{"id":124567,"date":"2025-09-06T15:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T15:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/124567\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T15:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T15:53:09","slug":"curry-barker-made-one-of-2025s-best-horror-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/124567\/","title":{"rendered":"Curry Barker Made One of 2025’s Best Horror Films"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

We\u2019re rapidly approaching the point where the most reliable route to becoming a horror director is to launch a short-form comedy career. Jordan Peele shocked the world with \u201cGet Out,\u201d Zach Cregger made it a pattern with \u201cBarbarian\u201d and \u201cWeapons,\u201d<\/a> Danny and Michael Philippou<\/a> jumped on the train with \u201cTalk to Me\u201d and \u201cBring Her Back.\u201d Now, YouTube prankster Curry Barker<\/a> has released one of the best horror films of 2025.<\/p>\n

\u201cObsession<\/a>\u201d begins with the simplest of horror premises: Bear (Michael Johnston) is a shy and sensitive music store employee who can\u2019t find the courage to ask his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) on a date. Rather than be honest with her and tell her how he actually feels, he wanders into a woo-woo crystal store and buys a One Wish Willow, a kitschy antique toy from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when they snap a branch in half. The cashier warns him that most of the customers who buy them have complained about the results, but it wouldn\u2019t be much of a horror movie if he listened.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a> \"'Fuze'\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

After dropping Nikki off at home after a night of bar trivia with their other co-workers (and weirding her out with his attempt to flirt while insisting they\u2019re just friends), he snaps the willow and makes a simple wish: that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. It isn\u2019t long before she emerges from her house and asks to go home with him, and Bear thinks he just purchased a one-way ticket out of the friend zone. <\/p>\n

Suddenly, Nikki is always horny for Bear, is eager to show public affection, and spends so much time with him that she basically moves in. For Bear, the new arrangement is great about 99 percent of the time\u2026 the only drawback is that Nikki occasionally snaps back into her old self and screams in utter terror for a few seconds, before resuming the love-bombing.<\/p>\n

Even before the movie spirals out of control, Bear and Nikki\u2019s mutual friends start pointing out how weird this all is. The other girls at work heard Nikki talking about how she saw Bear as a little brother mere hours before she turned into a lovestruck teenager, and it becomes clear that she\u2019s going through something. Rumors start to fly \u2014 guesses range from drug addiction to a full mental breakdown, but somehow nobody guesses \u201cnovelty \u201960s wish-granting toy with deadly consequences\u201d \u2014 but the one thing they can all agree on is that Bear is taking advantage of a girl in a vulnerable state. <\/p>\n

Social connections begin to dry up, party invitations get lost in the mail, and Bear soon finds himself with nobody to turn to when the new Nikki starts stabbing herself with broken glass, cooking his dead cat, and sealing his doors with duct tape to prevent him from leaving the house. All that he can do is call the customer service line on the back of the package \u2014 but when he hears that they have the soul of the real Nikki screaming for help, the hopeless romantic realizes that he bit off far more than he could chew.<\/p>\n

\u201cObsession\u201d is proof that the Cregger-ification of 2020s horror is in full effect, as its combination of sadistic violence, ironic needle drops, and comedy mined from people responding to tragedy in pathetically self-serving ways will merit plenty of comparisons to \u201cBarbarian\u201d and \u201cWeapons.\u201d It also wisely continues the recent trend of allowing forces of unexplained evil to simply exist in its world, finding its social commentary in the way humans react to things they don\u2019t understand. Instead of turning the actual evils into metaphors.<\/p>\n

The film<\/a>\u2018s most compellingly unpredictable thrust lies in Barker\u2019s choice to tell a story of something objectively horrible \u2014 in this case, a guy taking a woman\u2019s entire soul away and turning her into a psychotic replica of herself so that he can have sex with her body and pretend they\u2019re actually dating \u2014 exclusively from the perspective of the perpetrator. Navarrette delivers a brilliantly twisted performance as what\u2019s left of Nikki, but given that her real self is stuck shrieking in call-center purgatory and only gets to emerge for seconds at a time, Bear is the human whose eyes we see everything through.<\/p>\n

A sizable majority of the horror genre is built around men doing heinous things to women, with results ranging from deeply misogynistic to cathartically feminist. But \u201cObsession\u201d is built around a much more contemporary male fear: being the problematic guy whose entire social circle knows he took advantage of a girl and wants nothing to do with him. <\/p>\n

When we meet Bear, he isn\u2019t some monster just waiting to snap. He\u2019s a sensitive guy, frustrated by his lack of romantic success, and his heartbreak pushes him to put his own desires over his friend\u2019s autonomy just long enough to ruin both of their lives. He doesn\u2019t physically assault her, but he wades into a morally gray area for purely self-serving purposes, clearly haunted by the guilt of the irreversible cycle he set in motion. He also hates the fact that his friends are correct in their criticisms of him. (The fact that a movie like \u201cObsession\u201d can even exist is evidence of the tiniest bit of social progress, as it would only work in a society where men feel like there are real social consequences to sexual misconduct.) Barker shows him no mercy for his actions, but leaves the door open to darker introspection. For most viewers, the terrifying question shouldn\u2019t be \u201cCould I end up like Nikki?\u201d \u2014 rather, it\u2019s, \u201cCould I or someone I know be tempted to do what Bear did?\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that what happens to him is worse than what happens to her (at least at first), but Barker almost seems to be daring his audience to ask themselves how many \u201cgood guys\u201d in the theater could be capable of a similar lapse in judgment under certain circumstances. Men and women will experience two very different types of fears when they consider the answer, but \u201cObsession\u201d should keep everyone awake long after they get home from seeing it.<\/p>\n

Grade: B+<\/p>\n

\u201cObsession\u201d premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re rapidly approaching the point where the most reliable route to becoming a horror director is to launch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,65684,75,1554,68813,209,15896],"class_list":["post-124567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-curry-barker","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-obsession","tag-reviews","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}