Obsession

Year of release : 2026

Run time : 1h49m

Genre : Supernatural Horror

The movie was written, directed and edited by Curry Barker.

The movie opens with Bear who tells a waitress how he feels for Nikki, as if she were Nikki. The woman is impressed, but his friend, Ian, doesn’t like it, telling him to be playfully mean with her, but wait a while and do it at the right time, although he’s been waiting for a long time to express his feelings for her. At the end, after a few things are revealed about Ian it makes sense why he says these things.

When he gets home, Bear finds his cat, Sandy, died after eating his grandmother’s pills.

While he’s crying his eyes out, Nikki calls him to go out with her and their friends, but he’s sad so he doesn’t want to. Nikki tells him she quit her job and she might be leaving, so if he wants to see her, he should come see her. Because she said she dropped her crystal necklace down the drain while talking to him, Bear goes to a spiritual shop to buy her a new one. He sees a One Wish Willow box, and instead of buying her the crystal, he buys the willow box.

The clerk tells him the willows are collectables and people who do open them come back and complain about them. Bear still buys it.

Later that night, at the bar, while getting the drinks with Nikki, he wants to confess his feelings, but Ian shows up next to them, so he wouldn’t do it. She tells Nikki his cat died, and she hugs him.

Nikki wants to go home when Ian wants to go to other clubs, and Bear offers to take her.

In the car, on the way to her place, they talk about her book, and Bear tells her he got her something. Nikki tells him Sarah, one of their friends, asked about him all day, because she likes him, and Nikki says when she likes a guy no one knows she has a crush on him.

When she leaves, he calls her Freaky Nikki, which she doesn’t like, and she asks him if he likes her, to which he replies they are friends.

After she leaves he breaks the willow wishing Nikki will love him more than anything in the world.

Nikki stops by her front door, looking at him, and comes back, not wanting to leave, just wanting to spend time with him. Saying that whatever he had for her he left at home, she asks to go to his place if he doesn’t want to come to hers. She even goes as far as telling him she’s devastated her father she doesn’t speak to and hates has cancer, and is dying. This convinces him to take her to his place.

At his place, Nikki wants him to sleep on the same bed as her, and he finally agrees, and she kisses him. She suddenly comes out of it, jumping off him scared, falling off the bed, saying she though she saw something.

Bear sleeps on the floor, and gets up in the middle of the night to look up if the One Wish Willow works. He finds a thread in which people who didn’t use it say it doesn’t while the ones who used it say it does.

When he goes back to the room, Nikki is up and is asking him what was he doing away from her, asking him to get on the bed next to her.

He does, and in the morning he sees she built an altar to his dead cat on the kitchen floor (with the dead cat he probably put in the trash outside after he cleaned his house due to it dying).

Ian doesn’t understand why Nikki is all over Bear now, leaving with him and sleeping at his place, coming to work together . Bear thinks she’s going through something, like a mental breakdown, as her father is dying, and she’s acting really weird.

Ian thinks she was probably on Molly, hence the behavior.

After their shift is over, Bear doesn’t want to take her home, but Nikki already has a ride with Ian.

At home, Bear looks up the effects of using Molly, and Ian, who’s on the phone with him convinces him she probably took one ‘cause that’s how she acts on it.

Somebody knocks on Bear’s door, and when he opens it it’s Nikki. She apologizes for the way she acted the previous night, and tells him she knows he has feelings for her, but Bear still is like, why would you say that? Only after she admits to have feelings for him, he says he likes her too!

For a while things seem to go great between them, as they start dating. One evening, while out at a diner, Ian calls him and tells him Nikki’s father is healthy and never had cancer. And that Nikki friend zoned Bear thinking he was into her brother. Ian tells him again this is weird that all of a sudden Nikki is infatuated with Bear, like she “snapped into a different person”.

When he comes back to the table, and asks her about her father having cancer, Nikki starts acting weird, like a robot or something, asking him why does it matter she lied?

When he wakes up in the middle of the night, he finds her standing by the wall wearing his sweater, in the shadows, watching him sleep. She starts acting weird again, screaming he doesn’t love her as much as she loves him. When she gets in the bed next to him, and he wants to leave, she screams at him to stay put.

In the morning he asks her if she cut his hair while he was sleeping, and asks her not to do it anymore. Telling her he was terrified of her the previous night, she apologizes saying she had a bad dream.

When he wants to open the front door, the thing is taped to the point he can barely open it and get out, to which Nikki says that if he can’t open it he should stay home.

She stands the moment he leaves, and that’s where he finds her when he gets back, having gone to the bathroom on herself because she didn’t move from that place.

She packed his lunch, and eating it, he finds her notes and realizes she fed him his cat.

I personally enjoyed the movie. Bear is a man scared of telling Nikki he loves her in fear of rejection, so instead of coming clean, he puts a spell on her. A spell which comes with serious side effects. Also, they don’t seem to be into the same things, as she likes to go out, get high and drink, while he doesn’t.

Because of the way Nikki acts, I think she is taken over by something which possesses her, and every once in a while she comes out of it (breaks through the holding of the possession), hence the way she acts scared, jumping away from Bear. SPOILERS When he calls the One Wish Willow hot line, to see if he can alter the wish, the man he speaks to, is asking him if he wants to speak to Nikki, and he hears her screaming out of her mind. So whoever he is living with, is not Nikki, there’s something else in her body.END OF SPOILERS

 

Things only escalate, as Nikki grows more and more possessive, wanting to spend all their time together, jealous of every woman (especially their friend Sarah, who she says is in love with Bear) and Bear finds out he can only get out of the wish if one of them dies.

Their friends find it odd all of a sudden they are madly in love, and think Nikki is going through something, and Bear is taking advantage of her.

The actors were great, especially the two leads, Inde Navarrette who played the possessed girl, Nikki, and Michael Johnston who played Bear, and goes through the motions, scared of Nikki.

The soundtrack was good, eerie. Whenever something happened, it grew in intensity getting really loud and spooky sounding. The soundtrack was scarier than what was on screen.

The visual effects were good.

The movie, in part inspired by The Simpsons 1991 episode “Treehouse of horror 2” grossed 374 million dollars at the box office so far, against a budget of 750.000 dollars.

The movie received positive reviews from critics with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 77 score on Metacritic.

Cinema Score audiences graded it an A-.

The movie already received quite a few award nominations, and won half of them.

Rating : It’s so money !