‘Obsession’ Review: Inde Navarrette Makes Her Mark

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There’s a moment in Obsession where Bear, the film’s hapless, lovestruck protagonist, looks at the supernatural nightmare he’s created and says quietly, \”This is all I’ve ever wanted.\” It’s funny. It’s heartbreaking. And it tells you everything you need to know about why this movie works.

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Obsession — written and directed by 26-year-old wunderkind Curry Barker and now in theaters from Focus Features — is the kind of horror film that sneaks up on you. It looks, on the surface, like a simple \”be careful what you wish for\” yarn. And it is. But it’s also a sharp, darkly funny, genuinely unnerving piece of work that has critics calling it one of the best horror films of the year, and introducing the world to a performer who’s been hiding in plain sight on TV for years.

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That performer is Inde Navarrette, and after this weekend, nobody’s going to forget her name.

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The Setup: One Wish, Infinite Consequences

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Bear (Michael Johnston, known from MTV’s Teen Wolf) is a shy, sensitive music store employee — the kind of guy who rehearses his heartfelt confession of love to a random waitress because any woman’s opinion will do. He’s been quietly obsessing over his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Navarrette, previously best known for 13 Reasons Why and The CW’s Superman & Lois) for years, but can’t find the nerve to say so. After fumbling yet another chance to tell her how he feels, he wanders into a new-age crystal shop and picks up a kitschy novelty toy called a One Wish Willow — a flimsy little rod from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when snapped in half. The cashier warns him that most customers have complained about the results.

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He snaps it anyway. He wishes that Nikki would love him \”more than anything in the f—ing world.\”

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You can probably guess what happens next. And that predictability, several critics note, is actually part of the film’s strange power — you know exactly where this is going, and yet Barker makes you squirm the whole way there.

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Almost immediately, Nikki shows up at Bear’s door. She kisses him. She moves in. She is, to put it plainly, extremely into him — between bouts of vigorous sex and mawkish couple talk. The problem is that this new Nikki occasionally snaps back into her old self and screams in utter terror before the spell reasserts itself. She spends an entire day rooted in one spot so she’s guaranteed to be waiting when Bear gets home from work. She seals the front door with duct tape. She fashions something deeply disturbing out of his dead cat.

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\”This isn’t anything like how Bear imagined it would be,\” as one reviewer put it. \”Yet he happily sleeps with her anyway.\”

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Inde Navarrette Is the Reason to See This Movie

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Every critic who’s seen Obsession agrees on one thing: Navarrette is extraordinary. The role asks her to be funny, terrifying, heartbreaking, and physically unnerving, sometimes within the same scene, and she delivers on every count.

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Portraying Nikki as genuinely, disturbingly obsessed — without tipping into cartoonish camp — is a tightrope act. Navarrette walks it with precision. One moment she’s sulking so intensely it’s almost funny. The next, she’s unfurling a twisted fairy tale that leaves everyone in disturbed silence. Then she’s dancing while covered in blood, or screaming so hard your throat aches in sympathy. There’s a possession element to her performance — strange physicality, odd facial glitches, muscle spasms — that reviewers compare to something genuinely inhuman, without going full Exorcist contortion.

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Cinematographer Taylor Clemons frequently keeps Navarrette’s face out of frame, cropped or obscured by shadow. One review calls it \”an odd choice, as the actor’s so skilled you feel like you’re missing something.\” But her physicality transcends the framing. When the real Nikki briefly breaks through the curse — desperate, depleted, scrambling for escape — the performance becomes genuinely heartbreaking. That emotional weight, critics say, is what elevates Obsession beyond a neat genre exercise.

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\”She’s playing both the victim and the tormentor,\” one critic wrote, \”and she navigates both sides of Nikki’s personality.\” Another called her \”scream queen material.\” IndieWire went further, calling it \”one of the more physically and emotionally taxing horror leads to come down the pike in a while.\”

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Johnston holds his own opposite her — effectively conveying Bear’s sweetly moony yearning in the early scenes and his slowly dawning horror as things spiral. In one bedroom scene, he reportedly pulls off the feat of looking entirely thrilled and utterly miserable at the same time. It’s the kind of detail that makes you realize there’s more going on here than your average fright flick.

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The Bigger Picture: What Barker Is Really Saying

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The film works as a monkey’s paw horror story. It also works as a wickedly sharp dissection of modern male loneliness, the \”nice guy\” myth, and the entitled logic underneath it. Bear isn’t a monster in his own mind — he’s the romantic hero of his own story, a sensitive guy who just wants the girl. What he actually does, as his friends and the film’s camera make increasingly clear, is use a supernatural device like a roofie, then reap the rewards while Nikki is stripped of agency and bodily control.

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\”The most terrifying thing for a young man these days,\” one critic observed after watching young men flinch and gasp at the LA premiere, \”is an emotionally unregulated and unpredictable woman.\” Barker, to his credit, seems to know exactly what he’s doing with that fear — pointing the lens back at the audience and asking the uncomfortable question: how many \”good guys\” in the theater could be tempted to do what Bear did?

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The film is savvy enough not to let Bear fully off the hook. His social circle sees what he’s done. Invitations stop coming. Friends drift away. Several characters explicitly lecture him about his responsibility to Nikki. The horror at the center of Obsession, IndieWire argues, isn’t just the supernatural curse — it’s the very contemporary male fear of being the guy everyone knows took advantage of someone.

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Where some critics push back is in the third act, where the film’s feminist critique gets complicated by its own visual choices. Several reviewers note that the camera lingers on female bodies in ways that feel less like commentary and more like the exploitation it’s supposedly critiquing. \”Barker undercuts the message of anti-misogyny through third-act violence,\” Mashable wrote, pointing to scenes where female characters are brutalized in graphic detail that serves no apparent narrative purpose. It’s a legitimate tension the film never fully resolves.

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The tonal wobbles are real too — some jokey bits, including an inexplicable argument with a shop clerk and a jaunty closing credits song, land awkwardly. And the film is admittedly overlong for a premise this lean, with scenes so dimly lit that Navarrette’s face is sometimes lost entirely.

\n\h2>A Director to Watch — Closely

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What’s remarkable about Obsession is the distance it represents from where Barker started. Less than two years ago, he and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson (who co-stars here as Bear’s loutish best friend Ian) were making horror-comedy shorts for their YouTube channel \”That’s a Bad Idea.\” Their feature debut, Milk & Serial — a found-footage horror sendup of YouTube prank culture — cost a reported $800. It was a clever calling card, if not a fully realized film.

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Obsession cost $750,000 and has the kind of polished confidence that puts major studio efforts to shame. Focus Features — the distributor behind Nosferatu — spent $14 million acquiring it after its buzzy Midnight Madness premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Jason Blum is attached as executive producer. Shooting has already wrapped on Barker’s next Blumhouse feature, Anything but Ghosts, and an A24 reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre is in the offing.

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The film also has a lovely sense of place — Bear and Nikki work at Cassell’s Music, the beloved independent Los Angeles-area music store that appeared in Wayne’s World and recently closed after 78 years. It’s a small touch, but it grounds the film’s wilder flights of fancy in something real and a little bittersweet.

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The supporting cast includes Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless as the girl next door who clearly has feelings for Bear that he’s too distracted to notice, and Andy Richter in a reportedly underused role as the music store owner. The Rotten Tomatoes score has been climbing steadily alongside the film’s word-of-mouth, with box office projections growing as the opening weekend arrives.

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Critics are landing mostly in B to B+ territory — appreciating the craft, the performance, and the sharp social instincts while acknowledging the film’s rough edges. \”A simple story told well is the oldest trick in the book,\” the Boston Herald noted, \”especially when it works this well.\”

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The Obsession that Bear wished for turned out to be nothing like he imagined. The film named after it, though, is exactly what horror fans have been waiting for — a sharp, sick, surprisingly emotional genre movie with a performance at its center that demands to be seen. Navarrette has been working steadily for years. After this weekend, the industry is going to start paying very different attention.

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Obsession is rated R and is in theaters now.

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“category”: “Movies