The old monkey’s paw tale meets Fatal Attraction—and then goes off the deep end—in Obsession, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival before becoming a breakout success at the U.S. box office ahead of its opening in Prague cinemas this weekend. What begins as a familiar cautionary tale about getting what you wish for gradually mutates into something far more unhinged: a ferociously acted, structurally confident horror film from debut writer-director Curry Barker that pushes its central premise to deeply uncomfortable extremes.
Obsession stars Michael Johnston as Bear, a young employee at a music store who quietly nurses a crush on his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Shy, self-effacing, and painfully hesitant, he fumbles his chance to ask her out until fate—or something more questionable—intervenes in the form of a One Wish Willow: a cheap trinket promising a single fulfilled desire. His wish is simple, almost pathetic in its specificity: that Nikki will love him more than anyone else in the world.
What follows initially feels like a perverse inversion of a romantic fantasy. Nikki suddenly becomes intensely devoted, attentive, and emotionally all-consuming. Bear gets exactly what he thinks he wants. But Barker is not interested in wish fulfillment as catharsis; instead, the film slowly reveals that absolute affection without autonomy is not love at all, but something closer to possession.
At first, Obsession plays like a modern update of the monkey’s paw myth—an old-world moral about desire backfiring in cruelly literal ways. But Barker’s real achievement is escalation. Once the premise locks in, the film steadily strips away restraint, pushing Nikki’s devotion into increasingly disturbing territory.
Bear’s passivity becomes one of the film’s more frustrating and deliberate choices. Even as the situation clearly deteriorates, he fails to intervene with urgency, as if psychologically trapped by the gratification of getting what he wanted. Johnston plays this contradiction with effective blankness, but it is Navarrette who dominates the film, delivering a performance that is difficult to look away from.
Nikki begins as an idealized romantic partner but gradually fractures into something unstable and uncanny. There are moments where she feels like a sitcom dream of domestic bliss, and others where she becomes something closer to a stalking presence or psychological intrusion. Navarrette’s work here recalls Isabelle Adjani’s unforgettable turn in Possession as an escalating portrait of emotional collapse through psychological torment.
By the time the film reaches its climax, it abandons restraint entirely; one gruesome sequence in particular ranks among the most shocking horror set pieces in recent memory, not simply for its violence but for its sustained emotional discomfort. Barker understands timing: he lets scenes breathe just long enough for tension to become unbearable before releasing it in abrupt, often brutal fashion.
At its core, Obsession is less about supernatural horror than about relational distortion. Barker frames love as an unstable system—one that, when artificially amplified, collapses into control. The wish is not simply a plot device but a metaphor for emotional projection: Bear does not fall in love with Nikki as she is, but with the version of her he constructs.
As Nikki becomes increasingly defined by Bear’s desire, she also loses internal coherence. The film uses this deterioration to explore the unsettling idea that being fully known—or fully wanted—can be a form of erasure. In this sense, Obsession sits comfortably alongside recent horror films exploring intimacy as threat, but it pushes further into emotional extremity than most.
There is also a sharp, darkly comedic undercurrent running through the film. Barker repeatedly leans into the absurd logistics of undoing the curse, treating Bear’s delayed problem-solving with a kind of biting irony. The film’s final act, which revolves around increasingly desperate attempts to reverse the One Wish Willow effect, plays almost like a grotesque puzzle box—funny in structure, horrifying in outcome.
For a 26-year-old feature debut, Barker’s command of pacing is unusually assured. Scenes are allowed to unfold without excess exposition, but rarely linger beyond their natural tension. The result is a film that feels tightly constructed even when it spirals into narrative excess. Barker’s background in online shorts and sketch comedy occasionally surfaces in the film’s rhythm, but here it is disciplined into a cohesive cinematic vision.
Obsession succeeds most when it fully commits to its central conceit without restraint, and its confidence is most apparent in how far it is willing to push a simple idea. While Bear’s passivity occasionally frustrates and the premise itself is familiar, Barker’s execution elevates the material into something far more volatile than expected.
It is not a subtle film, nor does it aim to be. Instead, it operates with a kind of relentless narrative certainty, turning emotional dependency into something closer to a curse that feeds on itself. By the time it reaches its final stretch, Obsession has long since abandoned the safety of metaphor and becomes something more immediate—and far more disturbing. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.
