How <em>Obsession </em>Turned Gen-Z Relationship Anxiety Into the Best Horror Movie of the Year
Helmed by first-time director Curry Barker, the film is already breaking box-office records.
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Horror has always been the genre brave enough to say what romantic comedies won't. Obsession, director Curry Barker's incisive debut, does exactly that — weaponizing the classic "love potion" trope to autopsy something far more mundane and far more dangerous: a young man who can't communicate, won't be vulnerable, and ultimately mistakes possession for devotion.
The setup is deceptively simple. Bear (Michael Johnson) is consumed by feelings for his best friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) but too paralyzed by rejection anxiety to say a word. Rather than risk the conversation, he snaps a wooden wish stick — a One Wish Willow from some woo-woo shop — and wishes for her love. It works. Nikki becomes demonically, violently, irreversibly obsessed with him. The horror isn't supernatural, though. It's the part that comes before the wish: a boy so deep inside his own romantic fantasy that an actual woman's interiority never quite registers. According to Harper's Bazaar, Barker uses Bear's passivity not just as character flaw but as cultural indictment — a portrait of Gen-Z romantic disillusionment shaped by pandemic isolation, post-#MeToo anxiety, and a socialization gap that's left an entire generation unable to simply talk to each other.
The "Nice Guy" Is the Monster
What makes Obsession sting is its refusal to let Bear play victim. In the film's most damning scene, he calls a helpline listed on the wish stick's box — desperate, panicked — and actually hears the real Nikki screaming in agony through the receiver. The operator offers to connect him to her. He hangs up. This is the same man who endures her possession-fueled violence, her catatonia, her self-harm — and only decides something must be done when she commits murder. The film isn't subtle about the math here. The Atlantic declared a full "sex recession" back in 2018; The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino memorably wrote that Gen-Z seemed to be losing its appetite at a Vegas buffet of carnality. Barker's argument is that the drought starts well before anyone gets to the bedroom — it starts the moment vulnerability becomes optional.
The film's most devastating stretch arrives when the real Nikki briefly breaks through the demonic possession to beg Bear to kill her. His response — "What's so bad about being with me?" — is played almost earnestly, which is precisely the point. He genuinely doesn't understand what he's done. The girl in agony in front of him is still just scenery in his own love story. When the curse finally breaks — triggered not by Bear's heroism but by his accidental overdose — Nikki wakes up to bloodshed and wreckage, the physical residue of a boy who never once asked what she wanted.
The most terrifying thing about Obsession isn't the demon. It's how recognizable Bear is — and how long everyone around him waits for him to grow up.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
