Curry Barker’s Obsession is hardly an original idea
I am not the target audience for Obsession. It’s clearly made for a certain subset of 20-somethings (and maybe some people in their 30s and 40s who think they’re still in their 20s — we all know two or three of them.) But it’s obviously a film that resonates with a lot of people.
Curry Barker’s flick was purportedly filmed for about $1 million (and I’m going to stress the word purportedly here VERY hard) and on its opening weekend it grossed approximately $23 million. In case you forgot how math works, that’s profit times 23, and we haven’t even got around to VOD and physical media sales. And let’s don’t act like every Spirit Halloween and Spencer’s Gifts in America isn’t going to be glutted with One Wish Willow novelties this fall — it’s a foregone conclusion, really.
Obsession is a critical and financial success however you slice it. And my review isn’t going to change any of that. But at the same time, I can at least touch upon some issues I had with the movie — which, in a lot of ways, perfectly illustrates something I like to call “the YouTubification of horror.”
Barker (no relation to Clive or Bob, to the best of my knowledge) isn’t the only contemporary genre filmmaker who cut his teeth on YouTube. We’ve got Markiplier’s Iron Lung, we’ve got Chris Stuckmann and Shady Oaks, we’ve got Kane Parsons and Backrooms … it’s totally a real trend now and you can’t discount its impact and influence on horror as a whole. The same guys who used to monkey around with Super 8s in their backyards have been replaced by dudes who spent their middle school years idolizing PewDiePie and making Minecraft “machinima” videos. It’s a symbolic changing of the guards if there ever was one — or more accurately, a changing of the cameras.
Of course, what works in an isolated, ten-minute YouTube clip doesn’t exactly translate to a 90-minute feature film. It’s two completely different types of media storytelling — one is episodic and meant for instant gratification enjoyment and the other requires a long-term mental investment from the viewer. And let’s be real, an hour and a half movie IS a long-term mental investment for most of us these days. Hell, I’m almost ready to play some Candy Crush while I’m writing this article.
Barker’s previous horror film Milk & Serial was sort of a “meet me in the middle” situation. It was barely an hour long and most of the movie employed a “screen horror” conceit that made it visibly identical to a rank and file YouTube vodcast. It was horror movie that felt like cult of personality YouTube content, and it (mostly) worked. Obsession, however, is Barker’s attempt to tell a “real” horror movie narrative outside of the “we’re faux live-streaming” technique. And watching it, I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of deja vu.
Alright, so we’ve got a story about a young man who is totally smitten by some random girl. He gets a supernatural opportunity to make her fall in love with him, but as the story drags out she gets more and more deranged and ultimately it ends with the main male character making a radical decision that I’m not going to spoil here because come on, we’re nice people here at Wicked Horror.
By the way, I’m not talking about Obsession. I’m talking about the old Tales From The Crypt episode “Loved to Death” … which came out in 1991.
Now, I’m not saying Barker ripped off that episode for his movie. I’m not even suggesting he’s even seen it, for that matter. But it nonetheless illustrates the giant, gaping, inescapable problem with Obsession — mainly, the notion that’s totally bereft of any original ideas. At heart, it’s just another variation on the old “Monkey’s Paw” canard and there’s not much here that we haven’t seen in any number of previous “Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl” movies.
Obsession is essentially the same movie as something like Companion, only with less ambition and substance. Maybe Obsession is a “great” movie if you’ve never seen a horror movie made before 2020, but I simply can’t overlook it’s derivative and formulaic nature. It telegraphs everything, to the point that the jump scares aren’t even all that effective because you see them coming from a mile away.
Even in terms of acting the film leaves a lot to be desired. Our leading man (Michael Johnston, who is so obviously going to play Charlie Kirk in the inevitable biopic a few years from now) is an immensely vanilla character who doesn’t have much of a personality, unless you count starring bug-eyed into the void like Don Knotts used to do on The Andy Griffith Show the acme of charisma. Even worse, the object of his affection (Inde Navarrette) is stuck in a one-dimensional-by-design role as a hyper-jealous, mass murdering head case whose range is basically “goofy deranged smile” to “slightly less goofy deranged smile.” And there’s nothing to say about the ensemble cast at all — they’re all utterly forgettable, so don’t even bother.
I’m sure there are already people reading way too much into the film. I know somebody’s written a 3,000 word essay on how the movie is (supposedly) some sort of secret pro-feminist screed and outlines in gory detail all the reasons why Michael’s character is the “real” villain of the movie. People who like Midsommar are probably going to like this movie — make of that, what you will.
Maybe I’m just getting old and jaded, but no, watching women bash their own faces in with whiskey bottles just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Not even the scene where the goth girl with the septum piercing gets her face pulverized into molecular waste on a steering wheel (by the way, did the movie even explain how Inde’s character suddenly gained superhuman strength for that particular kill?) Oh, and don’t even get me started on the MDMA freakout scene. Bro, has this Curry guy ever actually SEEN anybody on Ecstasy in real life before? They don’t do all the stuff that Inde does — like, they just want to play with glow sticks and drink a lot of water.
Obsession is just another horror parable about a bad relationship. It’s Together, it’s Bone Lake, it’s Only Lovers Left Alive. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll undoubtedly see it many, many more times in the not too distant future. For all the acclaim this film has received, the one thing it hasn’t been praised for is an original premise. And if you think this movie is truly revolutionary for the genre, I’ve got about a thousand movies before it that already did the heavy lifting part.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: When Harry Met Sally, every Taylor Swift album made after Folklore, the board game Jenga
Director: Curry Barker
Writer: Curry Barker
Starring: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
Studio: Capstone Pictures/Teashop Productions/Blumhouse Productions
Distributor: Focus Features
Language: English
Runtime: 109 minutes
Release Date: May 15, 2026
