What viral thriller Obsession reveals about consent and desire
Filmmaker Curry Barker's breakout film is marketed as horror but works as a cautionary tale about manipulation, control, and the danger of getting exactly what you wish for.
Curry Barker's Obsession is not a horror film, however it's marketed. Like Jordan Peele's Get Out, studios do these films a disservice by classifying them under a genre that filmgoers avoid altogether. But rest assured, Obsession is simply a psychological thriller with a supernatural element. Only the ominous music makes it scary.
Written and directed by Barker, a popular YouTuber whose 2024 feature film debut Milk & Serial (made for $800 USD) was lauded by critics, his follow-up has become a TikTok sensation and box office hit. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September as part of Midnight Madness programming, and opened in theatres May 15.
Underneath the viral thriller's supernatural premise is a careful-what-you-wish-for plotline that works, at its core, as a story about consent, control, and the dangers of getting exactly what you wish for.
Pretty much all of us have wished—with a blow of a candle, an eyelash on the cheek, a four-leaf clover—that a certain boy or girl of our dreams would love us back. By applying W.W. Jacobs' 1902-penned three-wishes curse The Monkey's Paw to a romantic plot, Obsession becomes another careful-what-you-wish-for scenario. That is the premise that becomes a nightmare. Dig deeper and it's a story about consent.
Baron, nicknamed Bear, pines for Nikki, his childhood friend and co-worker at Cassell's Music shop, but just doesn't have the guts to tell her how he feels. He is more than a quintessential lovesick puppy dog, gazing at her with creepy infatuation. He sickens the viewer from the get-go for his embarrassing behaviour. Who would've thought the tables would turn?
When Nikki loses a crystal necklace down the drain, Baron goes into a new age shop to buy her a replacement as a surprise gift and winds up adding the One Wish Willow novelty from the counter. It's surprising the film isn't named after this crucial prop. After the wish is made, the film transforms from romance setup into a careful examination of what happens when desire becomes unmoored from consent.
The film's genius is in how it inverts the lovesick-male-lead trope. Instead of the usual narrative payoff where persistence wins the girl, Obsession asks: what if getting exactly what you wish for reveals the rot underneath? What if the problem was never whether she loved him back, but the fact that his desire for her was never about her at all?
Barker's direction is precise. The film builds dread not through jump scares but through the slow realization that the supernatural element is almost beside the point. What's truly unsettling is how easily desire can curdle into control, how the fantasy of being loved can mask the reality of not respecting another person's autonomy.
For a film that became a TikTok sensation, Obsession is surprisingly smart about the mechanics of manipulation. It's a cautionary tale for a generation that's grown up documenting desire—the likes, the follows, the comments—as if they were a form of intimacy. The film suggests they're not. And it suggests that sometimes the scariest thing isn't a supernatural curse. It's realizing you've become someone you didn't want to be.