By Mo Moshaty

When we were kids, our parents had a whole arsenal of phrases designed to make the world feel dangerous. Stop making that face, or it’ll stay that way. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. And of course, the one that always felt a little more ominous than the others: be careful what you wish for.

In writer/director Curry Barker’s first feature film following his 2024 runaway hit Milk and Serial, that last phrase takes on a life of its own.

Baron (Michael Johnson) is painfully, hopelessly in love with his childhood friend and current co-worker, Nikki (Inde Navarrette). All he wants is a moment where he can finally confess his feelings and have her meet him there. He rehearses speeches. He practices poetic lines. He even role-plays the conversation with his best friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), trying to engineer the perfect moment.

None of it works.

Either the timing is wrong, or Baron freezes when the opportunity finally appears. And with Nikki about to hand in her two weeks’ notice, the window for that moment is rapidly closing.

Everything changes when Nikki accidentally loses her favorite necklace down the toilet. Baron initially plans to replace it with something sentimental, a small gesture to brighten her day. Instead, he lands on something much stranger: a novelty trinket called a One Wish Willow, advertised with a simple promise. One wish to change your life. After yet another failed attempt to confess his feelings, Baron takes the willow for himself. In a moment of desperation, he makes the wish.

He wants Nikki to love him more than anything else in the world.

And for a moment, it seems like the universe is listening.

Nikki’s behavior shifts almost immediately. At first, she seems confused, disoriented. Then the emotions arrive in violent waves: fear, devotion, adoration, panic. Her attachment to Baron grows intense, overwhelming, and frighteningly absolute.

It’s a honeymoon period Baron initially relishes. After all, the fantasy has finally arrived, much to the chagrin of BFFs Ian and Sarah played by Megan Lawless (who has a hard-core crush on Baron).

But horror knows the deal: love that has to be manufactured rarely stays romantic for long.

Cinema is filled with men trying to engineer devotion from women who never offered it freely. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo reshapes a woman into an obsession. In The Invisible Man, control masquerades as romance until it curdles into terror. Phantom of the Opera, anyone?

Barker’s film slides neatly into that lineage, asking a simple but unsettling question. What actually happens when the fantasy works?

Inde Navarrette’s performance as Nikki is extraordinary to watch unravel. Her emotional shifts feel volatile and dangerous, swinging from tenderness to homicidal mania with dizzying speed. It’s a performance that understands obsession as both intoxicating and deeply unstable.

Michael Johnson’s Baron becomes an equally fascinating study in manipulation from the meek. He isn’t malicious in the traditional sense; instead, he embodies a much more familiar horror: insecurity paired with the belief that there must be a shortcut to love.

There isn’t.

And Barker wastes no time showing us the consequences.

For a debut feature written, directed, and edited by the same filmmaker, Obsession is fucking impressive. The film moves like a tightening knot, pushing its premise from romantic fantasy into full-blown horror fable.

By the time the story reaches its breaking point, Barker has delivered something delightfully cruel: a cautionary tale about desire, control, and the terrifying moment when the thing you wanted most finally arrives.

Be careful what you wish for, indeed.