Obsession 2026 Review: Curry Barker’s Landmark Horror Debut

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By TRH Entertainment Desk

Curry Barker’s debut feature is a squirming, darkly funny nightmare about desire, entitlement, and getting exactly what you wished for. Our full review.

Mumbai, June 1, 2026 — Transition from dangerous to mortifying can give an audience an edge of the seat experience. In the film Obsession, one feels the moment transported from dangerous to mortifying as horror shifts. The audience gets a sense with a creeping, stomach-dropping clarity that they had been rooting for the wrong person.

Curry Barker crafts the pivot. That is the film’s masterstroke. For this reason, Barker’s theatrical debut has rattled critics. From the day, the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the critics have been unsettled.

The film hits the audience with a sense that they shouldn’t just think of what make them afraid. Or, what could happen to them. But what they themselves might be capable of wanting.

The setup is deceptively simple. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a soft-spoken, hopelessly lovestruck young man nursing a crush on his coworker Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette). Unable to confess his feelings, he breaks a mysterious “One Wish Willow” — a piece of local folklore — and makes his wish. Nikki, almost immediately, becomes devoted to him. What follows is a darkly comic, increasingly nightmarish unspooling of what it actually means to get exactly what you asked for.

Barker built his reputation through internet sketch comedy. He then landed this studio debut. The background bears imprints in his debut theatrical work.

The film operates in the tradition of Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Zach Cregger’s Barbarian. Horror rooted not in monsters but in the mundane logic of masculine entitlement.

As IndieWire noted, Obsession is “proof that the Cregger-ification of 2020s horror is in full effect,” combining sadistic tension, sharp needle drops, and comedy drawn from people responding to crisis in “pathetically self-serving ways.”

The laugh catches in your throat before you can decide whether it was appropriate.

What elevates the film beyond a clever one-liner premise is the quality of its two central performances. Johnston navigates Bear’s spiral with uncomfortable precision — a man troubled, vulnerable, and disturbingly determined, whose pursuit of Nikki carries the quiet conviction of someone who has never once interrogated his own desires. But it is Navarrette who delivers the film’s true revelation. High on Films’ Shikhar Verma described her as “a convincing and headstrong young woman, who is suddenly thrust into an identity that occasionally wakes up into the nightmare of not recognising who she is” — a breakout turn that deserves serious awards attention.

The Cosmic Circus’ John Dotson captured what makes Barker’s tonal control so impressive: Obsession “takes one of the most beautiful human experiences and makes it crawl under your skin,” engineering scenes of profound social unease — the kind of grimacing discomfort you feel watching a public argument you cannot escape.

AV Club’s Monica Castillo put it succinctly: Barker “immerses his audience in a dark scenario that only escalates in tension and carnage. It’s the kind of horror movie that makes a viewer uneasy almost from the start and doesn’t let up until the credits roll.”

Where the film struggles is in depth. For all its wit and nerve, Obsession is better at establishing its themes — body autonomy, coercive desire, the horror of being reduced to someone else’s fantasy — than it is at interrogating them. It is, at times, an over-extended sketch rather than a fully calibrated feature. The premise earns its runtime in atmosphere and performance; it earns rather less in thematic resolution.

Still, Obsession is exactly the kind of horror film that lingers — not because of what it shows you, but because of what it asks you to notice about yourself. Barker has announced himself as a filmmaker of serious intent and considerable skill. This is a landmark horror debut.