Obsession
Director: Curry Barker
Writer: Curry Barker
Cast: Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter, Haley Fitzgerald
Seen on: 27.6.2026

Content Note: rape, animal death

Plot:
Bear (Michael Johnston) has been in love with his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) approximately forever. He is just about ready to tell her and hope for the best. But at the last second, he loses his nerve. Instead, he breaks a „One Wish Willow“ he got as a joke and wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone else. And apparently she does. But not all wishes turn out to be good when fulfilled.

Obsession is a tense film that gives us great scares at a good pace and will probably leave you gripping your armrest. But it is also a film that somewhat fails Nikki and would have profited from an actively feminist perspective.

Feminist discourse about Nice Guys has hit the mainstream for a while, and Obsession is exactly that: a movie about a Nice Guy that is mostly removed from the analysis of gender relations that created the term. Nice Guys are men who think that they are entitled to women simply because they are not some other type of man, a type they have mostly created in their heads. They are misogynists who think of themselves as feminists. They do not see women as people, but as rewards for good behavior. And they get very angry very quickly when they do not get that reward.

Obsession has a clear view of Bear as a Nice Guy. It doesn’t pretend that he is actually a good guy who made one bad decision. It is obvious that something is very wrong with Nikki as soon as Bear makes the wish. He fucks her anyway – that is, he rapes her. Repeatedly. While we may be very charitable and say that the first time, he hadn’t realized yet what was happening, he keeps raping her even after there is no denying anymore. He is simply not concerned whatsoever with her personhood or her wishes. Or at least, not as much as he is concerned with his own wishes and finally getting her.

But what is almost entirely lacking in all of this is Nikki’s perspective. We get glimpses here and there of what she must be going through, and Navarrette is fantastic and bringing home the horror of Nikki’s situation even in her most subdued moments. But in the end, Nikki’s horror is only there to serve as an auxilliary to Bear’s horror. And he finally gets out of it, while she is stuck with the consequences of his choices. Plus, I was not that much of a fan of the fact that Nikki became a threat to everybody around them and herself – it would have worked much better if it had been Bear who gets pushed to more overt violence.

That being said, for all its failings in the execution of the social points, I thought that it had its heart in the right place. I can’t deny that I was very invested in the film. It was absolutely creepy (with the reversed moments very well placed and not overdone) and very tense, and the gore was eyebrow-raising to say the least. It definitely had me flinching.

Summarizing: well done but not flawless.