The romantic horror film that has shattered all records
'Obsession', by young director Curry Baker, has ousted all blockbusters in its US premiere
- Directed and written by: Curry Barker.109 minutes. United States (2025).Starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, and Megan Lawless.
Like a reserve team player who scores the goal that wins the Champions League for their team. That's how unexpected the success of Obsession. The good feelings that this independent production by filmmaker However, although it seems to have come out of nowhere, Curry Barker has been chasing scares and chills on the internet for some years now. Like other emerging talents in the genre –the Philippou brothers or Kane Parsons, author of Backrooms–, the director made a name for himself with a YouTube channel where he has posted sketches and short films that oscillate between comedy and horror (such as The chair, where we can detect the germ of ideas exploited in
Obsession: characters with mercurial mood swings and a penchant for self-harming their skulls), and even a first feature film, Milk & serial, made for $800. With these precedents, it is possible that the ludicrous three-quarters of a million that Obsession, we can detect the germ of ideas exploited in Weapons, last year's terrifying hit – and wishes that his friend Nikki would fall madly in love with him, and this sets in motion an esoteric mechanism that is impossible to control.
The classic premise of “be careful what you wish for,” defined by W.W. Jacobs in the short story The Monkey's Paw, serves Barker to transform the dynamics of the screwball comedy, where women revolutionize their partners, into a territory of abjection. The portrait of the male protagonist is unappealing, almost an incel who believes he has the right to impose his romantic will. For her part, Navarrette turns Nikki into an extraordinary mask of absolute sensations, halfway between Emily Watson's childlike devotion in Breaking the Waves and Isabelle Adjani's madcap volatility in The Possession. From this dramatic framework, Barker lets the humor get lost, creates unexpected frightening rhymes (Nikki's gestures follow the hesitant pace of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's specters) and installs in our memory the trauma of a call to a hellish technical service that has a direct line to hell.
