Obsession

The premise runs on a wish, a device called the One Wish Willow, and the film treats it with the deadpan bureaucratic comedy of a thing you might call a customer service line about. Bear, played by Michael Johnston, is the young man at the center, and Johnston does something quietly precise with him: whatever the dialogue leaves unstated, his face carries. Distress, confusion, the slow arithmetic of a man realizing what he has set in motion, all of it registers before a word confirms it.

The engine of the picture is Inde Navarrette as Nikki. Possession horror lives or dies on the body of the possessed, and Navarrette builds hers out of contortion: eerie smiles, enormous frowns, expressions that read as childlike and wrong at once. What holds it together is the eyes. They stay legibly human, a person peeking out from inside something that has taken the controls and won't give them back. It is a performance of enormous physical control that never tips into camp, and the film's scares are staked almost entirely on it.

Barker and cinematographer Taylor Clemons worked without a reference bible, breaking the look down scene by scene from the sensation of being trapped in Bear's world. The palette grows rather than announces itself. Rock Burwell's debut score, synth-heavy and dread-soaked, was built alongside Barker to chase a specific uncanny discomfort, and the sound design does something sly: it tightens your body before your mind catches up to why. A drunk Jenga party is the film's showcase set piece, a controlled escalation of social awkwardness into something feral, and Barker's editing keeps the whole thing on an off-kilter meter that unsettles independent of any single shock.

At 108 minutes the film does not sag. It is lean and it moves. What it is doing with Nikki has become the loudest conversation around it, and that conversation belongs in the open zone below. For a debut-adjacent feature made for almost nothing, this is a work of unusual control over tone, one that keeps dread and dark comedy braided so tightly you stop trying to separate them.

Let me start with the fight, because it's the only honest place to start. Obsession has become the year's horror lightning rod, and the charge runs entirely through Nikki. The film centers Bear, a young man who wishes for a woman and gets one whose soul is being taken from her, and it tells that story from the point of view of someone who sees her as a prize rather than a person. That framing is the whole gamble. One camp reads it as deliberate indictment: the horror is Bear's entitled selfishness, and the objectification is the thing being exposed, not the thing being enjoyed. The other camp reads the progressive framing as a disguise, an escape hatch that lets the film pile violence and tropes onto Nikki while claiming immunity. In that reading she stays another thinly written woman in horror, dressed up in tongue-in-cheek jokes.

I don't think this is settled, and I don't want to pretend it is. Both sides agree on what happens on screen. They disagree on whether the execution earns the claim. The steering-wheel attack, where Nikki smashes a man's head against the wheel something like twenty times until his face is a mass of blood, is the kind of sequence that plays completely differently depending on which reading you walk in with. The RogerEbert.com review names the film's biggest blind spot as its refusal to fully reckon with the sexual and psychological violence done to Nikki during her possession, arguing that by locking onto Bear's perspective the film risks sidelining her ordeal. Joey Magidson goes further, calling it particularly icky, finding a cruelty toward the women he doesn't believe is intentional but that colors the whole thing, and saying the film can only gaze longingly at what Barbarian and Weapons managed.

That Cregger comparison is worth sitting with. The film has been labeled proof that the Cregger-ification of 2020s horror is in full effect: sadistic violence, ironic needle drops, dark comedy welded to real dread. Barker cites Peele and Whannell, and reviewers keep reaching for Get Out and Hereditary as the prestige-horror lineage. Whether Obsession belongs in that room or is doing an impression of it is, I think, the same question as the Nikki question wearing a different hat.

Louis Peitzman makes the case for the defense in the cleanest terms I've seen, arguing the film refuses to flatten Nikki into the crazy girlfriend archetype. Marshall Shaffer's early read framed it as a chilling portrait of a crush gone awry, and that framing did real work in the film's reception. And there's a genuinely persuasive version of the pro argument: the commentary lives not in turning evil into metaphor but in how the people around Nikki react to something they don't understand. If you buy that, the film is about the manosphere by anatomizing the nice guy from inside his own delusion.

On Navarrette I have no reservations at all. The awards discourse started on opening weekend and it isn't hype. Her performance carries the entire horror apparatus; her face is the film's special effect. Whatever you conclude about the writing of Nikki, the acting of Nikki is the reason people leave the theater rattled.

A few smaller pleasures. Barker voices the One Wish Willow customer service agent himself, a seemingly stoned functionary, and it's the scene where you hear Nikki screaming in the background and understand she is no longer her human self. Bear's morning discovery of what she's done to the door is the film's tonal thesis in miniature, dread and dark comedy at their most precise. There's also a real formal argument buried in the reception: one reviewer thinks the well-rounded supporting cast and open-ended premise make it tiptoe between cinema and prestige TV, a season arc compressed by a sub-million-dollar budget. Others find the tightness unambiguously cinematic. I lean toward the second. The film's grip is the grip of a movie, not a pilot.

Adam Kempenaar landed at four out of five, which feels about right to me as a summary of the majority position: this is one of the strongest, scariest horror releases of the year, and it is also a film whose central ethical question its makers may not have fully answered. Both things are true. I'd rather a horror film gamble this hard and leave a real argument in its wake than play it safe and leave nothing.