Editor’s note: This review was originally published during the 2025 Toronto International Festival. Focus Features will release the film in theaters beginning Friday, May 15.

We’re rapidly approaching the point where the most reliable route to becoming a horror director is to launch a short-form comedy career. Jordan Peele shocked the world with “Get Out,” Zach Cregger made it a pattern with “Barbarian” and “Weapons,” Danny and Michael Philippou jumped on the train with “Talk to Me” and “Bring Her Back.” Now, YouTube prankster Curry Barker has released one of the best horror films of 2025.

“Obsession” begins with the simplest of horror premises: Bear (Michael Johnston) is a shy and sensitive music store employee who can’t find the courage to ask his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) on a date. Rather than be honest with her and tell her how he actually feels, he wanders into a woo-woo crystal store and buys a One Wish Willow, a kitschy antique toy from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when they snap a branch in half. The cashier warns him that most of the customers who buy them have complained about the results, but it wouldn’t be much of a horror movie if he listened.

After dropping Nikki off at home after a night of bar trivia with their other co-workers (and weirding her out with his attempt to flirt while insisting they’re just friends), he snaps the willow and makes a simple wish: that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. It isn’t long before she emerges from her house and asks to go home with him, and Bear thinks he just purchased a one-way ticket out of the friend zone.

Suddenly, Nikki is always horny for Bear, is eager to show public affection, and spends so much time with him that she basically moves in. For Bear, the new arrangement is great about 99 percent of the time… the only drawback is that Nikki occasionally snaps back into her old self and screams in utter terror for a few seconds, before resuming the love-bombing.

Even before the movie spirals out of control, Bear and Nikki’s mutual friends start pointing out how weird this all is. The other girls at work heard Nikki talking about how she saw Bear as a little brother mere hours before she turned into a lovestruck teenager, and it becomes clear that she’s going through something. Rumors start to fly — guesses range from drug addiction to a full mental breakdown, but somehow nobody guesses “novelty ’60s wish-granting toy with deadly consequences” — but the one thing they can all agree on is that Bear is taking advantage of a girl in a vulnerable state.

Social connections begin to dry up, party invitations get lost in the mail, and Bear soon finds himself with nobody to turn to when the new Nikki starts stabbing herself with broken glass, cooking his dead cat, and sealing his doors with duct tape to prevent him from leaving the house. All that he can do is call the customer service line on the back of the package — but when he hears that they have the soul of the real Nikki screaming for help, the hopeless romantic realizes that he bit off far more than he could chew.

“Obsession” is proof that the Cregger-ification of 2020s horror is in full effect, as its combination of sadistic violence, ironic needle drops, and comedy mined from people responding to tragedy in pathetically self-serving ways will merit plenty of comparisons to “Barbarian” and “Weapons.” It also wisely continues the recent trend of allowing forces of unexplained evil to simply exist in its world, finding its social commentary in the way humans react to things they don’t understand. Instead of turning the actual evils into metaphors.

The film’s most compellingly unpredictable thrust lies in Barker’s choice to tell a story of something objectively horrible — in this case, a guy taking a woman’s entire soul away and turning her into a psychotic replica of herself so that he can have sex with her body and pretend they’re actually dating — exclusively from the perspective of the perpetrator. Navarrette delivers a brilliantly twisted performance as what’s left of Nikki, but given that her real self is stuck shrieking in call-center purgatory and only gets to emerge for seconds at a time, Bear is the human whose eyes we see everything through.

A sizable majority of the horror genre is built around men doing heinous things to women, with results ranging from deeply misogynistic to cathartically feminist. But “Obsession” is built around a much more contemporary male fear: being the problematic guy whose entire social circle knows he took advantage of a girl and wants nothing to do with him.

When we meet Bear, he isn’t some monster just waiting to snap. He’s a sensitive guy, frustrated by his lack of romantic success, and his heartbreak pushes him to put his own desires over his friend’s autonomy just long enough to ruin both of their lives. He doesn’t physically assault her, but he wades into a morally gray area for purely self-serving purposes, clearly haunted by the guilt of the irreversible cycle he set in motion. He also hates the fact that his friends are correct in their criticisms of him. (The fact that a movie like “Obsession” can even exist is evidence of the tiniest bit of social progress, as it would only work in a society where men feel like there are real social consequences to sexual misconduct.) Barker shows him no mercy for his actions, but leaves the door open to darker introspection. For most viewers, the terrifying question shouldn’t be “Could I end up like Nikki?” — rather, it’s, “Could I or someone I know be tempted to do what Bear did?”

That’s not to say that what happens to him is worse than what happens to her (at least at first), but Barker almost seems to be daring his audience to ask themselves how many “good guys” in the theater could be capable of a similar lapse in judgment under certain circumstances. Men and women will experience two very different types of fears when they consider the answer, but “Obsession” should keep everyone awake long after they get home from seeing it.

Grade: B+

“Obsession” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

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