Film · Horror

Curry Barker’s Obsession takes a kitschy wish-granting toy and a shy boy’s crush and turns them into one of 2026’s bleakest, most gleefully nasty horror films. A look at the curse, the moment the cringe curdles into carnage, and the monkey’s-paw lineage it’s built on.

Full spoilers, including the ending.

A lonely young man wants the girl, can’t say so, and makes a wish instead. That is the whole engine of Obsession, and out of that worn premise Curry Barker has built the breakout horror film of 2026. It arrived through the back door, made for under a million dollars by a YouTube prankster best known for the viral horror-comedy Milk & Serial, then premiered at Toronto in late 2025, set off a distributor bidding war involving A24 and NEON, and was finally picked up by Focus Features in a deal reported around fourteen million dollars. It opened wide in May to a near-perfect critical score. Barker, twenty-six, wrote, directed, and edited it himself.

He has been open about the seed: a Treehouse of Horror segment of The Simpsons in which Homer’s monkey’s paw grants wishes that curdle the instant they land. That is the spine of the thing, W. W. Jacobs’ old cautionary tale dressed in thrift-store clothes. Barker belongs to the same wave that gave us Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me, and Zach Cregger’s Weapons: comedians and internet natives who treat horror as comedy’s twin, all setup and release.

The shape of the curse

Where Cregger fractures a story across many viewpoints, Barker does the opposite: he locks us inside one boy’s head and never lets us out. We see everything through Bear, which means we are trapped in his cowardice as tightly as he is. The structure is a single, tightening spiral, each scene a fresh consequence of a decision he refuses to undo. The tonal architecture is the real trick. Obsession opens almost as a cringe comedy, an awkward will-they-won’t-they about a sweet, hopeless music-store clerk, and then it slides, scene by scene, into body horror and a bleak domestic bloodbath. You laugh, then you stop laughing, then you wish you could take the laugh back.

The horror is not that the wish fails. The horror is that it works exactly as asked.

How the wish unravels

The setup

Bear and Nikki

Michael Johnston plays Bear, a shy, sensitive twenty-something who has loved his childhood friend and coworker Nikki since before he had the words for it. Inde Navarrette plays Nikki, warm to him but plainly not interested in more, and Bear knows it, which is exactly why he can never say anything. Shopping for a gift, he wanders into an occult shop and finds a One Wish Willow, a tacky 1960s novelty toy that promises to grant a single wish when you snap the branch inside its box. The clerk warns him, dryly, that the customers who buy these tend to come back unhappy. Bear buys it anyway. Of course he does.

The wish

More than anyone in the world

He means to give it to Nikki. Instead, after losing his nerve yet again, he snaps the branch himself and wishes that she would love him more than anyone in the whole world. A small chime sounds. The wish takes immediately. By the next day Nikki adores him, and Bear, briefly, is the happiest he has ever been. The cruelty of the film is in how short that happiness lasts and how completely Bear has misunderstood what he asked for.

The unravelling

Not changed, replaced

The wish did not soften Nikki’s feelings. It overwrote her. What now lives in her body is a cursed version of Nikki whose devotion has no floor, an obsession that quickly curdles into possessiveness, then self-harm, then violence. She screams at things only she can see. When Bear phones the toy’s customer-service line begging to undo it, a voice tells him his choice was no less real for being his, then lets him hear the real Nikki screaming somewhere underneath. Later the genuine Nikki surfaces in a small, frightened voice while the entity sleeps, and begs him to kill her, because the only way to break a wish, he learns, is for the wisher to die. He refuses. Holding on is the most selfish thing he does, and the film knows it.

The reckoning

Everyone pays but Bear

The cursed Nikki kills Bear’s coworker Sarah, and Bear, too frightened to resist, helps hide the body before fleeing to his friend Ian. Ian, played by Barker’s longtime collaborator Cooper Tomlinson, does not believe a word of it, so he sarcastically snaps a One Wish Willow of his own and asks for a billion dollars. Cash rains down from the ceiling on the spot. The magic is real, and now it is everywhere. It does not save him. Bear returns home to find Sarah’s body posed and desecrated, and Nikki shoots Ian dead when he follows. The sweet little romance has become a charnel house, and Bear is the only one of his friends still breathing.

The turn, where the cringe becomes carnage

For its first stretch Obsession trades in social dread, the secondhand embarrassment of watching a man fumble his own life. Then it tips, hard, into gonzo horror. The violence arrives with the splattery, almost slapstick excess critics have rightly compared to the Evil Dead films, while the emotional register stays as grim as Hereditary or Talk to Me. The billion-dollar money storm is the hinge: a genuinely funny sight gag that also confirms the nightmare has no rules left, that anyone can pull the lever and the universe will simply obey, consequences be damned. From there the film commits fully to its own ugliness, never once letting the gore off the leash of its bleakness. It is schlock with a broken heart.

The reference shelf

Barker is working in a deep and specific tradition, and he knows it:

• The Monkey’s Paw — W. W. Jacobs’ 1902 story is the literal blueprint: a wish granted with monstrous literalism, and a wisher who learns that undoing it costs more than the wish was worth.
• The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror” — Barker’s stated spark, the segment that taught a generation the comic rhythm of a wish backfiring one ironic step at a time.
• Wishmaster & Wish Upon — the cursed-object horror lineage, where a charmed trinket grants desires and harvests the people around the wisher as the price.
• Evil Dead — the tonal license for gore that is excessive to the point of dark comedy without ever quite breaking into parody.
• Talk to Me & Hereditary — the modern A24-era register of grief and bodily dread, and another object (the embalmed hand) that invites the young to play with forces they cannot control.
• The Mist — the patron saint of the gut-punch ending, a film that earns its despair rather than flinching at the last second.
• Get Out, Barbarian, Weapons — the comedians-turned-horror-auteurs movement Barker now belongs to, where comic timing becomes a delivery system for terror.

What the title means

A lot of horror is built on men doing terrible things to women. Obsession aims at something sharper and more current: the fear of being the man everyone knows did it. Bear is not a leering villain. He is a sad, decent-seeming boy, which is precisely the point. His wish is an act of erasure dressed as romance, a refusal to accept a “no” so total that he simply rewrites the person who said it. The film treats consent as its real monster, and it never lets Bear off the hook for the comforting story he tells himself, that wanting her badly enough is the same as deserving her. The cursed Nikki is the wish made flesh: love with the personhood scooped out, devotion as a hostage situation.

Underneath that sits a study of codependency and obsessive love, the kind that mistakes need for tenderness. The cruelty Barker keeps returning to is that Bear gets exactly what he asked for and it is monstrous, because what he asked for was never really about Nikki at all. It was about being chosen, about not being alone, and the universe grants that with horrible precision.

After

The ending is as bleak as anything in recent mainstream horror, and it turns on the rule the film planted early: a wish only breaks when its maker dies. Cornered by the carnage he set in motion, Bear resolves to end his own life as the only way to free Nikki. He falters at the last moment, yet his attempt takes hold regardless. As he fades, the willow’s chime sounds again from the next room: Nikki has made a wish of her own, and Bear, suddenly serene, crosses the room to hold her. He dies in her arms. His death lifts his curse, and the real Nikki returns just in time to understand everything that has happened, recoiling from the body of the boy whose love cost her everyone she knew. Barker has said he shot a far darker version in which Nikki does not survive, and that the take in the film exists only because they let Navarrette try the survival version once, raw and unrehearsed. He has also said he is unlikely to revisit these characters, though he would happily widen the world.

For a film made on pocket change, Obsession has done what the best of this new wave do: announce a major voice and make the next one an event. Set it beside Weapons and you can see the shape of where horror is going, comedy-trained filmmakers using laughter to lower your guard before they cut. Bear only ever wanted to be loved. The film’s final, devastating joke is that he was, exactly as much as he asked for, and it killed everyone he cared about.