Spoilers throughout, including the ending.
I Came for the Hype
I came to Obsession because of hype, which is not the noblest reason to watch anything, but it is an honest one. Sometimes a film starts making enough noise from the next room that you eventually have to get up and see what everyone is shouting about. I had seen the trailer, and it left enough unexplained to make me curious: a strange little toy, a crush, a wish, and the suggestion that getting exactly what you want might become a problem rather quickly.
I expected a supernatural horror thriller with a sharp premise and some uncomfortable relationship material. What caught me off guard was its physical severity. The comparison that came to mind was Evil Dead from 2013, less for any resemblance in mythology than for the abrupt change in what I realised I was watching. A story that initially seemed capable of becoming a nasty little comedy kept moving somewhere harder to laugh at.
That shift worked on me. Obsession begins with an idea familiar enough to explain over dinner, then spends the rest of the film making that explanation feel inadequate. A young man wants his friend to love him. A novelty object apparently makes it happen. The longer I watched, the less interested I became in whether the magic followed tidy rules and the more interested I became in the person whose wishes had never been consulted.
The Small Object That Ruins Everything
Bear, played by Michael Johnston, has feelings for his friend and co-worker Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. Unable to tell her properly, he turns to a shop-bought One Wish Willow and wishes for her love. Curry Barker wrote and directed the film, which Focus Features released in US cinemas on 15 May 2026. Its premise has the compactness of an old supernatural cautionary tale, with a recognisably ordinary embarrassment at its centre.
The One Wish Willow looks faintly ridiculous, which is part of its appeal. It has the air of something you might find beside novelty mugs and vaguely mystical gifts while killing twenty minutes in a shop. As an object, it does very little to announce the scale of the trouble it can cause. That gap between modest packaging and actual function is much more interesting to me than another elaborate antique covered in warnings that nobody bothers to read.
Barker told Focus Features that he wanted something apparently trivial that could be bought in a shop. The choice gives the story a useful casualness. Bear is not an occult scholar embarking on a considered experiment; he is an embarrassed young man reaching for a ridiculous shortcut. He may not seriously expect it to work, but the wish still tells us something about the result he would prefer.
What he wants removed is uncertainty. He wants to get past the awkward conversation and arrive at the answer he has already chosen. The distinction becomes harder to ignore once Nikki changes and Bear has to decide what to do with the evidence in front of him. His responsibility lies both in what he asks for and in how slowly he confronts what getting it has done to her.
Curry Barker and the Move from YouTube
Barker’s route into the film is interesting without needing to become a fairy tale about the internet discovering talent. He and Cooper Tomlinson built an audience through the sketch-comedy channel that’s a bad idea, and Barker made the earlier horror feature Milk & Serial. Focus’s interview with him makes that progression clear; Obsession is not his first feature, even if its arrival in cinemas made him new to a much larger audience.
You can feel an understanding of awkward timing in this film. A conversation continues just beyond the point where it should have ended; someone reacts in a way that makes the room uncomfortable; a familiar social situation gradually becomes impossible to manage. Those are useful tools for comedy, and they remain useful when the audience stops laughing. The early embarrassment establishes a rhythm that the horror can later turn against us.
The old wish-gone-wrong tradition is plainly part of the appeal. Barker has identified The Simpsons‘ monkey’s-paw story as an influence, as discussed in his Entertainment Weekly interview. But recognising the family resemblance does not spoil the film. It gives us a set of expectations, then makes the consequences intimate enough that the familiar mechanism starts feeling unpleasantly fresh.
Bear, the Nice Guy Who Cannot Stand Risk
Michael Johnston makes Bear soft-spoken, hesitant and almost painfully conflict-avoidant. He seems like someone who might spend two hours considering a text message before sending “haha no worries” and feeling terrible about it afterwards. That recognisable awkwardness matters because the film needs us to understand his discomfort before it asks us to judge the decisions he makes around it.
I do not think the interesting question is whether having a crush makes him dangerous. It is what happens when his fear of rejection becomes more important to him than Nikki’s freedom to reject him. The wish reveals an ugly possibility inside a sympathetic feeling: that wanting someone badly enough might start to feel like an entitlement to being wanted back.
Bear does not become easier to watch once he is frightened by the result. His fear is understandable, but he can still seem more absorbed by how unbearable the situation has become for him than by what Nikki has lost. Johnston lets that mixture of panic, self-pity and delayed recognition sit awkwardly on his face. It keeps the character from settling into either an uncomplicated victim or a convenient villain.
That is also where the film becomes frustrating in a productive, occasionally repetitive way. Bear wants relief from the consequences before he has quite accepted responsibility for them. I recognised the emotional logic even when I wanted him to stop finding another reason to hesitate. The wish has taken away the risk of a difficult conversation and replaced it with something he has far less chance of managing.
Nikki, and the Person Underneath the Wish
Inde Navarrette is the reason the film lands as strongly as it does for me. She makes Nikki feel like a person before the wish, then keeps that person perceptible beneath the behaviour that follows. Without that distinction, the film could easily collapse into a familiar story about a frightening girlfriend. Her performance makes it much harder to forget how the frightening girlfriend was created.
There is a difficult balance in the role. Nikki has to be unsettling in the immediate scene while still suggesting that something has been taken from her. Navarrette shifts between warmth, insistence, confusion and flashes of distress without making those changes feel like a collection of separate acting exercises. A look or a brief change in expression can make an apparently affectionate moment feel terribly wrong.
What disturbed me was the impression of someone being required to perform a feeling she did not choose. Bear wanted her attention and devotion, but the film keeps showing us how little those things mean when the person supplying them has lost control. The performance gives that loss a physical presence without needing someone to stop and explain the theme.
There remains a risk in the way the film presents her. Nikki is its most striking source of menace, and it would be easy to remember only that surface. For me, Navarrette keeps pulling the emphasis back towards the woman caught underneath it. The horror is not simply that someone wants Bear too much; it is that the wanting has displaced someone who had a life of her own.
Ian, Sarah, and Everybody Else in the Room
Cooper Tomlinson’s Ian and Megan Lawless’s Sarah give the central relationship a social world. Their conversations, teasing and shared history establish that Bear and Nikki do not exist inside a sealed romantic bubble. Andy Richter is also part of the supporting cast. The film needs these other people around because Bear’s private wish will not remain a private problem.
I liked the ordinariness of the group: friends spending time together, negotiating small tensions and assuming that the people in the room are broadly the people they know. A gathering does not need much explanation before a change in someone’s behaviour makes it uncomfortable. Barker makes use of that familiarity, allowing the audience to feel the atmosphere turn before everybody understands why.
My reservation is that Ian and Sarah sometimes feel more fully present as parts of the escalation than as people beyond it. The actors give them enough personality for their involvement to matter, but I would have welcomed a little more time with the group before the wish began consuming the story. Their function is clear; the lives around that function are less developed.
An Old Cautionary Tale with a Harder Edge
There is something satisfyingly old-fashioned about the mechanism. A small object promises an impossible favour, somebody uses it carelessly, and the result exposes a problem in the request. It belongs to the same broad storytelling territory as The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside and all those anthology stories where a manageable desire becomes a very unmanageable situation before the credits.
What surprised me was how far Barker takes it from the neatness of a televised parable. The consequences acquire a weight that makes the initial premise feel less playful. My comparison with Evil Dead was a reaction to that change in intensity: the moment a film establishes that its unpleasantness will have more force than I had prepared for.
I do not need every horror film to push as hard as this one does. Here, though, the severity stops the wishing-stick idea from becoming too cute. Bear’s fantasy does not merely embarrass him or teach him a conveniently survivable lesson. It damages the lives around him, and the film makes it difficult to retreat into admiration for the cleverness of the premise.
There are points where I could feel the effort to escalate, and the change from awkward humour to outright distress will not work equally well for everyone. It mostly worked for me because the emotional problem remained visible beneath it. The story keeps returning to the same avoidable beginning: somebody could not bear the possibility of hearing an answer he did not want.
Darkness, Design, and the Shape of Dread
The visual design is one of the film’s quieter strengths. These are ordinary rooms, with the sort of furniture and clutter that generally disappears into the background. The longer we spend in them, the more their familiarity becomes a disadvantage. A bedroom or a doorway ought to be easy to read, yet the film makes me inspect it for something I might have missed.
Cinematographer Taylor Clemons told Focus Features about using static cameras and dark areas of the frame to make viewers search the image. He also described how brighter scenes provide contrast before the later passages close down again. That approach gives the darkness a purpose beyond making everything look suitably grim.
As a designer, I respond to what an image chooses to withhold. The empty space is doing work here. Bear can sit inside a recognisable domestic setting and still seem stranded in it, while Nikki can be present without being fully readable. Clemons’s discussion of her silhouettes explains part of that effect: familiarity remains, but certainty falls away.
The production design, credited to Vivian Gray in Universal’s production credits, supports that ordinary scale. The house does not have to become a spectacular haunted building. It only has to stop feeling like somewhere its occupants can relax. That is a smaller change, and often a more persuasive one.
Music and the Uneasy Shape of Romance
Rock Burwell composed the score, and Barker also edited the film, as confirmed in Universal’s credits. Those jobs matter to the way Obsession moves between apparent tenderness and discomfort. The film depends on changes in how a moment feels, sometimes before anything obvious has happened within it.
What I liked was the way a romantic atmosphere could become oppressive without being entirely replaced. Bear is, for a while, occupying a version of the scene he thought he wanted: attention, closeness, the sense of being central to somebody else’s life. Once I stopped trusting the feeling behind it, the same arrangement became difficult to sit with.
That uncertainty suits the performance as much as the sound. The film does not always need a fresh threat to keep a scene unsettled. Sometimes it only needs to hold an apparently affectionate moment long enough for the absence of choice to become impossible to ignore.
The Ending, and What Nikki Has to Carry
By the final act, the film has moved beyond the possibility of a reassuring reset. Bear dies by suicide, and Nikki is released from the wish. The ending leaves her alive to confront what has happened. I found that a stronger choice than a conclusion which would let the horror close around both characters and finish with a tragic-romance symmetry.
Barker told Entertainment Weekly that he also filmed a version in which Nikki died, but chose her survival after seeing the performance and receiving feedback. The change matters to my reading because it leaves the consequences with the person who never made the original wish.
I cannot read Bear’s ending as a clean redemption. The story stops his part in the nightmare, but it does not return what Nikki has lost. Her freedom arrives in the middle of an aftermath she must now comprehend. The film’s final emphasis rests on that disorientation, and Navarrette makes it harder to dismiss than another supernatural twist would have been.
What happens to Nikki afterwards remains outside the film. In CinemaBlend’s interview, Barker speculated about imprisonment, while Navarrette described the beginning of grief. Those are their interpretations of an unwritten future, rather than additional events the film shows. I do not need the practical details settled to find the uncertainty troubling.
The result is an ending in which release and recovery are very different things. Nikki has herself back, but that does not make the room around her comprehensible. The film leaves enough space for that realisation to register, which is why it stayed with me after the more immediate shocks had begun to fade.
What Held, and Where I Felt the Strain
The premise remains the film’s clearest strength. It is easy to grasp without a lengthy explanation, yet it leaves room for questions about what Bear wants and what Nikki loses. Navarrette gives those questions an emotional force that the concept could not supply on its own, and Johnston is willing to let Bear remain uncomfortable company.
I also found the pacing effective. At roughly 109 minutes, the film has room to build pressure without making its small set of locations feel like a production limitation. It felt purposeful to me: once the wish takes hold, the scenes keep changing what Bear can plausibly pretend is happening. A premise this compact needs development rather than padding, and for most of its running time I felt that distinction had been understood.
The weaknesses are connected to that focus. The supporting characters could use more space, Bear’s evasiveness occasionally repeats a point already made, and a few transitions make the machinery of the horror easier to notice. I do not think those reservations undo the film, but they prevent me from treating every uncomfortable moment as evidence of perfect control.
The wider appeal makes sense to me without needing a running tally of grosses or review scores. The initial feeling is easy to recognise; the decision that follows it is harder to excuse. That gap gives the audience something to argue about beyond whether a particular moment was frightening. It also lets an old wish story find a contemporary pressure point without spending the whole film announcing its relevance.
The Thing That Lingers
What stayed with me was Nikki’s face at the end: the difficulty of returning to yourself when the world around you contains consequences you never chose. Bear’s story has reached its end, while hers has become something she must somehow continue. That imbalance is more troubling to me than the object that set everything in motion.
I came in because of the noise around the film and stayed because its simple premise kept opening into something less comfortable. There was pleasure in recognising the old anthology machinery, but very little comfort in watching it work. By the end, the wishing stick seemed small again, almost absurd beside what it had done. Nikki was still there.
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