Film Review - Obsession (2026)

Obsession is written and directed by Curry Barker and stars Michael Johnstone as Bear a nervous young man who has a crush on his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarette) but cannot bring himself to tell her how he really feels about her so one night in a store he buys a One Wish Willow ornament that is said to grant any wish the person wants granted so Bear wishes for Nikki to love him but as the Genie said to Aladdin you can’t make people fall in love with you.

Obsession is a movie I have mixed feelings about, on the positive side the film is well made by Barker who uses the night very effectively to help create a mood of dread and tension throughout the film and the horror moments are very effective especially some of the bed scenes where its so early in the morning the characters should all be sound asleep but it also helps to put Bear and Co on edge the next day like they could snap from a lack of sleep.

And Inde Navarette is fantastic as Nikki, she is asked to a lot of strange stuff in this role especially after the wish is used on her and she excels at all of it from the way she’s dressed as an object of Bear’s desires rather than seeing her for who she really is to the way she talks like a devoted wife with the loving smile that looks creepy at times would and even down to the highly strung out emotional moments of screaming and crying and obsessive behaviour and all of it is simply fantastic to watch, this should be a star making performance.

I also enjoyed Megan Lawless as Sarah, Bear’s co-worker in the music shop who secretly has a crush on Bear but doesn’t tell him.

And that leads into one of the problems I have with this movie, nobody talks to each other about how they really feel about each other, right from the first scene you see Bear talk nervously to a girl in a diner and I sat there thinking “For goodness sake just tell her how you feel, it’s not that hard” and that feeling never really went away for me especially when Nikki is changed by Bear’s wish as she never really felt loved by Bear for who she was but who Bear wanted her to be, an object of sexual desire that he could have all to himself.

And that leads me to Bear as a character, I hated this obnoxious little dweeb that I just sat there thinking as Bear tries to figure out what’s going on that everything that’s happening is all his fault, he didn’t tell Nikki how he really felt about her and when he used his One Wish Willow to make her love him he doesn’t realize for much of the movie that she is doing precisely what he deep down wanted her to do, be his and his alone and his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) isn’t much better either as he comes across as the douchebag friend that says all the wrong things to Bear and I hated watching both of these obnoxious little shitheads.

And lastly the other main problem I had was with Nikki herself, we barely get to know her as a character in the early scenes of the movie before the wish changes her to make the impact of that wish really land properly and the movie I kept thinking about while watching this one was last year’s Companion with Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher which also dealt with an insular young man wanting a woman to love him but that film showed how insular and horrible the male lead was and gave the female lead a lot more agency in the story and I wish this movie had more of that.

And so that was Obsession and it’s a mixed bag for me, it’s well made and effective but the storytelling was not as good, 2 and a half out of 5.