Every so often a horror film arrives that reminds you tension doesn't require a $100-million budget, twelve CGI monsters and somebody explaining the mythology every fifteen minutes.
Curry Barker's Obsession is lean, nasty and wonderfully unsettling, using strange centre-heavy framing, uncomfortable empty space and superb sound design to make even seemingly harmless moments feel wrong. You spend much of the film waiting for something awful to happen - and Barker knows exactly how long to make you wait.
It wouldn't work without Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette. Johnston makes Bear sympathetic, pathetic and increasingly difficult to read, while Navarrette is extraordinary as Nikki, moving between warmth, vulnerability, desperation and outright terror without turning her into a cartoon psychopath.
Crucially, the film leaves enough ambiguity for several interpretations: romantic obsession, male entitlement, coercive relationships, loneliness, even the uncomfortable question of whether Bear is victim, perpetrator or somehow both. That's why people leave Obsession arguing about what they've just watched.
Does the plot survive forensic examination? Absolutely not. There are holes you could reverse a truck through, rules that become decidedly convenient and several moments where asking one sensible question would threaten the entire enterprise. But strangely, I didn't care. Barker commits so completely to the mood, performances and escalating nightmare that logic becomes secondary - you're too busy being dragged along by it to start filling out the paperwork.
And audiences clearly felt the same. Made for reportedly around $750,000, Obsession has turned into one of 2026's extraordinary box-office stories, with recent reports putting its worldwide haul close to half a billion dollars.
In an era of bloated budgets, endless IP and films designed by committee, here's a 26-year-old filmmaker with a tiny budget, two superb leads and a genuinely strong idea showing Hollywood how much can be achieved with very little. Flawed? Definitely. But tense, distinctive, disturbing and an absolute breath of fresh air.
