Obsession

Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker, opened May 15, 2026. Produced for a million dollars by a filmmaker who was still uploading horror shorts to YouTube two years ago, it has no business being this good. It is the best horror film of 2026 so far. I do not see anything lined up that tops it.

Bear Bailey works at a music store with his childhood friend Nikki. He has loved her for years, rehearsing confessions in the mirror and folding like a lawn chair every time the moment arrives. In a New Age shop he finds a cheap novelty called the One Wish Willow. The cashier mentions, almost as an afterthought, that some customers came back to complain, and not because it failed. After Bear bottles another confession, he uses the wish himself: that Nikki should love him more than anyone else on earth. The wish works. That love escalates until a lot of bad things happen.

The monkey’s paw is old furniture. Be careful what you wish for. Barker takes the frame somewhere more personal and more devastating than the genre usually earns.

The first act makes you care about four people before it starts wrecking them. Bear’s insecurity is painfully recognizable. Nearly every man watching has been some version of him: too scared to say the thing, too blind to see the room already decided, friend-zoned and unable to read the temperature. You wince because you remember being that guy. Ian is the half-jerk buddy coaching you through emotional paralysis. Sarah clocks that something is wrong before anyone else. Pre-wish Nikki is a full person with aspirations and complications that have nothing to do with Bear; he has flattened her into a fantasy without noticing. These are people you went to school with, worked with, rolled dice with. You see their traits in yourself and in your circle. Most big-budget horror cannot buy that investment.

Early on I hated how dark the image was. Literally dark. Squinting at the frame for the first thirty minutes felt like a fair complaint. Then it becomes clear Barker is using the murk on purpose. Darkness here is a storytelling tool. It keeps you unsure what you are looking at. That is different from the Game of Thrones trick of burying a battle so you will not see the CGI. Nikki standing in silhouette, unpredictable, leaves you guessing. Barely-there eyes with a glimmer that reads almost possessed. The photography is sharp when it needs to be. None of it would matter without Inde Navarrette.

You could strip the One Wish Willow. You could strip the handsome frames. Without the lead, the movie collapses. Navarrette, whom you may know from Superman & Lois, is fantastic. Histrionic in the useful sense: enormous emotional swings delivered with surgical control, tender to predatory in the same scene, sometimes in the same shot. People who have never tried that work call it “unhinged acting” and miss how hard it is to be that unhinged and that precise at once. Specific scenes belong in spoiler jail. Her work carries them. Award-caliber. I hope the industry keeps handing her roles.

The thing that knocks this from a ten to a nine is the cowardly jump scares. Barker already builds dread out of character, ambiguity, line delivery, and image. Three or four revelations drop your jaw and crawl your skin. That is enough. Instead the movie also detonates loud jump scares that blow out your ears. Unnecessary. Worse, they sabotage the special part. Act two asks you to watch closely for twists and tells. Ambiguity needs silence and stillness. Every nervous-system bomb steals that mystery and breaks concentration. Let the audience sit in the dread. Let them wonder.

One warning: the film depicts an abusive relationship with real force. If you have lived anything like that, it will dig those memories up. In a lot of ways that is the point, cathartic and cruel at the same time. This is a rough movie. Know that going in.

Barker’s debut runs circles around studio horror with fifty times the budget. Jump scares and a few pacing wobbles are the only things between this and a perfect score. Everything else operates at an elite level. Nine out of ten. If you watch horror, go.