I think that the movie would have worked better if it had explored this element a little more more Neverard is certainly up to the task and as much range as she already shows in the film, I think that she could have done even more given the opportunity to explore more. We get a lot of Nikki acting crazy, but Navarrete is just as capable at playing the brief moments where the real Nikki starts to peek through. Like many films from young directors, I think that Obsession is a little too long and I think that Curry Barker is so good at playing certain notes effectively that he just wants to hit that same note as many times as possible. But because he is so good at hitting that note, the movie can sometimes feel repetitive, but it doesn't really feel stale. The build-up, the slow burn of the first act is really well done and the explosive third act finale is really well done kicked off by a truly shocking moment. It's the middle part that I think could have used some massaging, perhaps taking the most effective seven or eight scenes and cutting a lot of the rest. Or as I mentioned, maybe sprinkling more of what Nikki is experiencing off-screen during this out-of-body experience instead of focusing mostly on Bear. The be careful what you wish for storyline has been done many times over, but that's because it's effective when it's done well. What would it be like if your dream girl suddenly developed an intense, frankly alarming fixation on you? Obsession explores this very thoroughly and comes to the conclusion that the results might not be that great. And the structural issues that I might have had with the film, the story issues that I have with the film, would have been a bigger deal if the acting weren't so exceptional and if Curry Barker wasn't so inventive in staging scenes and sequences that may thematically be stuff that we've seen before, but which still held my interest. Obsession delivers a lot of really strong moments and some great scares and that blunt some of my issues with the movie. So on my personal scale, I'm giving it a low grade, it's good score with the caveat that Indy Navarrete's performance is reason enough to see the movie just on its own even if everything else wasn't as good as it is.

[00:05:50]And let's dive into some of the reasons why this movie, even though it got an its good rating, didn't get a little bit higher on my scale. But in order to do that, I've got to get into some heavier spoilers for the plot of the film. So, if you don't want to know what happens in Obsession, and the movie does have a lot of surprises in store, maybe bookmark this video, click away, and come back after you've seen the movie.

[00:06:11]If you have already seen it, or you don't really care if you're spoiled on what happens, then let's plunge ahead and get into the spoiler talk. So, Obsession, I think, gets into the age-old issue of depiction versus endorsement, because standing outside of the movie, Bear is a horrible guy. He's the typical, quote-unquote, nice guy who feels like he deserves the girl, and when it doesn't look like he's going to get her, he uses a wish to get that love against Nikki's will. While he couldn't anticipate the full consequences of his actions, his base wish was to make her fall in love with him. But it was still a love that he wanted on his own terms.

[00:06:46]It was a love that he demanded was real, even though, by its nature, it was artificial. When Bear calls the customer service line, his first request, even though things have already gone very badly, is to modify the wish, not to cancel it. That's his second thought.

[00:06:59]So, he wasn't really that interested in giving Nikki her freedom back to love who she wanted. He wanted freedom from the consequences of his own wish. He only decided to try to cancel it once those consequences began to affect him. He knew from the very start that this was not what Nikki wanted. The movie is not depict a character like Bear. There are a lot of movies that have main characters that are bad people. Where I think the movie does fall short is in showing us that Nikki's situation in this film is not only as bad as what Bear is going through, it's worse. And those are those glimpses that I was talking about. When we hear her screaming over the phone on the customer service line, the scene where she talks in her sleep and begs Bear to kill her. She has lost all autonomy, bodily and emotionally, and that is horrifying. Bear actively chooses to ignore that to gratify what he wants, and I think the movie would have been significantly more effective in the third act if it had been about that battle between the two Nikkis in a way that would allow her to directly try to fight back against Bear instead of the third act being about Bear's struggles being tied to the actions of freaky Nikki. We get a lot of freaky Nikki in this movie, and I think that Barker actually is lucky that he has Indie Navarrete in that role because she is so good that you want to see more of her because I think she plays those moments so well. If there had been a lesser actress in that role, I think more of the audience might have been sitting there wondering, "Wait a minute.

[00:08:29]When is Bear actually going to get his comeuppance in this movie?" Yes, ultimately Bear does die, but it's by his own hand. He gets to make the decision on when, he gets to make the decision on how. So, even until the end, he still has the same kind of decision-making and autonomy that he was depriving Nikki of for the entire movie.

[00:08:49]We do get that brief moment when he falls under the spell of the One-Wish Willow, and I thought that that actually would have been kind of a an interesting way to end the movie. They they're they're mutual victims, and and if Nikki can't come out to play, then she's now suppressed Bear for the rest of his life or her life as well. But, then he gets the out. He dies. And so, he doesn't have to go through that same horror, and Nikki does eventually re-emerge, but she doesn't really re-emerge through anything that she does or any action that she takes. She re-emerges because Bear chose to kill himself and then is immediately horrified at what's gone on, doesn't have any real recourse for any of the consequences of these actions, and we leave her in a very bad place. I understand that not every story is going to be classical storytelling. Not every story is going to have the characters get their comeuppance, so the people that deserve it are always going to be able to get their just deserts. But, when you're telling a story like this, I do think you have to keep an eye on the balance. When you're robbing a character like Nikki of her autonomy in this way, and there's no recourse for that, it is a downer ending, and maybe that's what Curry Barker wanted. Maybe he wanted a downer ending. It was an effective ending. I just don't think it was a particularly satisfying one. And I'm not saying this purely from a social standpoint that I would prefer a story where the lead female character is able to reclaim her own body and soul, although honestly, I would prefer that ending. Narratively, I think it's more satisfying for a movie about one character taking away another character's soul basically to end with the wronged character getting a chance for revenge. But, that's not what Curry Barker wanted to do, and plenty of horror movies end on dark downer endings. That's why I'm saying that this dulled my enjoyment of the movie, but it doesn't reflect necessarily on the quality of the movie itself. I guess where the movie and I don't see eye to eye is that on a story level, the movie is about Nikki, who's a victim, and Bear, who's a perpetrator, even though he does suffer consequences from his own decision-making. But, the story itself continually shows us Bear as the victim, and Nikki as the perpetrator with glimpses of what's actually going on with her in the background. Maybe that's intentional, maybe that's the result of a creative blind spot. I don't know. I don't sling around accusations, but I think that it does leave the door open for a lot of people to walk away from this movie thinking that it's a movie about a crazy woman who traumatizes a sweet, love-lorn guy. That's not the correct reading of the film, in my opinion, but I don't think the movie does a whole lot to prevent people from walking away with that. It could serve to bolster the view that everything would have been fine if she just wouldn't have been so crazy, when in truth, for Nikki, everything would never have been fine. That imbalance is what threw me off most about the movie, but that is just one element of the film and I want to underscore that I still think that it was a very well-made movie and a particularly well-acted movie and it's one of those things where I'm looking forward to Curry Barker's progression as a filmmaker, both as a director and as a storyteller because I think that you have to leave room for young directors to be imperfect or at least leave open the possibility of that and allow them to progress in their art form. I think that this was a very, very promising start, a very strong and not first film necessarily. I think Curry Barker's last film was like an hour long, but this really does feel like his first real feature film. But I saw a lot there that was promising, a great discovery for me in India Navarrete in her role in the film. I think that there's a lot of really cool positive stuff that could come to the horror genre from what we've seen in this movie and I look forward to seeing what that is. So those are all of my thoughts on Obsession. What did you think? Have you seen it? Are you going to head out to theaters to see it? Let me know down in the comments below. If you're not subscribed to the channel, please hit that subscribe button. Hit the bell so you know when I upload new videos and be sure to stay tuned right here for the latest in movie news, reviews, box office and more. Until next time, stay safe and I'll see you then.

[00:12:47]Bye.

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