I’m Obsessed With Obsession
This past weekend, Curry Barker’s Obsession opened in theaters to critical acclaim and box office success, already grossing over $23 million over a budget of < $1 million. The writing’s been on the wall that 2026 is a big year for horror—even May alone with hits like Hokum and soon Backrooms—and the release of Obsession has only strengthened that projection for many theatregoers. Director Curry Barker has long been creating sketches on YouTube with co-star Cooper Tomlinson (who stars in Obsession as Ian) on their channel “that’s a bad idea”, making his feature directorial debut with 2024’s Milk & Serial. The following year, he would shoot and premiere Obsession at TIFF where Focus Features would acquire the distribution rights.
Though Obsession is shot like a traditional narrative film, it thrives off the same realism in its writing and performances found in Milk & Serial. Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette star alongside each other as Baron “Bear” Bailey and Nikki Freeman respectively, two childhood friends who work at a local record store owned by their friend Sarah’s (Megan Lawless) father, played by Andy Richter. When Bear discovers the One Wish Willow while browsing a crystal shop for a gift to Nikki, his wish that she’d love him more than anyone in the world brings more than he’d bargained for. As their lives spiral out of control, the one constant remains that the two are together through it all, whether they truly want to be or not.
The concept of the film, while fairly easy to simplify in explanation, only gets more harrowing as the film drags on. I could feel myself getting tense as the entire audience, like we had to walk on eggshells for every cut the film would make at a certain point. With how grounded in reality as the writing of the film often is, the graphic nature of the film as it goes on caught me all the more off guard. Even when such a scene came to be, the atmosphere would remain tense as no one trusted this was as far as it would go.
Director Curry Barker has already gone on record about what’s next after Obsession: he’s already hard at work editing the footage for it. The Hollywood Reporter has a few early details on Barker’s Anything But Ghosts, in which Barker himself stars and writes alongside Cooper Tomlinson. The film seems more in the vain of Milk & Serial, but Focus Features will return for distribution. Barker and Tomlinson will play two ghost-hunting con artists whose careers spiral out of control once confronted with real spirits.
Obsession is now playing in theaters nationwide. If you want more films about sudden possession, check out 13/13/13 over on our sister site, Galxy!