movie review: obsession

​Soul crushing: Obsession
(2025, dir. Curry Barker)

The premise announces itself with disarming simplicity: a lovesick retail worker buys a New Age store novelty 'wishing stick' to win over his friend and colleague. What follows is a meditation on corrosive desire and modes of control dressed up as genre cinema.

Bear (Michael Johnston) works alongside Nikki (Inde Navarette) in the deadened environment of a strip mall music shop. They're best friends, and it’s purgatory for him. When Nikki’s talismanic gem necklace falls into a drain, Bear seizes the moment to employ a strategy, stumbling into the shop and leaving with a replacement stone and his occult geegaw.

The wish, delivered half jokingly to himself, is granted, and immediately delivers a romantic payload with algorithmic precision. Nikki becomes utterly, consumingly his. Her behavior – sexual, social, even spatial – knows no bounds.

The dream inserts itself into Bear’s life with such thoroughness that it begins to collapse under its own weight. Proximity becomes suffocation; devotion curdles into psychosis. Nikki’s personality has been eradicated - like a zoomer Nosferatu, she is appetite.

Director Curry Barker, emerging from YouTube into feature-length narrative, demonstrates no little ability, but this is Inde Navarrette's film. Her transformation – vocal, physical, psychological – charts the dissolution of selfhood with uncomfortable precision. We see personality become pathology, person become possession. Her occasionally-heard screams from the ‘beyond’ suggest something clawing its way up from some hellish ethereal substrata. In among the personalities is character work matching the maturity of Jessie Buckley or Anya Taylor-Joy. 

The violence, when it arrives, is brutal, but much more devastating even are the implications that we’re left with as the heft of the aftermath sits on us. Obsession is a parable about consent and love's totalitarian impulses. It's nasty, effective, and deeply uncomfortable. I can't say I completely enjoyed it, but I couldn't look away (PO).

Obsession is playing in cinemas across the city