Remember that trope in most ’90s romances, where an introverted nerdy main (loser) guy falls head over heels in love with a girl way out of his league? He can’t tell her how he feels. She might have left Mr Nice Guy in the friend zone. Then friends get involved and soon the couple is coupling.
Now add an ominous object and some male entitlement to the plot, and you get Curry Barker’s micro-budget film that has won big bucks on the box office, Obsession. The 26-year-old YouTuber known for That’s a Bad Idea takes a cliché and drags it somewhere much darker. Something you may not be ready for but will thoroughly enjoy.
Made on a $1 million budget—a fraction of what most studio horror films cost—the 109-minute follows four friends, Ian (Cooper Tomlinson, who’s also Barker’s longtime creative partner), Sarah (Megan Lawless), Baron aka Bear (Michael Johnston), and Nikki (Inde Navarrette). But everything ultimately revolves around Bear’s unrequited love for Nikki that somehow spirals into an unsettling obsession—but the other way around.
In a year of doom-and-gloom scenarios as far as onscreen love stories are concerned (Wuthering Heights, The Drama, Something Very Bad is Going to Happen), Obsession pushes the mantle with its “What if you got exactly what you wished for?” premise. It’s creepy, funny, and deeply uncomfortable, sometimes, all at once, taking you to the edge of the seat and back with dizzying suddenness. Inde Navarrette steals the show as Nikki. Her unnerving frozen smiles, raw tears, and blood-curdling screeches are the stuff of nightmares (but also a meme gold mine).
And for those who haven’t had enough of Obsession, Barker already has ideas for a sequel or even an anthology series revolving around the One-Wish Willow. Below, unfiltered thoughts that confirm why everyone is currently obsessing over Obsession.
- Only millennials will agree, Bear being so smitten with Nikki but struggling to tell her how he feels is such a peak ’90s trope.
- What a cute store! Spell candles, rare crystals, little voodoo dolls... Need to have a store like this!
- Oh, it is an actual store: a brick and mortar in Burbank called The Green Man. You are welcome. (Or we’re sorry?)
- Bear’s decision to buy the One-Wish Willow has big “walking into the dark basement after being told not to” energy.
- Obsession proves that men will literally try altering reality before they ask you out, perfect openings be damned.
- How does a pretty girl at the door in a red dress give Chucky vibes?
- Wow. From being friends to moving in together in the space of a few minutes, life’s taken a 180-degree turn for Bear and Nikki. Nothing says romance like removing someone’s free will.
- Why is Bear behaving like he did not want any of this?
- “It smells like you.” Bear reeks of dead cat?
- I’d be drunk if I took a shot every time Nikki mentioned Bear’s dead cat.
- Nikki snapping back to herself mid-kiss is the scariest thing I’ve watched all year.
- No, wait, her cowering in the corner of the bedroom watching Bear sleep is the scariest thing I’ve watched all year. Also note to myself: staying off vases in the near foreseeable future.
- No, Nikki, we don’t drag a dead cat into the house and host a funeral.
- Sealing apartment doors shut with duct tape to stop Bear from leaving for work? Children, this is what loving someone “more than anything in the fucking world” looks like.
- Is this a stare-down? How long are we supposed to be stuck on Nikki’s ear-to-ear, possessed AF smile? It’s giving me the creeps.
- You don’t test the palate of the “little food critic” by offering him a shady sandwich! What did the cat ever do to you, Nikki
- Inde Navarrette, you freak! What a star. She moves from an ear-to-ear smile to loud, raw tears to angry bark and back in seconds. That’s faster than I can fake benign acquiescence in a meeting.
- The car scene might have brought me closer to my death. I can feel that eyeball staring at me. Googling “jump scare” should lead one to this clip (even if you’re in India and are getting the abridged version).
- Can I switch lives with Ian? Only for the billion dollars and a grand total of two minutes, though.
- Bear needed maybe two more friends to fix this whole thing.
- Curry Barker better pay our light bills for the next two months.
