Obsession Review: The Indie Horror Film You Won’t Stop Thinking About

The following contains spoilers for Obsession (2025).

Obsession is an independent horror film about Bear (Michael Johnston), a mild-mannered young man who desperately wants the affection of Niki (newcomer Inde Navarrette). To get it, he makes a wish on a wishing willow — asking that Niki love him more than anyone in the world — and inadvertently traps her in a deeply unsettling possession curse.

At its core, Obsession is built on the classic monkey’s paw premise: your wish will come true in the worst, most terrible way imaginable.

What sets the film apart from the average genre entry, however, is not its horror mechanics but its psychological depth.

Blood and violence are par for the course in horror, but Obsession invests more heavily than most in its psychological architecture. That investment is what makes the film linger — and it is all the more remarkable given that the entire production was made on a reported budget of just $750,000.

At first, the audience’s worst assessment of Bear might simply be frustrated exasperation — he is too timid to confess his feelings to the girl he likes. But as the story progresses and the signs of Niki’s deteriorating state become impossible to ignore, Bear’s responses reveal something far more troubling. When he realizes something is wrong, he calls the wishing willow’s customer service line and asks to modify the wish — not cancel it. When he hears Niki’s soul screaming on the other end of the line, he hangs up rather than trying to save her. When Niki’s true self surfaces in her sleep and begs him to kill her, he dismisses it with a breezy “What’s so bad about being with me?”

When things spiral beyond his control and he learns from the customer service line that the only way to end it all is for the wishing person to die, Bear considers taking his own life. He sits in a bathroom, unable to pull the trigger, then turns to pills — only to attempt to make himself vomit them back up. Then Niki makes her own wish on the wishing willow. We can infer what she wishes for: that Bear love her in return. And in that instant, we see Bear swallow the pills without a moment’s hesitation — and on his face, for the first time, is an expression we have never seen before. Genuine love for Niki. It is also, in that same moment, that we understand with certainty: Bear never loved Niki before this. Only now that he actually loves her does he truly want her to be freed — and only now is he willing to die for it.

By this point, the film has completed its portrait of Bear: a selfish, cowardly “nice guy” who never truly loved anyone yet craved being loved by someone more than anyone else in the world. But just because he seems harmless — just because he reads as sympathetic, and just because each of his evasions seems to come with a ready excuse — does that give us permission to overlook the quiet, invisible harm he causes to everyone around him?

If Bear is the film’s moral reckoning, Niki is its beating heart — and the performance that brings her to life is extraordinary.

Inde Navarrette’s performance is genuinely remarkable. Her shifts between Niki’s true self and the possessed persona are executed with such precision that the audience immediately knows at any given moment whose will is behind her eyes. Whenever the camera holds on her for an extended beat, a creeping tension sets in — something is surely about to happen — and even a simple smile is enough to send a chill down your spine. That is a testament to how effectively this film builds its atmosphere of dread through pure performance. It makes you genuinely eager to see whether Navarrette’s work here will earn her recognition during awards season.

Beyond the scares, Obsession also has something genuinely interesting to say about love itself.

Does loving someone more than anyone in the world mean loving them more than yourself? The film seems to suggest as much: in her later stages, Niki begins losing control of her body entirely — scenes of incontinence and physical self-neglect make the possession’s toll viscerally apparent. Earlier, before the curse fully takes hold, Bear and Niki enjoy a period of genuine happiness together as a normal couple — until Niki begins fixating on whether Bear loves her enough, whether he loves her the way she loves him, and spiraling into a possessiveness that becomes unbearable to witness. Of course, Bear’s wish was never predicated on loving Niki in return — and yet, this is a dynamic that maps uncomfortably onto real life. We instinctively assume that in a loving relationship, if we love someone, that love should be matched equally. Reality, more often than not, has other ideas.

There is also an interesting counterpoint in the film’s secondary character, whose wish is for a billion dollars — which, honestly, was probably most people’s first instinct too (Same here). Of course, he pays his own price for it. Love, money, power — these seem to be the three things none of us can resist wishing for when given the chance.

So: if you were handed a wishing willow, what would you wish for? And what would you be willing to become obsessed with?

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