Obsession at – A sold-out festival run and a Focus Features pickup set the tone for a film that turns domestic longing into something cruel, funny, and frighteningly sure of itself.
“Wish fulfillment” stories usually arrive dressed as comfort. Obsession (2025), screening at Misryoum’s Overlook Film Festival 2026, refuses that bargain from the first seconds—and its timing couldn’t be better.
The trajectory around the film has been the kind that typically makes people suspicious: it premiered in TIFF’s Midnight Madness on September 5. 2025. sold out every screening. then traveled through Fantastic Fest and won Sitges’ People’s Choice Award.. Misryoum watched the momentum continue when Focus Features picked it up for a reported $15 million before the festival season even fully took off.. Obsession opens wide on May 15. and the buzz around it isn’t just about scale—it’s about control: the sense that the filmmakers know exactly what reaction they want. and when to deliver it.
The premise is familiar in its bones, even if the execution feels unusually personal.. Writer-director-editor Curry Barker starts from an “ancient” idea: Bear. a music store employee played by Michael Johnston. has an unrequited crush on his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette).. He gets his hands on a One Wish Willow—one of those forgotten childhood objects people swear they remember—and when he breaks it. he makes a wish for Nikki’s love.. Horror fans recognize the machine underneath: the familiar cruelty of a wish that grants exactly what’s asked for. not what’s deserved.
What makes Obsession land is what comes after the wish opens up.. Barker and Navarrette build an emotional trap rather than a typical escalation.. The story doesn’t just threaten characters with supernatural consequences; it challenges the idea of agency.. Nikki’s autonomy is something the film treats as fragile, contested, and—most terrifyingly—meant to be overlooked.. Navarrette has to play a person whose feelings and choices are hijacked while the movie keeps cutting between comedy and dread.. That tightrope is hard to sustain, but Obsession never lets the audience relax into “this is just a horror concept.”
The film’s craft supports that thesis in ways that feel almost tactile.. Cinematographer Taylor Clemons shoots in a center-composed style with deliberate extra headspace. a framing choice that reads like a technical detail until you’re seated in a theater and realize you’re waiting for something to go wrong—even before it has.. Production designer Vivian Gray constructed Bear’s house from scratch in Burbank. and it has that unsettling quality of a space that feels lived-in rather than staged.. Misryoum’s takeaway: domestic settings in horror often work because they’re recognizable.. Here. the realism makes the intrusion heavier. as if the movie is insisting that the wrongness can arrive wearing the face of everyday life.
Rock Burwell’s score, also a debut, stays out of the way until it absolutely shouldn’t.. That restraint matters.. It trains the audience to watch the characters first. then punish them emotionally when the music finally argues with the image.. And the movie doesn’t rely on jump-scare tricks to get under the skin—it uses mood as leverage.
Navarrette’s performance is the film’s most powerful argument.. The production repeatedly places Nikki in near-shadow during the spell’s hold. a choice that becomes quietly devastating once viewers understand what it’s pointing at: compliance isn’t consent. and the “romance” Bear imagines has the texture of control.. In scenes where Nikki appears to almost fight the spell. Obsession slides into the uncanny valley not as an aesthetic. but as a statement about how coercion can masquerade as inevitability.
Bear is written and performed to be difficult to root for on purpose.. Michael Johnston plays him like someone designed to stay stuck—lonely. contained. and primed for a version of personal redemption that looks nothing like growth.. Barker modernizes familiar horror logic without sanding down its edges: the film borrows from classic tropes. but it forces them through a lens that’s hilariously horrifying and. importantly. consistent with Barker’s own vision.
Barker’s background helps explain that confidence.. He came up making a found footage slasher. Milk & Serial. for $800. then posted it to YouTube and watched it reach two million views on the strength of the film itself.. Misryoum reads that origin as more than trivia: it shows up in Obsession’s precision.. Even with a real budget behind it. the film retains a scrappy steadiness—like a director who already understands pacing. audience pressure. and the way small decisions become big feelings.
If Obsession has a structural anchor beyond its wish-curse machinery. it’s the contrast between who Nikki is and who Bear decides she is.. Co-writer Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless as Bear’s best friends help clarify that gap. doing “real work” in how the movie frames Nikki’s identity against Bear’s fantasy.. Misryoum also senses the story’s careful awareness of enthusiastic consent—questions that sit in the gap between what Bear believes he has and what’s actually happening.. That moral tension isn’t an afterthought; it shapes the film’s emotional weather.
There is a moment at the start of the third act when the situation shifts into something more overtly uncomfortable—“cringy. ” in the film’s own tense sense rather than in a laughing-at-the-character way.. The movie seems to understand what audiences fear most: not just horror, but horror that mimics the language of desire.. The comedy doesn’t evaporate, but it changes register, turning from playful to cutting.. That shift is where Obsession becomes less like a twisty genre ride and more like a reflection on loneliness.
At its best. Obsession treats ordinary domestic space as the place where something genuinely wrong can bloom—quietly. plausibly. and with the kind of confidence that makes you feel implicated.. The story captures the paradox we’re living in: how people feel increasingly lonely and desperate for connection while being surrounded by curated versions of what connection should look like.. Barker’s message—direct, unsentimental—is that obsession is not intimacy, and fantasies can become weapons.
Misryoum expects that Obsession’s mainstream release will sharpen that debate rather than soften it.. For viewers coming from horror canon, the Monkey Paw framework offers recognition.. For viewers approaching it from contemporary culture—where romance narratives can slide into entitlement—the film offers a sharper reckoning.. And for anyone leaving Misryoum’s Overlook Film Festival screenings. the film’s final aftertaste may be the point: not “be careful what you wish for. ” but “accept people for who they are—before your version of them becomes the thing that harms.”
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