Obsession (2025)

You’ve got to hand it to Obsession for being so arguably unoriginal, borrowing familiar ideas from all over the place and simply making them work. All credit to director and writer Curry Barker for fashioning a masterful piece of horror that is entertaining as often as it shocks (including, for example, one of the best calculated jump scare cuts I’ve ever seen). Much of what makes Obsession so great is the performance by Inde Navarrette, which is brilliant. She plays a young woman named Nikki on whom Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush. But he is too stammeringly shy to do anything about it. One day he wanders into a mysterious antique shop. It’s not run by Keye Luke like the one in Gremlins, but it does sell a mysterious novelty product called One Wish Willow. The One Wish Willow is packaged up with warnings. They even have a phone number to call, though we learn later (in a chilling scene that ends deliciously over the top) the person answering only says nothing can be done. The One Wish Willow looks like something you would buy from Archie McPhee or Spencer Gifts. The idea is that you get one wish. If you’re thinking about the classic horror story by W.W. Jacobs now, “The Monkey’s Paw,” you are on the right track. These wishes come true, and they can’t be reversed, but they don’t come true the way they were intended. Bear, of course, impulsively makes the wish we’re all expecting: “I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone in the fucking world.” The wish comes true. Nikki and Bear have a brief honeymoon period before a nightmare of rom-comic proportions descends. Nikki, who only ever had feelings for Bear “in the friend zone,” soon becomes an even more psychotic version of Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) from Fatal Attraction. She wails about Bear leaving her even if he’s just going to the bathroom. She plasters the inside of his apartment door with duct tape attempting to keep him trapped in there. She pitches screaming fits constantly. Her ambition has always been to be a writer and she’s prone to going off on poetic soliloquies that scare everyone around her, such as an incestual version of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. You have to see this movie to believe how good it is. The ending is amazing. Put this Obsession up there with “The Monkey’s Paw,” Gremlins, and Fatal Attraction too. Nice to see a horror show that knows how to do it. It’s funny too.