• Obsession, directed by Curry Barker and rated R, follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy young man who uses a supernatural novelty item called the One Wish Willow to make his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) fall in love with him — with increasingly disturbing results
• Critics have praised the film for grounding its horror in emotional realism, with Collider calling it better than most recent dating-horror thrillers at weaponizing “blurred boundaries, emotional entitlement” — Barker executes the story “with restraint” as the romance curdles into something “uglier, sadder, and genuinely disturbing”
• Inde Navarrette, previously known for a supporting role in The CW’s Superman & Lois, has been singled out for what one reviewer called a “tour de force performance” — and Michael Johnston’s work as Bear has been called a potential breakout moment
• The film has become a box office success; the director had to cut its most brutal scene to avoid an NC-17 rating, landing the film at R

Curry Barker’s Obsession understands something that most horror films about bad romantic fixations don’t: the truly terrifying part comes before the violence does. The premise is deceptively simple. Bear (Michael Johnston) — a shy, infatuated young man working at a small music store alongside his friend group — uses a supernatural novelty item called the One Wish Willow to make his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) fall in love with him. What follows, per Collider, is “something uglier, sadder, and genuinely disturbing” as Nikki’s affection spirals into emotional instability and dangerous obsession.

Collider’s review frames the film as the rare modern dating-horror entry that “weaponizes” fears around emotional entitlement and the moment intimacy becomes control — and does it better than most. Barker grounds the story in emotional realism first: the film opens with the familiar rhythms of a rom-com, making Bear’s awkward affection feel almost endearing before the turn. “Forced love is horrifying before bloodshed ever begins” is how Collider summarizes Barker’s thesis — and critics appear to agree he’s made that case effectively.

The Performances

Inde Navarrette carries a psychologically demanding role. Her Nikki goes from relatable crush to someone who bursts into violent episodes, lies to manufacture sympathy, and refuses to leave Bear’s side at social gatherings — her laugh, in one scene described by reviewers, is “too forced and too unnatural” in exactly the right way. Falls Church News-Press called it a “tour de force performance” and noted that Navarrette, of Mexican and Australian descent, handles the complexity “with dazzling believability.”

Michael Johnston’s Bear works as the moral center of a story in which neither the wish-granter nor the wish-giver comes out clean. The role has been described as a potential breakout for Johnston, who has spent years in television and voice work. Cooper Tomlinson co-stars as Ian, with Megan Lawless as Sarah, per Falls Church News-Press. The film is rated R — the director cut its most brutal scene to avoid an NC-17. That the film lands as hard as it does while staying within those parameters is part of what critics are responding to, per Tooele Online.

The post ‘Obsession’ Is a Horror Movie About Forced Love — and Critics Say Inde Navarrette Is a Revelation appeared first on Cream.

• One studio has attempted to make a preemptive $10 million offer for Curry Barker’s next original project — before he’s pitched a single idea
• The offer is “attempted” because Universal already holds right of first negotiation for Barker’s next feature; he’ll pitch to Universal executives first
• Barker, 26, came from YouTube — his debut feature Obsession made more money in its second weekend than its first, a near-unheard-of box office feat
• THR, which broke the story exclusively, described his rise as “a generational shift of where the industry’s next filmmakers could come from”

Curry Barker hasn’t told anyone what his next movie is. He doesn’t need to. Hollywood is already throwing eight figures at it.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, one studio has attempted to make a preemptive offer of $10 million for Barker’s next original project — sight unseen, no pitch, no logline, nothing. The 26-year-old filmmaker hasn’t even had his meeting with Universal yet, which matters because Universal holds the right of first negotiation for his next feature. That prior deal means any other studio’s offer is technically an attempted offer, not a done deal. But the fact that a competitor is willing to drop eight figures without knowing what they’re buying tells you everything about Barker’s current standing in Hollywood.

The context: Barker came from YouTube. His debut feature, Obsession, was low-budget horror — the kind of film that typically fades after its opening weekend. Instead, it increased its box office haul in its second weekend, a feat that defies normal theatrical patterns and signals genuine audience word-of-mouth rather than front-loaded opening night crowds. The second-weekend spike turned heads across the industry.

THR framed his ascent as something larger than one filmmaker getting hot: “his meteoric ascension heralds a generational shift of where the industry’s next filmmakers could come from.” The implied argument is that the pipeline from YouTube to theatrical filmmaking — which Barker appears to be proving out — could reshape where studios look for talent in the coming years.

Barker will meet with Universal executives soon to pitch his new project. Whatever he brings into that room, at least one other studio has already decided it’s worth $10 million before hearing a word of it.

The post Hollywood Is Throwing $10 Million at Curry Barker — and He Hasn’t Pitched Anything Yet appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession became the cheapest film to top the box office in 17 years, beating out the record set by Paranormal Activity in 2009.
• The film was made for just $750,000 and has already earned $27 million worldwide after only a few days in release.
• Director Curry Barker is a former YouTuber making his theatrical debut, continuing a growing Hollywood trend.
• Star Inde Navarrette’s performance is generating serious awards buzz, rare for a horror film.
• The Mandalorian and Grogu looms next weekend, but Obsession’s word-of-mouth momentum is already extraordinary.

Obsession just made box office history — and it did it on a budget that most Hollywood productions spend on craft services.

The horror film from director Curry Barker hit number one at the box office on Monday, making it the cheapest movie to top the charts in 17 years. The last film to do it? Paranormal Activity in 2009 — a film that famously cost $15,000, was shot in a single house, and became one of the most unlikely blockbusters in cinema history. Obsession’s reported budget of $750,000 is higher than that, but in the landscape of wide-release studio films, it’s essentially the same category: a miracle.

On Monday alone, Obsession earned $2.9 million, pushing its worldwide total to $27 million. That’s after opening to $16.1 million domestically over the weekend — good enough for third place behind the Michael biopic ($26.1 million) and The Devil Wears Prada 2 ($18 million), but the highest new opening of the weekend and well above pre-release tracking that had it topping out around $15 million. Add in $7 million overseas and a $2.6 million Wednesday preview haul on premium large format screens, and the numbers tell a story that’s hard to believe.

Obsession was produced for less than $1 million. Focus Features acquired it out of TIFF for a reported $14 million — an aggressive bet that is paying off in a very big way.

The Movie Everyone’s Talking About

The film follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a guy with a crush who uses a mysterious toy called the “One Wish Willow” to wish that his friend Nikki loved him “more than anyone in the world.” As you might expect, the results are not what he had in mind. Inde Navarrette plays Nikki — and the performance has become the story within the story. She goes from overbearing romantic to full psychopath, sometimes within the same scene, and audiences and critics alike have been floored by it. The film holds a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, and earned a rare A- CinemaScore — the kind of score that tells you word of mouth isn’t just going to be good, it’s going to be relentless.

/Film called it a “confident crowd-pleaser.” IndieWire’s review out of TIFF noted the film’s chilling relatability — that it dares to challenge men in the audience to ask whether they’re capable of doing what Bear does, effectively stripping away another person’s autonomy. That discomfort is clearly landing. Awards conversations for Navarrette have already started, which is almost unheard of for a horror film at this stage.

The audience breakdown is also striking. About 75% of viewers were under 35, with the 25-34 bracket being the largest single group. The film skewed slightly male, but 41% of the audience was female, and 32% was Hispanic. On Saturday to Sunday, it dropped just 11% — a stat that exhibitors notice, because it signals a film that people are recommending to each other in real time.

The YouTuber Who Shocked Hollywood

Barker came up as a content creator on YouTube, and ahead of the film’s release, he was clear about what kind of filmmaker he wanted to be. “I don’t want to put myself in a box,” he said. “The movies I want to make are the ones I would be excited to go see at the theater.” Clearly, a lot of people felt the same way.

He’s part of a growing wave. Markiplier’s Iron Lung brought in $50 million on a $3–4 million budget. Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me earned $92 million on $4.5 million. And now A24 is betting on Kane Parsons’ Backrooms — born from a viral YouTube series — to be one of its biggest releases ever. But none of those had a budget as low as Obsession’s, and none generated this kind of awards conversation.

Focus Features ran a marketing campaign that matched the film’s energy. Cryptic billboards. A campaign where fans could sign up to receive texts from Nikki — 30,000 people did. A series of Discord quests targeting gamers that drew over a million participants in just over a week. AMC secured Dolby Cinema screens and offered an exclusive popcorn tin. Alamo Drafthouse named it an Alamo Recommend and hosted a live-streamed Q&A with Barker. It was old-school and new-school at once, and it worked.

“If we really want to make exhibition feel whole again, we need more movies like Obsession,” Focus Features distribution chief Lisa Bunnell said. “It’s nice to see a movie that surprises people and shows them there’s a lot of talent out there left to be seen. We’re taking seriously that people are discovering talent and content in new ways, and instead of dismissing it we’re saying, how are we able to take this to the big screen and really showcase the talent? I think that inspires young people. And if you can give them hope … that’s a beautiful thing.”

What Comes Next

The comparison points being thrown around right now are Hereditary — which opened to $13.5 million and finished with $90.3 million worldwide — and Barbarian, which opened to $10.5 million and closed at $46.1 million. Both were buzzy, word-of-mouth horror films from first-time directors. Obsession opened bigger than either of them.

The immediate challenge is The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars film in seven years, which is projected to open somewhere between $80–100 million next weekend. That’s a wall. But Obsession’s Saturday-to-Sunday hold and its Monday surge suggest this isn’t a film that collapses — it builds. Paranormal Activity opened to just $77,000, lost steam, then came back to win the box office in its fifth weekend. The situations aren’t identical, but the DNA is familiar.

Barker already has two more horror films in development, a comedy, and an original take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He’s also been talking about Obsession sequels and an anthology series exploring different wishes and their consequences. For now, all eyes are on this weekend — and whether a little horror movie about a wish gone wrong can hold its own against Baby Yoda.

The post Obsession Sets a 17-Year Box Office Record appeared first on Cream.

• Curry Barker’s supernatural horror film Obsession opened to $2.6M in previews and holds a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences
• The 26-year-old director went from TikTok sketch comedy to a $15M Focus Features acquisition out of TIFF — almost overnight
• Jason Blum, who executive produced Obsession, has called Barker one of the most exciting emerging voices in horror
• A car-kill scene had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17 rating, and the film’s original ending had Nikki dying by suicide
• Barker has two major projects lined up: Blumhouse’s Anything But Ghosts with Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard, and A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Not long ago, Curry Barker was posting sketch comedy videos on YouTube under the brand “That’s A Bad Idea.” Now he has a billboard next to his car wash, a $15 million Focus Features deal, and Jason Blum in his corner. At 26 years old, Barker is having a moment — and if Obsession‘s opening weekend is any indication, it’s only getting started.

The supernatural horror film, which Barker wrote and directed, earned $2.6 million in Thursday previews and Wednesday early access screenings alone — a striking number for a movie that cost just $1 million to make. It’s playing in 2,542 locations across North America, including 435 large-format and premium screens. And it arrives with a rare 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, the kind of double approval that studios dream about.

Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy, 20-something music store employee who has been quietly in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. When he can’t bring himself to just tell her how he feels, he cracks open a vintage “One Wish Willow” toy — an ’80s novelty item that promises to grant one wish — and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. She does. Immediately. Terrifyingly. What follows is 108 minutes of possession, obsession, jealousy, and gore, as Nikki transforms into a self-destructive, dangerously violent version of herself, incapable of letting Bear go.

“We wanted it to feel grounded, and we wanted to really lean into, ‘OK, magic is real in this world, fine. Let’s accept that, let’s move on,'” Barker explained. “And now, what you’re left with is a pretty tragic story about a man and a woman, and leaning into the realism of that was really important to me.”

At its core, the film is about consent and the cost of avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. Bear’s inability to simply tell Nikki how he feels is what sets everything in motion — and the movie doesn’t let him off the hook for it. Navarrette’s performance walks a razor’s edge, playing Nikki as both a villain and a victim, with the real Nikki occasionally breaking through her possessed state in tortured, horrified outbursts. It’s the kind of dual performance that earns a star a reputation, and reviews have already started calling her a scream queen in the making.

From YouTube Sketches to TIFF Bidding Wars

Barker’s path to this moment is genuinely unlike most directors working today. He and his longtime creative partner — and Obsession co-star — Cooper Tomlinson met in film school, dropped out together, and started making content online. Their sketch comedy brand “That’s A Bad Idea” built them a real audience. Then Barker made Milk & Serial, an $800 found-footage serial killer film that he released for free on YouTube. It went viral. Hollywood noticed.

He signed with UTA. Buyers came calling. And when Obsession premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, it sparked a full-on bidding war — Focus Features beat out both Neon and A24 to acquire it for around $15 million, with Universal Pictures coming aboard to handle international distribution.

“My agent looked at me after TIFF — this is someone who’s had clients that have made it and who knows what this industry is like — saying to me, ‘Your life is never going to be the same. Your life just changed,'” Barker recalled. “I was hearing him and taking that in, but also being, like, we’ll see. It’s too much for a human to comprehend at that time.”

The pinch-me moment came later, walking down a street and seeing an Obsession billboard next to the car wash he always uses.

Focus leaned into an inventive marketing campaign that matched the film’s eerie tone. Replica One Wish Willow toys sold out within hours of going on sale. An in-world commercial for the toy has racked up more than 4.4 million views on YouTube. And fans across Los Angeles and New York have been encountering cryptic billboards featuring Nikki’s obsessive handwriting alongside a phone number — call it, and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of Nikki’s increasingly unsettling texts, voice notes, and special deliveries.

The Scene That Almost Got an NC-17

The film’s most talked-about sequence involves Nikki killing Bear’s female co-worker — slamming her head into a steering wheel in a jealous rage — and in its original cut, it was significantly more extreme. The MPAA pushed back, and Barker had to reduce the number of head impacts to avoid an NC-17 rating.

“I was so upset about that at first and scared that it was going to change the integrity of the scene,” he said. “I was scared to touch it, because I had already seen the reaction at TIFF. I didn’t want to mess up whatever good is happening here. But it was fine. I think the integrity of the scene is still there.”

He’s already dreaming about a director’s cut that restores it — along with an alternate ending and a cut monologue from Nikki at the car where she talks about love and romance. “Let this movie breathe just a little bit more,” he said. “It would be fun to experiment and do a new cut of it.”

That alternate ending is its own conversation. In the script, Nikki wakes up from her possession with a gun already in her mouth. She looks around, sees Bear, realizes for the first time in a while that she has control over herself — and then puts the gun back in her mouth and ends her life, unable to live with the horror of what she’s done. Barker ultimately decided against it.

“We just decided that it was more brutal if she stays alive,” he said simply.

Jason Blum’s Stamp of Approval

One of the more striking elements of Barker’s rise is the support he’s received from Jason Blum, the producer behind the Halloween franchise, Get Out, and the entire Blumhouse empire. Blum serves as an executive producer on Obsession and has publicly described Barker as one of the most exciting emerging voices in horror.

Barker said the support has been “awesome” and made clear it isn’t a one-time thing. The two are already deep into their next collaboration — Blumhouse’s Anything But Ghosts, which Barker just finished shooting alongside Atomic Monster and Spooky Pictures.

The film stars Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard as con artists who call themselves ghost hunters but are, as Barker puts it, “glorified magicians” who don’t actually believe in ghosts. Until, presumably, they have to. Barker and Tomlinson also star in the film — a first for both of them at this scale.

“I was nervous at first, because I have very specific ideas of what the scene looks like for me,” Barker admitted about directing Paul and Howard. “But my dad said, ‘They want to be directed and you’re going to let them down if you don’t give them direction.’ That really meant a lot to me.” He added that both actors were “literally both the most sweet people I’ve ever met in Hollywood.”

Texas Chainsaw and What Comes After

Beyond Anything But Ghosts, Barker is also attached to direct A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre — a project he’s been openly excited about since A24 acquired the rights to the franchise. His pitch for it sounds exactly like what you’d hope: grounded, brutal, and character-first.

“It’s gonna be grounded, brutal, raw. It should be very, very uncomfortable,” he said. “I want to make you care about the characters that we’re on the journey with. Just like Bear, Nikki and Sarah are characters that you never knew before — I mean, we all know Leatherface and the Sawyers — but what are the characters that I can invent that we can grow to care about? If they do die brutally, we’ll actually be sad that they died.”

And if all that weren’t enough, Barker is also quietly entertaining the idea of returning to the world of Obsession. He’s acknowledged, with good humor, that the One Wish Willow’s rules don’t entirely hold up to scrutiny — “if the One Wish Willow actually works, which it does in this lore, and people are just making wishes left and right, there would be some crazy — like, dragons would exist” — but that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about what comes next.

“I obviously have a couple more things that I’m excited about next, but I do see Obsession 2, maybe,” he told Total Film. “Or even what really is exciting to me is maybe an anthology, like a one-hour episode. Each episode is a different wish that goes completely off the rails. Maybe I’ll direct the pilot with the same DP, and you could invite other filmmakers to kind of give their spin at it. That would be really cool.”

For a filmmaker who was posting YouTube sketches just a few years ago, Curry Barker is now operating at a level most directors spend decades trying to reach. And from everything he’s said about Texas Chainsaw, Anything But Ghosts, and whatever version of Obsession he eventually gets to make without anyone telling him to pull back — he’s just getting warmed up.

Obsession is in theaters now.

The post Curry Barker Is Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession earned $2.6M in Thursday-Wednesday previews, topping Smile’s $2M preview number before its $22.6M opening.
• The film was made for just $750,000 — and Focus Features bought it for $15 million after its TIFF debut.
• Director Curry Barker is a YouTube filmmaker making his big-screen debut with the romantic horror film.
• Obsession holds a 95% critics score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes heading into opening weekend.
• The film is projected to earn between $9.5M and $14.5M in its domestic opening weekend.

Obsession is arriving in theaters this weekend with serious momentum behind it — and the early numbers are backing up the hype. The romantic horror film from first-time big-screen director Curry Barker pulled in $2.6 million in previews spanning Thursday night through Wednesday shows, a figure that already puts it ahead of where Paramount’s Smile stood before that film opened to $22.6 million.

For a movie that cost $750,000 to make, that’s a pretty stunning place to be.

Barker — who built his following through his YouTube channel “that’s a bad idea” — made the film on a shoestring, then watched his life change overnight when Focus Features and Blumhouse picked it up for $15 million following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025. “That’s the moment my life changed,” Barker said in a recent New Yorker featurette. The film’s actual budget — which he confirmed at $750,000 — is even lower than the $1 million figure previously reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie follows Baron “Bear” Bailey (Michael Johnston), a young man who comes across a trinket that grants him the ability to wish the girl of his dreams — his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki Freeman (Inde Navarrette) — into falling in love with him. As you’d expect, chaos follows. The film almost earned an NC-17 rating due to one particularly violent scene that had to be toned down before release.

It’s now booked at 2,542 locations, including 435 premium large-format screens — a wide release footprint that makes its microscopic budget feel almost absurd in context.

Critics and Audiences Are All In

Obsession is riding into the weekend with a 95% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 110 reviews, alongside a 96% audience score. What makes those numbers even more remarkable is the timeline: the film allowed critics to share scores as early as March, when it briefly hit 97% — which Forbes noted would make it the best-reviewed wide-release film of 2026 at that point. It’s dipped a few points since more reviews came in, but the reception has stayed overwhelmingly positive.

Its closest comps in the indie horror space are A24’s Heretic and Talk to Me, both of which opened to $1.2M in Friday previews before earning $10.8M and $10.4M respectively in their opening weekends. Obsession has already cleared both of those preview marks.

Current box office projections put the film at around $11 million for its opening weekend domestically, with a range of $9.5M to $14.5M according to BoxOfficeTheory — a significant jump from the $7M estimate when tracking first began, and miles ahead of an early BoxOffice Pro range of just $4M to $6M. Given its $750,000 budget, the film technically only needs to gross $1.8 million to break even on production costs alone, meaning this weekend’s haul will already be a massive win before a single international dollar is counted.

What It’s Up Against This Weekend

The bigger question heading into the weekend is whether Obsession can shake up a box office that was shaping up to be a two-horse race. Lionsgate’s Michael is heading into its fourth weekend, and 20th Century Studios’ Devil Wears Prada 2 is in its third — both were tracking north of $20 million each before Obsession’s preview numbers landed. New Line’s Mortal Kombat 2 is also still in the mix, though it’s expected to drop around 60% to roughly $15M.

Also opening this weekend are Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey — starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza González as a covert ops team on a near-impossible heist mission — and Is God Is, the feature directorial debut of Aleshea Harris, adapted from her award-winning stage play and starring Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Janelle Monáe, and Sterling K. Brown. Is God Is is sitting at an extraordinary 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. Neither is expected to challenge Obsession’s numbers this weekend, but both are generating serious critical attention.

Looking further ahead, Obsession will face two horror releases in the coming weeks — Paramount’s Passenger and A24’s Backrooms — so this opening weekend matters. The town is clearly paying close attention to Barker: beyond Obsession, his follow-up film starring Aaron Paul has already landed at Focus Features, and he’s set to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie for A24.

For now, though, all eyes are on this weekend. A $2.6M preview haul from a film that cost less than most music videos to produce is the kind of story Hollywood genuinely loves — and it’s only just getting started.

The post Obsession Earns $2.6M in Previews Before Opening Weekend appeared first on Cream.

• Blumhouse horror film Obsession is now in theaters from Focus Features, which acquired it for $14 million after its TIFF debut
• Director Curry Barker, 26, is a YouTuber-turned-filmmaker whose debut cost $800 — this one cost $750,000
• Inde Navarrette delivers a widely praised star-making performance as Nikki, a woman supernaturally obsessed with her friend
• Michael Johnston co-stars as Bear, the lovelorn music store worker whose reckless wish sets the horror in motion
• Barker already has a Blumhouse follow-up in post-production and an A24 Texas Chainsaw Massacre reworking in the pipeline

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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.\”

\n\n

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.

\n\n

Obsession is rated R and is in theaters now.

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“category”: “Movies

The post ‘Obsession’ Review: Inde Navarrette Makes Her Mark appeared first on Cream.

• Obsession, starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, opens in theaters May 15 from Focus Features
• The film currently holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best-reviewed wide-release movie of 2026 across any genre
• Prop One Wish Willows sold out on the Focus Features website and are now reselling on eBay for around $200
• Director Curry Barker has already wrapped his next film, Anything But Ghosts, and recently signed on to direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot
• Barker’s debut film Milk & Serial was released free on YouTube and quietly built him a devoted horror following

\n\n

Curry Barker is only two films into his career, and horror already feels like it belongs to him. His new movie Obsession — a brutal, relentless, genuinely nerve-shredding wish-gone-wrong story — opens this Friday, and it arrives carrying the kind of critical momentum that most directors spend a lifetime chasing. The film currently holds a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it not just the best-reviewed horror movie of 2026, but the best-reviewed wide-release film of the year, full stop. For context, Sinners finished 2025 with a 97%. Barker is in that conversation now.

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And he’s just getting started.

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A Wish That Goes Very, Very Wrong

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Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston, Teen Wolf), a hopeless romantic who can’t bring himself to tell his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) how he feels. So he does what any desperate, lovelorn person would do in a horror movie: he snaps a cheap novelty toy called a “One Wish Willow” — a $6.99 trinket he picks up at a novelty shop — and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. It works. Immediately. And catastrophically.

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What follows, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s review, is a film that “takes typical aspects of dysfunctional romantic relationships to initially comic and then horrific extremes” — one that’s as darkly funny as it is genuinely terrifying. Navarrette, in particular, is being singled out as a revelation. THR called her performance “virtuosic,” noting she “delivers such intensity she’ll induce nightmares for anyone who’s ever wondered what exactly the hell is going on with their romantic partner.” It’s being described as a breakthrough turn that should change her career trajectory entirely — a significant pivot after her supporting role in Superman and Lois and a smaller part in the Dave Bautista action film Trap House.

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The film also stars Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and — in a genuinely delightful bit of casting — Andy Richter, all of whom joined Barker and his leads at a special Los Angeles screening at the Hollywood Legion Theater on May 11.

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Where the Idea Came From

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The origin story has become one of the more charming footnotes in the film’s press run. Barker had been sitting with a vague idea about obsession for a while — the consuming, all-encompassing kind, whether it’s about a job or a person — but couldn’t quite crack the structure. Then he rewatched the “Monkey’s Paw” episode of The Simpsons.

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“That Simpsons episode struck the idea of making it a wish-gone-wrong type of movie,” Barker said. “The idea of being obsessed with another person was something that I hadn’t really seen done to its full glory. The wish thing really unlocked the full potential of that.”

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His writing process is deliberately loose. He outlines, but he doesn’t treat the outline like scripture. “You can really allow yourself to discover things a little bit more when you don’t treat the outline like a bible,” he explained. “Maybe you outline that by this scene, they should be going to the restaurant. But maybe as you’re writing, you discover that the car swerves over, and now they’re on the side of the road.” He goes in with specific moments he wants to include and figures out where they fit — carefully, because forcing a scene into the wrong spot, he says, can cost you the story.

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The “Modern Jump Scare” — and Why He Doesn’t Actually Do Jump Scares

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Here’s something interesting about a horror director who’s being praised for how scary his movie is: Curry Barker doesn’t really believe in traditional jump scares.

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“Jump scares can be kind of predictable, and sometimes unearned,” he told GamesRadar+. “Someone opens a closet and a ball falls out but because the music is loud, it’s supposed to be a jump scare? A modern audience kind of rolls their eyes at that.” Instead, Barker has developed what he calls his own “modern jump scare” — which isn’t a jump scare at all, but something stranger and harder to shake. “If you have two or three, even four, moments in your movie where you can make the audience go, ‘Oh, I didn’t like that. That was weird. That made me feel…’ — to me, that’s a modern jump scare.”

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The philosophy comes from comedy. “Tricking someone is kind of how you make someone laugh,” he said. “You make them think that something’s going one way, and then if you surprise them, you’ll usually get a laugh. My job is to trick you.”

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It’s an approach you can trace back to Barker’s YouTube roots. He and collaborator Cooper Tomlinson built a following through their channel That’s A Bad Idea, with shorts like The Chair and Warnings that leaned into uncanny dread rather than cheap shocks. His debut feature, Milk & Serial — a found-footage film he released entirely for free on YouTube in 2024 — earned strong reviews and real buzz, and set the table for everything that’s happened since.

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The One Wish Willow Is Already a Phenomenon

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When Barker invented the One Wish Willow, he knew it had franchise potential baked in. The film establishes that these trinkets exist all over the world — a detail that quietly leaves the door open for an entire cinematic universe of bad wishes. “It clicked in my head once I kind of came up with the idea,” Barker said. “I knew that there was the potential for this to be, like, kind of an iconic thing.”

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What he didn’t anticipate was that the prop replicas would sell out on the Focus Features website before the movie even opened — and start flipping on eBay for around $200. “People haven’t even seen the movie yet,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

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He does have more One Wish Willow stories in his head, and yes, they’re all horror. As for the film’s more mysterious elements — the creepy phone number, the ambiguous purgatory-like space — Barker is deliberately keeping the lore sparse. “I like that it’s in the people’s hands to come up with their own theories and ideas,” he said. “Your movie is so based in reality except for that one little outlier.”

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The Road to TIFF — and the Version You’ll Actually See

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The version of Obsession that got Barker into the Toronto International Film Festival was, by his own admission, a very early cut — one with a completely different opening and scenes that hadn’t yet been shot. Getting into TIFF from that rough state was, he said, “mind-blowing,” and it changed everything. “It kind of greenlit our additional photography. It kind of knocked everybody into place. It got us a post-supervisor! I had never had a post-supervisor before. I was just kind of editing this thing in my free time.”

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The theatrical version is close to what screened at the festival, with a few additional sound and color passes — and some cuts made to secure the R rating. “There were a couple of head smashes that we had to take out,” Barker said, which tells you something about just how far this movie goes.

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The brutality was always intentional. “All I’m interested in doing is pushing the boundaries of horror,” he said. “I get kind of disappointed when the films that I watch pull their punches or don’t really go there, or they kind of promise that they’re going to go there and they don’t.”

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As for when he knew the film was something special — that took a test screening. Every single person who watched it said they would recommend it to a friend. “I was told that’s unheard of,” Barker said. “No one’s ever had every single person saying ‘Yes’ to that.”

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What’s Next: Ghost Hunters and Leatherface

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Barker has already finished shooting his follow-up, Anything But Ghosts, which he stars in alongside Tomlinson as a pair of ghost hunter con artists. He describes it as living in the same tonal world as Obsession — real stakes, real dread — but funnier by nature of its premise. “That premise alone just lends itself better to comedy,” he said. “But we take the stakes very seriously.”

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And then there’s the Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, which Barker recently signed on to direct. It’s the kind of franchise attachment that could mean anything — another tired cash-in, or a genuine reimagining. Based on everything Barker has shown so far, it sounds like the latter. “It’s loving the original but also knowing that there is something left to be shown with that family and with the series in general,” he said. “I actually think there’s a lot to be explored that they haven’t dived into.”

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His strategy for handling the pressure of one of horror’s most iconic properties? “Isolating myself and trying not to think too much about that pressure because that’s the killer of creativity. You’ve got to kind of throw it away, honestly.”

\n\n

Obsession is in theaters now. The film reportedly cost under $1 million to produce — and Focus Features paid at least $15 million for distribution rights. Before a single ticket has been sold at the box office, Curry Barker has already won.

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“category”: “Movies

The post Meet Curry Barker, Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice appeared first on Cream.

• A24 has tapped Obsession director Curry Barker to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot
• Barker says he wants to explore the full Leatherface family dynamic, not just the iconic killer himself
• He cites Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake — his first-ever horror film as a kid — as his favorite entry in the franchise
• Barker’s upcoming film Obsession already holds a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its May 15 release
• No release date has been set for the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Leatherface is getting a new lease on life — and the director A24 has chosen to swing the chainsaw this time around has a clear, genuinely intriguing vision for where the franchise can go next.

Curry Barker, the rising horror filmmaker behind Obsession, has been tapped to write and direct a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre for A24. And in a recent interview with Total Film, he laid out exactly what’s driving his approach: he wants to go deeper into the family at the heart of the story — not just Leatherface, but the whole terrifying household behind him.

“I think of it as respecting the source material,” Barker said. “I absolutely love the original film, but I want to do something that’s different. I’m not going to stray away too far from what we know, but just making it stronger. Really, I want to lean into the uncomfortability of the family. I want to lean into the rawness of what’s going on there. There’s some really messed-up stuff happening at that farm. I genuinely feel there’s so much potential for that concept that has not been realized.”

It’s a smart angle. Leatherface has been the face of this franchise for over 50 years, but the character’s motives have always been rooted in family — he’s less a lone predator and more a product of the deeply disturbed people around him. The Hewitt family has popped up in a handful of installments, most notably in the second and third entries, but no film has ever truly put them front and center as the main event. Barker clearly sees that gap, and he wants to fill it.

“There’s so much that concept hasn’t really leaned into or hasn’t dived into,” he added. “So I actually feel like there’s a lot to explore, and I’m really excited about it.”

Why His Favorite TCM Entry Says a Lot

Here’s a detail that adds useful color to Barker’s thinking: when asked about his history with the franchise, he didn’t name the 1974 Tobe Hooper original as his favorite. He named the 2003 Marcus Nispel remake — the one starring Jessica Biel — as the entry closest to his heart.

“The 2003 reboot was my favorite,” Barker said. “It was like my first horror movie I’d ever seen when I was a kid, and I actually think it’s a decent remake.”

That film — produced by Michael Bay and co-written from the original screenplay by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel — was a significant financial success that helped trigger a wave of horror franchise reboots in the mid-2000s. Critical reaction was mixed at the time, but it’s held up for a certain generation of horror fans as a genuinely effective, visceral piece of work. Knowing that’s where Barker’s love of the franchise was born makes his instinct to dig deeper into the family dynamic feel even more grounded — the 2003 film did spend real time with the Hewitts, and it clearly left a mark on him.

Who Is Curry Barker?

If you haven’t heard the name yet, you will soon. Barker broke through with Milk & Serial, an acclaimed found-footage horror film that’s available to watch for free on YouTube and has earned serious praise from genre fans. His follow-up, Obsession, hits theaters on May 15 — and it’s already sitting at a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes based on early reviews. That kind of momentum is exactly why A24 came calling.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has had a rough stretch. The 2022 Netflix sequel was widely dismissed, and before that, the series had been lurching through reboots and sequels with diminishing returns for years. Handing it to a filmmaker with genuine horror credibility and a specific, considered vision feels like the right move — and Barker sounds like someone who’s thought hard about what this story still has to offer rather than just what it can recycle.

No release date has been set yet, but Obsession opens May 15 — and if Barker delivers there, the anticipation for what he does with Leatherface’s family is only going to grow.

The post TCM Reboot Director Wants to Make It a Family Affair appeared first on Cream.