Obsession is the best horror film of 2026. That sentence is the kind of claim that usually needs hedging, but the consensus has arrived fast and it’s not close — 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 8.2 on IMDb, Overwhelmingly Positive audience reactions, and a box office run that is genuinely one for the record books. Directed, written, and edited by 26-year-old Curry Barker — a YouTuber best known for sketch comedy who shot this on a budget of roughly $1 million — Obsession is the kind of film that makes you angry about how mediocre most big-budget horror is by comparison. It is oppressive, claustrophobic, skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, and it earns every one of those adjectives without a single wasted scene.
Bear (Michael Johnston) works at a music store and has been in love with his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for as long as he can remember. She doesn’t see him that way. He finds a One Wish Willow at a New Age shop and snaps it. He wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone in the world. She does. Everything goes exactly as badly as you know it will, and considerably worse than you can imagine. This is a monkey’s paw story in the tradition of Tales from the Crypt and Drag Me to Hell — familiar scaffolding, utterly unfamiliar execution. That’s the whole game, and Barker wins it decisively.
Inde Navarrette and What Makes This Film Work
The film lives or dies on Navarrette’s performance, and Navarrette delivers something that should be generating serious awards conversation. Playing Nikki requires her to move through half a dozen distinct registers — the normal, slightly standoffish friend; the too-attentive romantic partner in the honeymoon phase; the first hints of something wrong; full supernatural possession that is also, somehow, still recognisably her; and finally the moments where her trapped real self surfaces through the spell to beg for release. In lesser hands any one of those transitions would feel mechanical. Navarrette makes them feel like a single arc of a person being dismantled. She is 5’2″ and continuously terrifying, which is the right kind of impossible to pull off.
Johnston as Bear is the film’s moral centre and its most complicated element. He is not the villain, exactly — he didn’t believe the wish would work, he didn’t intend what happened — but he is also not the hero the genre typically provides. He doesn’t have the realisation, the redemption arc, the moment where he does the right thing. He has the moments where he almost does the right thing, chickens out, and continues to benefit from a situation he knows is monstrous. Barker makes this choice explicitly and commits to it all the way to the ending, and it’s the hardest and most correct decision in the film.
Curry Barker and Why Comedians Keep Making Great Horror
Barker comes from sketch comedy — he co-created the YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea” with Cooper Tomlinson (who also appears in the film), and his previous horror work was the micro-budget Milk & Serial, self-released on YouTube. The comedians-to-horror pipeline has been one of the genre’s most reliable sources of quality over the past decade: Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Danny and Michael Philippou. The comedic background produces filmmakers who understand setup and payoff, who know how to build tension through structure rather than just through jump scares, and who are more interested in the audience’s emotional state than in any individual scary moment.
Barker cuts his own films, a rare choice that shows throughout Obsession — the rhythm is genuinely unusual, sometimes holding on a shot past the comfortable point, sometimes cutting before the payoff arrives, always working to keep the audience off-balance without feeling arbitrary. It’s shot in an unconventional 1.50:1 aspect ratio, bathed in shadows and brown colour timing that creates a sense of dankness and enclosure. The physical acting he pulls from Navarrette — the specific ways she moves when something is wrong, the angles of her body, the moments of unnatural locomotion — is precisely controlled and genuinely unsettling in the way that the best practical horror always is.
The Box Office Story and What It Means
Focus Features acquired Obsession out of TIFF’s Midnight Madness section for $14 million — one of the better trades in modern film distribution. On a production budget of $1 million, the film has already crossed $150 million worldwide and is tracking toward a $280-330 million finish, making it one of the most profitable films in recent memory by ratio. It landed without declining in its third weekend — the first film to do that in over 44 years. Barker and Backrooms director Kane Parsons (20 years old at time of release) became the youngest directors ever to simultaneously top the domestic box office, both having built their audiences on YouTube before their theatrical debuts. The industry story is real and the film behind it is even better.
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly (In a Good Way) |
|---|---|---|
| Inde Navarrette’s PerformanceOne of the best horror performances in years — moving through multiple emotional registers while maintaining a single arc of character disintegration. Awards-level work. | The Wish Premise Is ThinA One Wish Willow sitting in a crystal shop for $7 is a less elegant setup than some of the genre’s best monkey’s paw entries. The film is strong enough to carry it but it’s the weakest element. | The Dinner SceneYou’ll know which one. Horror earns its best moments by making the audience wish it would stop. This one doesn’t stop. |
| Bear’s Non-Redemption ArcThe film refuses to give its protagonist the traditional hero moment. He almost does the right thing, repeatedly, and doesn’t. It’s the harder and more honest choice. | Slow SetupThe first 20-25 minutes are deliberately paced — establishing Bear’s world before the wish. Patient viewers are rewarded. Less patient ones may check out before the film properly begins. | The Car SceneTelegraphed. You can see it coming. The tension is the point. When it arrives it’s still devastating. |
| Barker’s Direction and EditingUnconventional rhythm, unusual aspect ratio, shadows used as active compositional elements — a filmmaker developing a genuine visual language in real time. |
The Verdict
Obsession is the rare horror film that earns the word landmark. It takes a premise the genre has visited before — wish gone catastrophically wrong — and executes it with enough commitment, craft, and genuine moral intelligence that the familiarity becomes irrelevant. Curry Barker is a filmmaker worth following for however long he continues making films that feel like this. Inde Navarrette is one to watch for every project she takes on from here. And the film will genuinely occupy your brain for days afterward in the way only the best horror does.
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