Have you ever been so scared at a horror movie’s preview screening that you’re desperate to cover your eyes, but you can’t because you need to pay attention in order to write a review for Farrago? Well, I have, and it was while watching Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025).

The film’s opening scene introduces us to Bear (Michael Johnston) as he is practicing confessing his love to Nikki (Inde Navarrette), his co-worker and friend. This rehearsal is in vain, though, as Nikki soon makes explicit that this love is unrequited. Miserably pining and firmly friend-zoned, Bear half-heartedly uses a “One Wish Willow”, a tawdry ‘80s “magic” gimmick, to wish for Nikki to love him more than anything in the world. 

As soon as Bear snaps the “One Wish Willow”, Nikki’s identity fractures: normal Nikki is annexed by one who is madly in love with Bear, and this “love” gradually devolves into psychopathic obsession. The volatility of Nikki’s character is a large part of why this movie was so stressfully tense: there’s the constant threat of deranged behaviour as Nikki unpredictably flickers between adoration and obsession, sycophancy and psychopathy. Under the possession of the “One Wish Willow”, Nikki’s behaviour is erratic, transgressing every imaginable relationship and moral norm in increasingly obsessive attempts to keep Bear to herself. 

This accounts for more than just the film’s excruciatingly sustained tension. The “real” Nikki, who appears at the start of the film when she friend-zones Bear, occasionally slips through the cracks of “obsessed” Nikki. This is when the film is at its most horrifying. It made my stomach drop. I felt like crying. Seeing a character’s brief and desperate struggle against the forceful denial of their agency made Obsession stand out as truly unsettling. 

Navarrette embodies the complexities of Nikki phenomenally well. She perfectly captures through her movements and expressions the slips between different fragments of her identity. Her mannerisms when possessed are uncanny, and her subtle shifts in expression are potent, especially when contrasted with an over-the-top psychopath grin or all-out screaming. 

These psychologically disturbing components are amplified by nauseatingly grotesque levels of gore. This gore is tasteful, though, insofar as it feels earnt. It’s not mere shock value—it also helps to demonstrate Nikki’s character growth, or rather character debasement. The blood-soaked violence feels like an inevitable stage in the gradual degradation of Nikki’s sanity.

I also appreciate how the films chose to portray its very real and terrifying theme of men stripping women of their agency for their own selfish gain. Initially, Bear is plausibly an innocent victim: he made a wish in miserable desperation, not thinking it would actually work. But the movie frequently challenges Bear’s assumed innocence. Initially, Bear’s friends ask if he’s taking advantage of what they interpret as a vulnerable, unstable Nikki. Later, the “real” Nikki momentarily regains control and begs for Bear to kill her; Bear angrily retorts, “is it really that bad being with me?” This is no magic. This is not a wish gone wrong. This is Bear intentionally robbing Nikki of independence, her ability to consent, because he cannot accept that his love is unrequited. The real evil is not the “One Wish Willow” or its possessing magic, but the man who continues to exploit this magic in order to take advantage of a woman. This is an important commentary insofar as it challenges victim-blaming cultural habits and shifts our collective focus towards the real perpetrators, but the movie seemed happy to let Bear’s exploitation of Nikki exist in a cultural vacuum. The misogynistic cultures and institutions which enable perpetrators like Bear remain unacknowledged. Whilst Obsession was successful in broaching these themes, it didn’t perfectly expose their core. 

One other aspect of the film worth noting is its comedy, which is frequent, effective and genuinely funny. The comedic inclinations of the movie are established in the opening scene, which had the whole audience heartily laughing. The jokes were well-crafted and varied in their tone and target: one drew on the universally-shared experience of awful customer service, another relied on Nikki committing the most egregiously deranged yet ultimately harmless faux pas, and another still was simple prop comedy. Importantly, Obsession’s comedy didn’t cheapen the horror or diminish its intensity. Instead, it mercifully granted snippets of reprieve from impending dread, and the whiplash return to the film’s bleak reality made me appreciate both the comedy and the horror elements more. This was direly needed, as after the instigative wish, there was no substantial release of tension until the credits started rolling. 

I do not like being scared, so I have tried to be descriptive in this review, analytic instead of emotional. But my honest emotional reaction to Obsession was one of initial astonishment, tormenting unease, and, finally, the most well-earned relief. In hindsight, the somatic contentment of this final release almost made me glad to have been so scared in the first place.