THB #833: Obsession (2026)

The most frustrating movie for me is a movie that coulda, woulda, shoulda been great and, simply, is not.

I am not going to dig into the details of this movie because there is no need for spoilers and those details are really irrelevant to this review. Thing is, as a bunch of extreme moments, the movie is okay and will find an audience that really enjoys it. The film is pretty well shot, very well acted, and the effect that writer/director Curry Barker is aiming for, he pretty much achieves.

The premise has the potential for true greatness. Longtime foursome of friends… one guy has a crush on one of the girls… he buys a little silly toy for the girl from a hippie store that is a “magic stick” that will grant you one wish when broken. But she confronts him about whether he is wanting her and he awkwardly says, “no” and forgets to give her the present. So on a whim, he uses it himself and wishes for the girl to love him more than anything. Madness ensues.

This is what the trailer tells us and I bought in. 100%. The performance of The Girl, Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette, is, even in the trailer, mighty. She hits the notes that we have all heard from women who have been pushed to the brink, in love, lust or pain.

But here is the problem. For whatever reason, Mr. Barker chooses to forgo normal human behaviors for characters who live in the real world. After a very stop-and-start leap into her obsession (which was okay), the movie throws any connection to reality out the door, never to be seen again until a clever (too late and too much like too much of the movie) ending.

Everything is played at a 10 (or a Spinal Tap 11) or a 2. And the core idea, that she is now more in love with this guy than any person has ever been with another, is not embraced as the consistent anchor of the emotional journey of the film. Really, the movie becomes about her wanting him to love her as much as she loves him and her constant frustration getting this from him. Even putting aside that he is more than a little shy, he is sane, not under some magic power.

The screenplay is so busy coming up with the next extreme moment of her displaying her madness that it seems to completely forget any realistic motivation. That doesn’t mean that some incredibly dumb ideas are not fun and don’t get a big reaction from audiences. But the movie, which sometimes comes up for air, devolves into a relentless series of gags, as the term is used for comedy bits or stunts.

I spent the entire second half of the movie watching these big moments, the audience laughing and gasping, and earnestly trying to figure out what idea of “love” would motivate most of the behaviors. And even then, I was rooting, rooting, rooting for this movie to find itself in a full way.

There are all kinds of movies from which Obsession steals shamelessly, from It Follows to Barbarian to Companion to Weapons to Sam Raimi films to Darren Aronofsky to DePalma to Hitchcock. And that’s fine. Movies are built on movies. But what the film really needed was to take a few strokes from Nora Ephron and Billy Wilder and romantic comedies and dramas in general. Greatness from this idea, unless like Barbarian you are going to flip the whole movie mid-way through in a brilliant way, requires thoughtful use of pacing and changes in speed and laying back far enough for the big surprise thriller moments are big surprises and not just another broken window the audience knows is coming but the characters, who have lived the experience, can’t see coming. And it’s not, “girl, don’t go in there.” It’s whatever conversation is happening on screen is about to be interrupted by a bloody mess that is poorly motivated.

For a movie that is so relentlessly violent that, apparently, they had to make cuts from the TIFF 2025 print to get an R rating instead of an NC-17. Yet, it is as coy about sex as imaginable in this premise. And what is the first blush of pretty much every romantic relationship? Sex. And there is a bit in here. If I thought there was a conscious notion that a woman trying to please a man with sex was somehow a philosophical departure from this character of “Nikki,” okay. But I find it weird when a movie is so coy about seduction - especially in a story of a nerd obsessed with a girl for years - when it has no compunction about drawing her blood and the blood of everyone else in the movie. I don’t know the details of from whence they came, but it took 30 seconds to find topless photos of this actress online.

Physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. All sides of each of us that someone looking to be loved will show in that pursuit. But in this film, the main show of passion is rage, quick to show up before anything else. And as I have noted before, Ms. Navarrette is pretty much pitch perfect. She should be on any 5 Netflix series of her choice and movies and more in the years to come. Everyone else in the film is good. But she has The Role and she kills it, literally and figuratively.

As an audience, I can be completely disconnected from a movie, but when they break out a couple good actors playing, say, a parent and a child or a couple having a complex painful moment, I will connect for that moment. Or as I often say, if you want tears from any audience, put a gun to an animal’s head and you will get them… but whether that makes your movie or show any better is another question altogether.

Okay… I am going to do one small SPOILER. It’s one gag and it’s not a story changer. But it is specific.

SPOILER ALERT

When Nikki doesn’t want The Boy (Bear, played by Michael Johnston) to leave the house, she duct tapes the front door shut. Covers the entire door and 5 inches off of each side. A sight gag. He struggles to open the door, but does open the door.

Here’s the thing… there isn’t a scene around her having this ineffective and insane idea. There isn’t her desperately trying to get him not to walk out the door. There is the sight gag. A shock laugh. Right there is the problem with the entire movie.

SPOILER END

The film has one supernatural idea that it really doesn’t commit to and which, as a result, really doesn’t work. It’s such an extreme idea that it is memorable… but the movie forgets the idea almost instantly after it expresses it. So frustrating.

The very end of the film is imperfect, but suggests that Mr. Barker is capable, in concept, of pulling off a premise like this at a high level. Unfortunately, the emotions in the relationships in the film have been so abused in the name of shock gags by the end of the film, Barker’s attempt to give us a clever variation of a great moment from The Godfather doesn’t have the juice to play with all the real pain and fear of its ambition. It plays… but as with most of the movie, at about 65% of where is should be.

I truly worried that I was having a “the movie I would have preferred” experience of this film and my disappointment would be unfair. But I don’t think that is what I was doing. I was happy to give this film its premise and its broad choices for how to tell the story. But it was so close to being great, on an objective level, that it made me insane. I needed these characters to act like humans act, not just a moment or two that felt familiarly human enough to get an audience reaction, but consistently.

Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been given a variety of motivations over the years and sequels. But ultimately, he is a force of nature, not human motivation. I’m fine with that… and Michael and Freddy, etc, etc, etc. Hannibal Lechter and Aunt Gladys are on a different level of complex motivations. I’m great with that too. I hate the Hostel movies… but as disgusting as I find the premise and often the execution, I get the motivation of those male characters.

And I understand the conceptual motivation of Nikki here. But the movie is too busy coming up with cool creepiness and extreme violence that it loses anything real about her and her motivation. And it drove me nuts because there were so many great pieces there, overcoming the scale and the lack of movie celebrity and a clever variation of Single White Female or Cape Fear or whatever obsessive story so many of us loved.

If Barker had just done less, he could have made a movie that was so much more.

Until tomorrow…