I enjoy horror a lot. Honestly I think we're in a golden era right now. A24 and smaller studios been pushing the envelope in ways the bigger studios just aren't. It's one of the few genres where you can still come in with a small budget, do something special, and not need $200 million to pull it off. Only downside for me sometimes is I'm watching these joints alone because my partner is just not in the mood for horror a lot of the time. That's just how it goes.
Obsession is exactly the kind of film I'm talking about. Before I get into the movie though, the money story deserves a mention because it's wild. This thing was made for $750,000. Debuted at Toronto, Focus Features bought the distribution rights for $15 million. The film has since crossed $400 million worldwide. It officially knocked Enter the Dragon and The Blair Witch Project off the top spot for highest-grossing film in history made for under a million dollars. The director Curry Barker is 26 years old and built his whole following making shorts on YouTube. Let those numbers breathe for a second.
Wide release was May 15, 2026. It's now available to rent or own on digital as of June 30th. I watched it at home. Now let's get into it.
Obsession is a twisted modern take on the monkey's paw. You know the premise. Be careful what you wish for. The story follows Baron, played by Michael Johnston, a hopeless romantic working at a music store who's been carrying this unrequited crush on his lifelong childhood best friend Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. He cannot bring himself to say anything. Every time he gets an opening he lets it go by. He is completely in his own head about it and it is painful to watch.
The friend group is Baron, Nikki, Ian, and Sarah. They all work together at a music store that Sarah's father owns. Ian is the confident one, always in Baron's ear telling him to just say something already. Sarah is more quiet, more in the cut. Before everything falls apart the four of them just feel real. You buy them as a group. That matters because when things go wrong the damage it does to that whole dynamic hits different.
One night they're all out at their regular trivia night. Baron picks up this strange supernatural wishing willow trinket from what I can only describe as an oddities shop. He drops Nikki home at the end of the night, she gives him every opening to say what he feels, and he still doesn't do it. So he makes the wish instead. He wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. And then everything starts going wrong.
What got to me right away is how selfish that wish is. And the movie is deliberate about showing you that Baron is not just shy. There is actual entitlement underneath the nervousness. He feels like he deserves Nikki's love just because he wants her that bad. He was too scared to be vulnerable so instead of just dealing with that he took a shortcut that could end up destroying somebody else. I genuinely could not stand him for it. Thought it was disgusting honestly. That feeling stuck with me the whole movie.
The wish works. That is the horror. He gets exactly what he asked for. Just not what he meant.
Nikki shifts instantly. What starts out as what he always wanted just keeps getting darker. She becomes completely fixated on him. Has to be around him all the time. Starts hurting herself. Hurts people around her. Treats the whole friend group differently. She is not herself anymore. It feels like watching somebody get possessed. The real Nikki is gone and whatever replaced her only exists to fulfill the terms of the wish. She loves him more than anyone in the world, including herself, and she will tear everything apart to show it.
Now here is what I want to be clear about. Nikki is not just a victim in this story. What she becomes is terrifying on its own. The things that come out of her mouth, the way she moves, the way she looks at people in certain scenes with the group, genuinely unsettling. She is dangerous. And the collateral damage is not just Nikki either. Watching the whole friend group get warped and pulled apart around this thing is painful in its own way. Baron keeps trying to figure out how to undo what he did and there is just no clean way out. Every option he finds feels wrong. The monkey's paw does not come with a return policy. Things just keep spiraling.
You get the classic stuff here. Creepy figures in the dark. Nikki standing in corners under bad lighting. Strange walks. Screams. Some body horror, some gross-out moments. Curry Barker does not lean on jump scares and that is the right call. He uses framing and lighting to build this low-level anxiety that just sits under every scene. There are moments where characters are having a completely normal conversation and Nikki is just there in the background, out of focus, wide eyed, watching. It works.
But what really got me was not the traditional horror stuff. It was the situation itself. Watching someone you cared about disappear and get replaced by something obsessive and dangerous. Watching Baron deal with what he caused. And here is the other thing about this movie that I think is part of why it connected with so many people. This story is relatable. A lot of people have had some version of an obsession story, whether they were on the giving end or the receiving end. You watch this and you either think damn maybe mine was not that bad, or you watch it and go oh no, I have been there. That is a different kind of horror. It lives closer to home. It gave me anxiety from start to finish. Gave me the ick. Not in a way that made me not enjoy the movie. In a way that means it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
I want to shout out the cinematography too because it genuinely stood out to me. I looked it up after and the DP is a guy named Taylor Clemens. I don't know much about him but whatever he and Barker put together visually works. The framing feels intentional. Heavy dark lighting that builds the dread without being obvious about it. The way Nikki is shot in certain scenes, the stillness of it, the positioning, it all lands. For a movie made for $750,000 it looks and feels like something that cost way more than that.
She is the standout and it is not close. From everything I saw after watching this she is not a horror person at all. Not her natural space. She has said she probably would not even watch this movie because it just is not her vibe. And yet on screen she becomes something completely different. The way she goes from this warm, open, affectionate person to something manic and goes quiet and still in a way that gets under your skin, and she does it just by changing her face, is genuinely chilling. The way she moves, the way she goes still, the way she looks at people, the way she talks. You completely believe that whoever Nikki was is gone and something else is running the show. She turns into a whole different being and that is what makes this movie work as well as it does. I hope to see her in more things. Horror, outside of horror, whatever. She has something real and this performance proves it.
Obsession is a Recommend for horror fans. If this is your genre this is exactly the kind of film you want right now. Simple premise, effective execution. The performance at the center of it will stay with you. The situational horror hits harder than anything supernatural the movie throws at you and that is a credit to how well the story is built.
It is available to rent or own on digital right now. Watch it.
And when a 26 year old makes a $750,000 movie that becomes the highest grossing under-a-million film in cinema history, you pay attention to what he does next.
Recommend.
Obsession is the real deal. Watch it.