Curry Barker | Obsession | Focus Features | May 2026 | 109 minutes

Sometimes it’s more valuable to talk about a film, or any piece of art, after a bit of time has passed. I think this is especially true whenever said piece of art becomes a full-blown cultural phenomenon. At the time of writing this review, Obsession is the most profitable original film of the decade and the highest-grossing film to ever be made on a budget under a million dollars, with a worldwide box office well exceeding $500 million. Now how much money a movie makes has no actual bearing on its quality, but in certain instances, it can cause us to ask simple but important questions, like “why was this film so successful?” I’ve been asking myself this for a while now, and while there are a multitude of factors at play (marketing, timing, etc.), I’ve found myself hung up on one potentially insidious reality. And that is that Obsession is engineered to plausibly comment on serious hot button issues, from rape culture and mental illness, while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability about all of it. 

Our protagonist is Bear (played by Michael Johnston), and Bear is a “nice guy,” but not a “good guy.” Early scenes establish him as not necessarily malicious, but incredibly weak-willed and irresponsible. Bear is rehearsing a love confession to his crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) with another girl and his “friend,” Ian (Cooper Tomlinson). Bear’s planned confession is a little clumsy but actually quite sweet and the girl seems to respond to it well, but Ian immediately shuts it down and supplants the positive reinforcement with the idea that it’s cringey and he should tease Nikki instead, be playfully mean. Ian often seems to be the personification of toxic masculinity more than his own character, and Bear bends to his suggestions pathetically throughout the film in much the manner emotionally vulnerable men might seek out meninist influencers. That’s a strong base for social commentary, but trust that Curry Barker will find ways to undermine his own messaging, whether said messaging is intentional or incidental.

Bear returns home to find that his cat has died after leaving out his medication. Even in private, there’s a denial of responsibility, a brief mourning period and a subtle plan to use the tragedy to evoke sympathy from his crush. There’s not a sense of Bear “orchestrating” anything in Obsession: he does not have the cleverness or fortitude to plan anything. Still, he is manipulative in a much sadder way: bad things happen due to his own negligence, and then he meekly attempts to turn the mishaps to his advantage. He is a very real, very human character and you probably know a Bear. Curry Barker will find ways to complicate this unnecessarily.

Later, Bear and Ian meet up with Nikki and their other friend/coworker Sarah (Megan Lawless) at a bar. Bear tries to confess honestly, Ian once again sets out to undermine him, while Sarah sends strong signals that she’s interested in Bear. Nikki is established somewhat oddly as a character. We ultimately spend very little time with the “real” Nikki over the course of Obsession, and while I could pretty confidently call her the most sympathetic character of the four due to the massive disparity between how poor of a person she is compared to what she goes through, she is not characterized especially well. There’s a viral clip that has made the rounds, of Inde Navarrette flitting through about a dozen microexpressions as she teases Bear for ordering a “girl drink.” Some read this as a tendency to overact: Navarrette’s performance across Obsession is undoubtedly loud. But alternatively, she presents the real Nikki as someone desperate for attention and with a need to be liked and seen as “good.” It’s heavily hinted that she knows that Bear likes her and she feeds this. It’s unknown whether she feels the same: Navarrette has said she played the role to be ambiguous on this point. What’s easier to infer is that she likes that he likes her. She also used to have the nickname “Crazy Nikki” and there’s a moment where she pressures Sarah into giving her money so she can give it to a homeless person. It’s an empty good gesture on Nikki’s part since she gets to feel good about giving the money even though it’s not hers to give, while Sarah does ultimately do the good thing but grumbles about it and talks shit about the homeless person.

This is all to say that while it’s to wildly varying degrees, all four main characters in Obsession kind of suck as people. This is a pretty good approach to popcorn horror, shallow slasher flicks, etc. since you don’t want to feel too bad about seeing these people getting torn to ribbons, even if it’s just a movie. Here, Barker’s choices read more misanthropic, and arguably misogynistic, as the film progresses.

When Bear finally wishes on the One Wish Willow that he purchased from a gift store, after failing to confess to Nikki again after driving her home, he wishes for her to love him “more than anyone in the fucking world.” And it works, in its own horrible and twisted way. Obviously, this is a selfish thought, no one reasonable would deny that it is. But Obsession already begins to sabotage itself right here, simply due to the fact that it is unreasonable for him to believe the wish would actually work when he makes it, and the rules of the wish give him no real way to back out cleanly: to cancel the wish, either Nikki has to die, or he does.

This is an incredibly shoddy foundation for any sort of effective social commentary on how Bear robs Nikki of her agency. He does, undoubtedly. But again, initially, he does so unintentionally. This doesn’t make it okay, but when the film refuses to allow him even the option of backing out early in a way that doesn’t cost someone their life, the analogy ceases to be applicable to the real world. In the real world, if you hurt someone by accident, you can stop without killing someone else or yourself. Bear is never given this choice. There are moments that solidify Bear as firmly in the wrong, but these come later, after it’s already confirmed that Bear couldn’t do the right thing without ending his own life even if he did want to. And I start to wonder why that is, because if Barker wanted to make a film with clear messaging, with Bear as less ambiguous in his moral failings, it would almost be easier to give him that option in-universe and consciously choose not to take it out of his own selfish desire to possess Nikki. He is, in fact, established as the sort of person who would believably do this. So why complicate this point? Is Barker that clumsy of a writer? Maybe, but there’s an uglier reality possible, where Barker wants to villainize Bear for those who wish to see the meek “nice guy” trope villainized, while sneaking in weird dogwhistles that could plausibly make Bear sympathetic to rape culture misogynists. A way for Barker to activate both ends of a culture war, pander to and criticize both sides for maximum profits.

As the film continues and wish Nikki grows more and more unstable, Barker does create moments of sympathy for both real and wish Nikki, but one of the film’s crucial flaws in my view is the lopsided focus on the scary things she does, and how these things impact Bear. In a sense, Obsession is a Frankenstein movie: Bear is Frankenstein and wish Nikki is Frankenstein’s monster. In Frankenstein, the notion that Frankenstein is the actual monster is left less complicated, because his creation of the monster was intentional and aimed outwards. But here, when Bear is fed his own cat, or his door is duct taped shut, or wish Nikki scares him into having sex, we get trapped into this bizarre triangle where Bear is raping real Nikki, but wish Nikki is raping Bear, but wish Nikki can’t be anything other than what Bear made her, but Bear didn’t mean to make her, and what comes out in the wash, when you really look at it, is a film that tries to say everything and ends up saying nothing.

I’m also hung up on how the disparity in cruelty towards Obsession’s female characters vs. its male characters manifests. If you were to break this down, despite how the film clumsily portrays it, real Nikki easily goes through the worst arc here and is most unambiguously a victim. Barker at times seems to delight in showing wish Nikki take her body through all sorts of hell: soiling herself, not eating, using real Nikki’s body for sex, forcing her to commit horrible acts of violence, etc. Sympathy can extend to wish Nikki insofar as she is clearly mentally unwell. Some have suggested that wish Nikki is a representation of BPD, which is perhaps partially true but also so wildly exaggerated as to be deeply problematic. Sarah’s arc of suffering is much shorter but incredibly brutal to an outright unnecessary degree: Barker has said that he had to make changes to avoid an X rating, but the theatrical cut already feels cruel in a way that adds nothing to the film. The idea that it was originally meant to go even further is almost concerning.

Ian, meanwhile, who might be on the other end as the only one of the four who elicits no sympathy at all, is let off relatively easy, far as this film goes. Actually, the disparity is so wide as to be unignorable. And when I notice these things, Barker’s confusing directorial intent causes me to wonder whether he is making his women characters suffer to elicit sympathy or because it’s “shocking” and whether that’s all this has ever boiled down to. Am I watching an anti-incel movie, or an incel movie?

And I think it’s neither. Or both. I don’t think Obsession has a position, or ideas of its own, or any sort of real human pulse to it. It’s a cold movie that pilfers culture war discourse like Hideaki Anno borrowed Christian iconography for Neon Genesis Evangelion just because he thought it looked cool. Obsession is commentary as aesthetic. A schlocky B-movie masquerading as something more. And this really illuminates its success. What better way to capture the modern zeitgeist than with a loud, unnecessarily cruel film that pretends to have something meaningful to say but collapses under the slightest bit of scrutiny?

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Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others.