Obsession Review: The Midas Touch, But the Gold Is Love
The numbers first, because they’re insane.
Obsession cost $750,000 to make. It has grossed over $400 million. That’s not a return on investment, that’s a clerical error in heaven. It’s the biggest horror movie of the year, it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes across nearly 300 reviews, and it was written, directed, and edited by a YouTuber making his first feature.
2026 is the year the YouTubers took over horror, and honestly? They can have it. The kids are alright.
The Setup: Be Careful What You Wish For Is the Whole Movie
Michael Johnston plays Bear, a music store employee and world-class hopeless romantic. He’s in love with his childhood friend Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette. Nikki does not feel the same way. She’s his friend. That’s it. That’s the boundary, and Bear respects it right up until he doesn’t.
Bear finds a gag gift called a “One Wish Willow.” It’s the kind of thing you buy as a joke. So he makes a wish as a joke: he wishes Nikki would love him more than anything in the world.
Wishes don’t come true. Right?
Right?
Wrong. The wish comes true. Nikki loves him more than anything in the world. And we mean exactly that. More than anything. In the world.
That’s the movie. Ninety-four percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the premise fits in two sentences.
The Cast Actually Shows Up
Johnston plays Bear as a guy who genuinely believes he’s the good guy in this story, which is what makes him so hard to look away from. He’s not a villain. He’s a nice guy who made one selfish wish and is about to learn what “nice guy” costs when the universe takes you literally.
But Inde Navarrette is the revelation here, and everyone who’s seen it agrees. She plays a woman who is physically incapable of doing anything besides loving Bear love with no off-switch, no boundaries, no self left over and it’s chilling. Not because she’s monstrous. Because she’s not. She’s playing total, absolute devotion, and total, absolute devotion is terrifying.
Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless play Ian and Sarah, the friends who have to watch this happen the movie’s stand-ins for the audience, screaming internally while being polite externally. And Andy Richter plays Carter. Yes, that Andy Richter. Conan’s Andy Richter. Doing horror. He’s good. Nothing about this movie is supposed to work on paper, and that includes the casting.
The Midas of It All
Okay. Here’s the part we actually wanted to talk about.
Everybody knows the Monkey’s Paw. W. W. Jacobs, 1902: a mummified paw grants three wishes, and every wish comes true in the worst possible way. You wish for money, your son dies in a factory accident, and the company pays you exactly what you wished for as compensation. The horror is the twist.
But Obsession isn’t really a Monkey’s Paw story. It’s a Midas story. And the difference matters.
King Midas didn’t get tricked. His wish was granted exactly as he asked: everything he touched turned to gold. No twist. No fine print. Just gold, all gold, only gold, forever. His bread turned to gold. His wine turned to gold. He hugged his daughter and she turned to gold. Midas starved to death in a palace full of wealth surrounded by everything he wanted, unable to touch any of it.
Nobody scammed Midas. The wish worked perfectly. That was the problem.
That’s Bear. He didn’t wish for mutual, healthy, functional love. He wished that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. And she does. Totally. Exclusively. Without limit, without rest, without a self left over to love him back like a person. He got exactly what he asked for, and what he asked for was a nightmare because he asked like a man who never thought about what “more than anything in the world” actually means.
Too much of a good thing isn’t a metaphor here. It’s the plot.
Gold doesn’t stop being gold because you have too much of it. That’s what makes it gold. Love doesn’t stop being love because there’s too much of it that’s what makes this movie so upsetting. Navarrette isn’t playing a monster. She’s playing love with the boundaries removed. And love with the boundaries removed is indistinguishable from a haunting.
Midas learned that wealth without limit is starvation. Bear learns that love without limit is suffocation. Same wish. Same mistake. Different metal.
How Barker Pulled It Off
Curry Barker came up on YouTube Milk & Serial put him on the map and Obsession is his debut feature. He wrote it, directed it, and edited it himself, which on a $750,000 budget isn’t auteurism, it’s survival. Focus Features picked it up after it tore through TIFF’s Midnight section and Fantastic Fest, with Jason Blum executive producing, and it’s been printing money ever since.
The craft is lean and mean. One hundred and eight minutes, no fat. Barker pushes everything to the limit one festival review called it “an insane journey paved with blood-soaked violence and no shortage of nightmare fuel,” and gave it four stars, and that’s about right. This isn’t elevated horror that’s embarrassed to be horror. It’s a wish-gone-wrong movie that understands the wish is the scariest part, and then it has the nerve to show you why.
The low budget is doing secret work here, too. There’s nowhere for the movie to hide behind CGI or spectacle, so all the horror has to come from two people in a room and a wish that won’t stop coming true. It’s the most expensive-feeling cheap movie we’ve seen in years.
What Didn’t Land
The outcome is telegraphed from the start even the rave reviews admit it. You know where this is going by minute ten. Barker’s trick is making the journey surprising even when the destination isn’t, and he mostly pulls it off, but nobody’s getting shocked by the shape of the ending.
A couple of the friend characters are thin. They exist to react, to escalate, to be imperiled which is fine, it’s a horror movie, but you’ll forget their names by the parking lot.
And the third act goes so hard it risks tipping from horror into endurance test. There’s a line between “I can’t look away” and “I need a minute,” and this movie tap-dances on it for about twenty minutes. Your mileage may vary. Ours varied.
Our Verdict
7/10.
Obsession is the Midas myth with the gold swapped for love made for three-quarters of a million dollars by a YouTuber, backed by Blumhouse, and currently the biggest horror movie of the year. It understands something most wish stories miss: the curse isn’t the twist. The curse is getting exactly what you asked for.
King Midas got his gold. Bear got his girl. Both of them got exactly what they wished for.
That’s the whole movie. That’s why it works.
It’s streaming on Peacock now. Watch it, then be very careful how you phrase your next wish.
