Obsession Review: Curry Barker's Horror Debut Earns the Hype

Inde Navarrette as Nikki in Obsession (2025)

Curry Barker made his horror debut on a $750,000 budget, low by Hollywood standards, but not micro-budget, and the result doesn't feel like either. It feels like a director who already knew exactly what he was doing.

Barker's path here isn't the usual film-school pipeline. He built an audience doing sketch comedy on YouTube with his creative partner before turning to horror, and it shows in the confidence of the execution rather than any lack of polish. His father, Jeff Barker, works as a screenwriter and has stepped in as a script consultant on his projects, so Curry grew up with real exposure to the industry, even if he wasn't a nepo hire in the traditional sense. That background gave him a leg up on craft and access, and he used both well.

Obsession is one of my favorite films of the year, and it's not because it plays it safe. The premise is outlandish, a guy too meek to ask his crush out instead makes a wish on a "One Wish Willow," a novelty charm you snap in half, and next thing you know she's obsessed with him against her will. It's the kind of setup that could easily tip into camp. Barker plays it straight instead, and that choice is what makes it work. There's a tongue-in-cheek awareness of how absurd the premise is, but the film never winks at the audience long enough to undercut the horror.

The real engine of the movie is Inde Navarrette. Her performance sits in the same register as Toni Collette in Hereditary or Mia Goth in Pearl, an actress giving a $100 million performance in an independent production, playing every beat like her life depends on it. It's subtle and dynamic at once, and she sells the film's central horror: a woman losing control of her own body while flashes of her real self break through and then get pulled back under.

That's the through-line worth sitting with. Obsession is part of a small but noticeable cluster of recent films where the horror is a woman's loss of bodily autonomy. The Substance has a body doing things its owner doesn't want, Pearl has a woman controlled by her own psychological unraveling, and Companion runs the same idea through a female robot gaining consciousness while still being manipulated. Obsession fits right into that conversation, and it does it without leaning on any of those films to make its point.

Where it complicates things is the ambiguity around who the real villain is. Bear, the guy who makes the wish, isn't purely sympathetic or purely at fault. The read I landed on is that his friends manipulated him into believing she wasn't interested to begin with, when I think she actually was. That ambiguity is doing real work. The film sets up an impossible dilemma: there's nothing Bear can do to free her except remove himself from the equation entirely. That's a genuinely hard needle to thread as a screenwriter, and Barker threads it.

Score: 8/10. New blood in horror doing something that doesn't feel stagnant, which is exactly what the genre's needed for a while.