2026 | rated R | starring Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston | written & directed by Curry Baker | 1 hr 48 mins | 2 out of 5 |
A passive, shy young man named Bear (Michael Johnston) can’t work up the nerve to tell his friend and crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) his feelings for her, so he turns to a One Wish Willow toy at a novelty shop to wish that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world. The wish takes effect and Nikki is immediately obsessed with him beyond his ability to deal with it in, increasingly erratic and violent ways.
Obsession turns the Monkey’s Paw story onto modern Gen Z romance, offering a premise where you should be careful what you wish for because it might turn out more than you expect – or twisted by evil magic. But writer/director Curry Baker’s take on it did not for work me at all. Every thematic point and every creepy moment hit like an out of tune piano key. And it wasn’t because the movie is poorly made (mostly) or out of a lack of thoughtfulness. Almost everything I don’t like here was a clear deliberate choice that was made. Baker is clearly going for a David Lynchian living nightmare with Obsession, where everything in the world is odd, awkward and disjointed. Maybe it’s not you, Obsession, it’s me. Or maybe those choices lead to a broken film that takes the least interesting option at every single turn.
Starting with the good stuff. This is one of those movies that is designed as red meat meal for an actor to go hog wild with and that’s exactly what star Inde Navarrette does. Think Naomi Scott’s descent into madness in Smile 2 or, more classically, Isabelle Adjani’s famous full body performance in Possession. Navarrette delivers all that in spades, even recalling Adjani’s unhinged mania in her best moments. It’s grand and nuanced, physical, without ego and in a lot of ways it’s a dual performance playing Nikki as an entirely believable cool girl and then Wish Nikki’s rubber-faced hysteria. She’s a star in the making. A performance to launch a million Gen Z crushes. She is the only reason this movie isn’t a total wash for me.
On the other side we have Bear, who is performed well by Johnston, but is also written and created as the most frustratingly passive, emotionally constipated lead character to hit the screens in quite some time. The fatal flaw that causes him to use the One Wish Willow travels with him the entire movie. He is actively pushing back against every opportunity this situation provides to beat some character growth out of him, to the point that he’s so inactive he doesn’t drive the story at all. It just happens to him and he doesn’t have the mental capability to even come close to recognize much less solving the problem. I’m very much a defender of the age-old complaint that people making stupid decisions in horror movies (because people make stupid decisions in real life) and I definitely don’t need a character to be likable or do “what I would” in that situation, but when you push that so far that a lead character does nothing (and I mean nothing) in the face of insanity – or his decisions are so obviously dumb they make everything worse – it cripples the entire story and sends it running in place for most of the duration. The movie knows this, characters even comment on it, and I guess I’m supposed to think the lack of a character arc is bold and subversive when it really just makes for a stunted, frustrated treadmill experience where the lead is so uncurious and incapable that the movie’s potential themes go unexplored.
And there are some interesting ideas orbiting around Obsession. The first act feels brutally real. Baker nails the feeling of being in a friend group and suddenly having a crush threaten that group, the ache of wanting to tell the person while being aware it might blow up your friendship. It feels a lot like the effectively angsty Copper Raiff movie Shithouse and Nikki in this movie a lot like Maggie in that movie, a male/female friendship that becomes so emotionally intimate it blurs lines. Obsession turns the messy grey-area purgatory of Shithouse into a horror movie. At first, I thought this was a clever way to side-step our way around the online gender war – the only way to make a love story today is to make it an ironic horror movie. But that only works if the writer doesn’t actually believe it. Instead, this is a movie for the social media generation that considers anyone looking at the opposite sex, or expressing any kind of feelings for someone at all, as “weird” or “creepy”.
Aside from Bear, the other element that cripples this story is the One Wish Willow itself and the movie’s disinterest in it or establishing any rules or lore for how it works. The One Wish Willow just works. You wish for something and it immediately happens; it’s an easily found novelty item so you can just go get more of them; and because it works instantly it’s an easy thing to convince other people that it works. Establishing rules for the Willow would be another thing that would keep the movie from running in place, it would give the characters a path to follow to solve the problem. Insted every character is going out of their way to not understand what someone in front of them is saying and the dialog is overly padded with everyone saying some version of “What are you talking about?” over and over and over. The obvious solution to this whole thing is: Bear hands his friend another OWW and asks him to wish away the curse. Because we need the movie to happen, this doesn’t occur to our fearless leader until the final few minutes, and even then, he doesn’t know what to do with that idea. When Bear finally calls a support line for the Willow, the guy answering the phone doesn’t seem to know who he is or why he’s there either.
That falls in with Baker’s Lynchian nightmare world he’s trying to create but that one is glaringly at odds with the central premise: Nikki is acting outlandishly strange because she is now cursed. If everyone in this movie is acting strange, it mutes the impact of Nikki’s strangeness, and she just becomes another weird thing in a weird world.
Even with twisted evil magic, it’s not clear why a wish for love would manifest the way it does in this movie. She’s in love with him so she stands in the corner to watch him sleep (instead of just from the other side of the bed). She is given a Blumhouse creepy horror movie walk because why? That’s just what monsters do. Before, when I said the movie orbits around some interesting ideas, this is the angle that keeps undercutting those ideas.
At the start of the second act, the moment Bear makes the wish, all of those narrative choices – it’s inactive protagonist, the lack of rules with the curse, the surreal tone and Baker’s own fuzziness about what he wants to say about modern Gen Z dating – crash together and the movie goes off the rails into a series of contrived and contradictory scenes that never let up. Bear drops Nikki off at her house and after missing another chance to tell her how he feels, Bear breaks the Willow and makes the wish. Nikki is immediately back in his car, asking to go back to his place and behaving strangely. From there we get a back and forth where she is all over him and he is suddenly weirded out, does the right thing and sleeps away from her on the floor. He immediately suspects the Willow at first when she’s just seemingly into him and a little weird, and then as the movie progresses and she continues to act strange he flips and decides it’s not the curse at all and lies to cover for it. At no point in this movie is it not obvious to the audience that Nikki is curse. Very often something insane will happen to Bear – something mind-boggling that should change his entire view on this – and he just walks into the next scene as if nothing happened. There is a moment in the third act when he tries to convince someone that the One Wish Willow works, the wish is conjured up in front of them and then in the next scene that character shows up banging on the door announcing that it worked as if they both weren’t just in the same room watching it work.
Because Nikki is immediately at a 10 on the crazy scale, the story has no escalation. Because she stays that way and there is seemingly no way to turn this around, there is no ticking clock or tension. Because our heroine is trapped in a curse and our hero is a pathetic incapable wet rag, there is nobody to root for. Earlier this year we had Adam Scott as an a-hole lead in Hokum, but Adam Scott’s character, despite being severely unlikable, was an active agent in moving forward and uncovering the story. There is nobody doing that in Obsession.
Ok, smart guy, how would you change it? Easy. Instead of making the wish and immediately getting together with Nikki, Bear should have made the wish and driven home. Then we see a slow escalation as cursed Nikki tries to worm into his life. Maybe he actually has something going on in his life and she interferes with it. He believes that she has finally fallen for him and we get the satire of the Nice Guy that Baker desperately wants to make fun of here in a way that plays a coy with whether or not the wish worked. Bear is still the bad guy here, but we give him a reason to string that along a bit more. Then the more she is around him, the more unhinged she gets so we get a ticking clock progression. Maybe the end game is that she wants them to physically be together forever or maybe she wants to consume him so he can be inside her. You know, something actually creepy instead of just this movie’s upside-down Gen Z view of creepy: a pretty girl staring at you. Maybe we find a way to let Real Nikki come out and the movie plays it as a threesome where Nikki keeps swapping back and forth or control of her body. You know, give the lead some agency.
Did I mention it looks like garbage and is just as dark as any movie now. Not just because the lighting is low but because almost everyone is deliberately and pretentiously backlit, so they appear as shadows. Probably for the same reason Curse Nikki is given a robotic walk. That’s just what horror movies do.
There is an interesting movie to be made about this kind of passive character suddenly, supernaturally, getting what they want and not being able to deal with it. There are interesting potential ideas about relationships that can spring up from this as an allegory. Like the old quote, I wouldn’t want to be part of a club that had me as a member. Maybe you can build this into a story about how someone needs to work on themselves before being in a relationship, how it’s not a guarantee in life, and that if you don’t like yourself first, maybe that rubs off on the person you’re with becoming a turn-off to you. Maybe what you liked about them was a personality that came with their single life, and you don’t like that they are with you at all. Any number of ideas and themes. Obsession is not that movie though.
That I’ve dug so deep into this is a sign that Obsession is a fascinating mess of a movie. It’s fundamentally broken in the language of how stories are told and how movies operated. It’s also a depressing sign of things to come. As more Zoomers and Youtubers become filmmakers we’re going to get more movies poisoned at the core by a generation of people raised in the hostile, broken, alternate reality of social media. If that’s the future, stop the world I want to get off. I really get the impression the movie wants to be a Gen Z gender-power allegory about toxic masculinity. Toxic maybe, but nothing Bear does in this movie would be considered masculine.
You know those frustrating rom-coms where a simple mix-up keeps the couple apart and would be cleared up if people just sat down and talked for 5 seconds. Obsession is the horror version of that.