A hopeless romantic, a haunted novelty and one very bad idea — that is the engine of Obsession, and writer-director Curry Barker keeps it running at full throttle. Baron “Bear” Bailey, a sweet, going-nowhere clerk at a struggling music store, buys a dusty toy called the “One Wish Willow” and wishes that his coworker Nikki Freeman would finally fall in love with him. She does. That is the problem. What begins as a lonely man’s daydream curdles, scene by scene, into something possessive, violent and genuinely frightening, until Nikki’s devotion stops looking like love and starts looking like a hostage situation.

Barker — a YouTube sketch comedian who talked his way into a feature after his short The Chair made the rounds — shot the whole thing near Los Angeles in twenty-six days for $750,000, and the constraint is the secret weapon. There is no fat on it. The premise is the oldest trick in the book, the monkey’s paw the film cheerfully cites by way of a childhood Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror,” but Barker, who also edited, weaponizes sound and silence with a confidence that belies the money. The tone is the real achievement: creatively grotesque one minute and laugh-out-loud funny the next, part of what critics have started calling the “Cregger-ification” of 2020s horror — comedy and dread sharing the same frame without either one blinking.

The film belongs to Inde Navarrette. As Nikki she has to be both the object of a wish and the agent of a nightmare, sweet and uncanny at once, and she plays the turn so precisely that the movie’s worst moments register as character rather than gimmick — a major-key horror debut more than one critic flagged as the year’s breakout. Michael Johnston makes Bear pitiable without ever quite letting him off the hook, which is the harder job, and Andy Richter turns up to remind you the whole thing is also, deliberately, a comedy.

Inde Navarrette in a tense scene from the horror film Obsession — Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette in *Obsession* (2026). Focus Features / Blumhouse.

Then there is the story around the story. Jason Blum boarded as executive producer after the Toronto premiere; Focus Features paid a reported $14–15 million for it, a record for a genre title at the festival, and was rewarded with the highest-grossing film in its history — more than $332 million worldwide against that $750,000 budget, with a fourth weekend big enough to beat The Blair Witch Project’s horror record. A 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and an A− CinemaScore say critics and crowds agree for once. Obsession does not reinvent the wish-gone-wrong story; it executes it with a nasty wit and a real filmmaker’s eye, and that is enough to make Curry Barker a name worth circling.