Curry Barker’s debut, Obsession, is about to change the horror game forever. It has all the thoughtfulness and precision of early A24, but it’s delivered without an ounce of pretence or overthinking. Once consent is breached, the damage is done, and there’s no going back.

You can see Barker’s influences in plain daylight, but they’re shrieking and foaming at the mouth as though infected with rabies, waiting for the sweet release of death that never arrives. His internet-famous humour constantly punctuates the nightmarish stress, but it never lightens the load. Instead, it’s more like smearing coarse salt into freshly opened wounds.

In the film, Bear (Michael Johnston) pines silently and desperately for his best friend and coworker, Nikki (Inde Navarrette). The day his cat dies tragically, and yet another attempted confession of love falls flat, he makes a wish on a novelty shop toy for her undying affection.

The result is instant: Nikki suddenly returns his love with an intensity that feels too good to be true. At first, Bear embraces the bizarre turn of fortune, but her devotion quickly spirals into something darker, more frightening, and all-consuming. As her behavior grows erratic and her identity begins to sink into the abyss, Bear is forced to confront a horrifying truth: whatever force answered his wish has not only devoured Nikki but also has its sights set on him.

The back-to-basics Monkey’s Paw logic of Obsession’s script makes for a fun and familiar genre sandbox, but once you start to dig, you soon find the bone, flesh, and viscera of the mental illness you thought you’d left behind in your youth. It’s all still there, babe. It’s never going to leave, and it’s smiling at you.

Writer/director Curry Barker first caught attention online with his razor-sharp, darkly absurd comedy videos, which earned him an intensely devoted following and a creative collective—making him something of an internet cult figure. At the premiere for Obsession, his crew was hooting and hollering during his brief introduction as if he were a legendary sports star or benevolent cult leader. But Barker’s genius is restless, eager to evolve into the realms of narrative cinema—and it’s doing so at a breakneck pace.

That twisted humour sharpened with one of his breakout short films, The Chair, a shocking little magic trick of horror cinema that stretches deadpan comedy into an unrelenting nightmare almost without warning. The short announced him as a filmmaker with an instinct for braiding the grotesque and the hilarious, merging them in ways that felt both fresh and dangerous. He doubled down with the ultra-indie found-footage shocker Milk & Serial last year, a queasy, homespun descent into madness and paranoia. Now, with the shocking reveal of Obsession, this trifecta of early works charts Barker’s progression from internet comedy provocateur to one of the most important new voices in horror. Still, the film’s success is not Barker’s alone.

Michael Johnston’s performance as Bear is expertly tragic. His bewildered anxiety adds weight to the film’s cringey, relentless nightmare of errors. But the not-so-secret weapon of Obsession is Inde Navarrette as Nikki. Her ghoulishness has all the makings of a newly minted horror icon. I’m not exaggerating when I say this performance is genuinely startling. Think of Mikey Madison’s fireworks in Anora, then imagine she’s been bitten by a Deadite suffering from the world’s worst migraines. Her suffering is nearly as frightening as the suffering she enacts on the world around her. It’s a revelation.

At its rotten core, the character of Nikki is what makes Obsession so relentlessly scary. Upon its eventual release, much attention will likely spotlight Barker’s penchant for shocking gore and next-level jump scares. But the film’s purest horror lives in its fleeting glimpses of Nikki’s existential torment and Bear’s unforgiving burdens of grief and regret.

On the page, this might just look like A24 horror filtered through a Gen Z lens. But in practice, it’s something altogether new: a brutal, expert vision of the next generation of hardcore horror. And don’t kid yourself—you’re not ready. I sure wasn’t.

Obsession had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, September 5th, 2025.

Summary

Curry Barker’s ‘Obsession’ is like a fun teen horror movie if it were infected with rabies—shrieking and foaming at the mouth. Read our TIFF 2025 review:

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