{Overlook Film Festival 2026} Obsession (2025) Is Cruel, Funny, and Confident in What its Doing

Obsession premiered at TIFF’s Midnight Madness block on September 5, 2025, sold out every screening, swept through Fantastic Fest, won Sitges’ People’s Choice Award, and got picked up by Focus Features for a reported $15 million before the festival season barely started. It opens wide on May 15. That’s the kind of trajectory that usually sets a film up to disappoint you. Here at the Overlook 2026 I went in with sky high expectations. Writer-director-editor Curry Barker did not disappoint.

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The premise is, by Barker’s own admission, ancient. Bear (Michael Johnston), a music store employee with an unrequited crush on his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette), gets his hands on a One Wish Willow (a toy that some people remember from their youth….I guess like candy cigarettes), breaks it, wishes for her love, and gets exactly that. Horror fans have seen this machinery before. Its a Monkey Paw’s tale at its core but one we have NEVER seen before. What we haven’t seen is what Barker and Navarrette do once that paw opens up.

Barker came up making a found footage slasher called Milk & Serial for $800, posting it to YouTube, and watching it hit two million views on the strength of nothing but the film itself. That scrappiness is still present in Obsession, even with a real budget behind it. He and cinematographer Taylor Clemons shot the entire film center-composed with extra headspace, a choice that sounds like a technical detail until you’re sitting in a theater and your skin starts to crawl before anything has technically gone wrong yet. Production designer Vivian Gray built Bear’s house from scratch in Burbank, and it feels like a place someone actually lives, which makes what happens there land harder. Composer Rock Burwell’s score, also a debut, does its job by staying out of the way until it absolutely shouldn’t.

Then there’s Navarrette. What she’s doing here is legitimately difficult: playing a person whose feelings, actions, and autonomy have been hijacked, in a film that is also, often, very funny. She has to hold the comedy and the horror simultaneously, and she does, without ever letting you forget that Nikki’s compliance is not Nikki. The film is smart enough to keep her almost perpetually in shadow during the spell’s hold, a visual choice by Clemons that reads as both technically elegant and quietly devastating once you understand what it’s marking. It’s one of the scariest decisions in the film, and it announces itself almost immediately. There is a movement in these scenes where Navarette appears to almost be fighting the spell that exists only in the uncanny valley

Bear, for his part, is deliberately not easy to root for. Michael Johnston plays him as exactly the kind of person who feels stuck in a lonely life that seems engineered to prevent him from launching a post teenage life. He is primed to be red pilled but instead he gets he gets One Wished Willowed (I would say way worse but….not sure about that one). There are subtextual questions regarding enthusiastic consent that feel like they exist in every scene, in the gap between what Bear thinks he has and what is actually happening. Barker borrows liberally from past horror tropes which is expected with its source material but each time these ideas are modernized and forced through this hilariously horrifying viewpoint that feels authentic to the directors vision.

Cooper Tomlinson (who co-wrote Barker’s next film, Anything But Ghosts, with him) and Megan Lawless as the best friends do real work clarifying who Nikki actually is versus who Bear has decided she is…now, which is the film’s most quietly important structural move. The people around the couple are as horrified as the audience. At the start of the third act the move takes a giant CRINGY turn. Not the movie, the actions of the characters. Its tough but extremely terrifying and more than a little funny.

Obsession is at its absolute best when it commits to treating ordinary domestic space as the location of something genuinely wrong. It shifts from funny to brutal with the confidence of a film that knows exactly where it’s going. It manages to capture the paradox of how we increasingly feel lonely and desperate for connection when bombarded with the cultivated vision of the way some people feel we want them to be. Barker is telling all of us….Get a life guys. Or at least accept people for who they are, even if they don’t like us like that. I caught Obession as part of my coverage of The Overlook Film Festival. Its freaking great. You should go.