Apologies for the lengthy preamble to this review, but I want to bring up something before I talk about the movie in question. If you don’t care about box-office performance, skip to the pros & cons.

Hollywood continues to struggle in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters and put a lot of things on hold. There are plenty of factors that have contributed to its steady decline other than lockdowns, however. I could go on at length about the endless bad decisions that have been made in the entertainment industry, but the one I think that feels pertinent to the review of the day is the ”ballooning budgets” problem.

Hollywood, like a heroin addict, has been chasing the blockbuster dragon the past few years, hoping that every summer will be like 2019, in which 9 movies made more than a billion dollars worldwide at the box office—and they were mostly made up of superhero or “live-action” remakes of animated movies. The studio heads clearly took those results to heart because they have been willing to pump more and more money into the same types of movies for years with little to no creativity or inspiration.

Seven years of the same garbage and uninspired attempts at making movies no one wants to watch have brought us to a summer in which Supergirl, a movie that allegedly needed to make around $500m to break even with its production and marketing costs, couldn’t earn more than $130m worldwide. It’s a disaster of epic proportions and should be an important lesson for multiple reasons, including the fact that it got outperformed at the theaters by a horror movie that had been out for weeks already.

Obsession, a small horror movie made for reportedly less than $800,000, was released in theaters on May 15, 2026. Due to positive word-of-mouth, it garnered significant traction with the public and became the #1 movie at the box office for weeks. By the time Supergirl came out, Obsession had made more than Supergirl ever would. By the second Tuesday of Supergirl’s release, its daily revenues at domestic theatres dropped below what Obsession was still pulling at the box office—almost two months since it came out in theatres! As I have mentioned many times before, horror movies can make a killing (pun intended) because of how cheap they are to produce and how much they can potentially pull in at the box office—it worked for Sinners last year. This year, smaller horror movies like Iron Lung, Obsession, and The Backrooms have only further cemented that fact with incredible success, with Obsession pulling in more than $400,000,000 worldwide.

With success like that, can the movie live up to the hype? Or was the general public obsessed with another movie for no reason other than the memes?

Pros

Solid acting from the small cast, especially Inde Navarrette
Straightforward premise resembles a Twilight Zone plot that is easy to understand
Effective dark humor scattered throughout, sometimes subtly
Creepy moments with some good lines of dialogue
Good use of lighting to affect the atmosphere or how a character’s features appear
Decent makeup effects and use of camera effects to make a character’s movement feel uncanny
Good sound design and musical score to make the tone uneasy at times
Under two hours long

Cons

Side characters are not very complex or interesting
Certain plot points come and go; some backstories to characters seem pointless
Predictable and unsurprising

Plot & Thoughts

Baron “Bear” (Michael Johnston) has a crush on his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). It’s no small crush either. He’s scrolling her posts on social media at night. He thinks about her when he’s distraught. He’s preparing speeches to her at diners with waitresses while his friend Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) watches on in shame and pity. He’s also a coward who fears rejection so much that he just cannot seem to work up the courage to ask her out.

One night, Bear gets a call from Nikki asking him to come out drinking with their friends and co-workers. She mentions losing a necklace during the call, so Bear stops by a local store to buy her a replacement but doesn’t find one that would suit her. Instead, he picks up a One Wish Willow novelty gift in which a person makes a wish before they snap it in two. After a trivia night at the bar with everyone, including Bear’s other co-worker, Sarah (Megan Lawless)—who has a crush on him—Bear drives Nikki home. He’s had multiple chances all night but still fails to ask her the important question, even when she pushes the issue and lets him know that “now’s the time” to let her know. Instead, he says goodnight, and in his frustration for being a cowardly cuck, he makes the wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world before snapping the One Wish Willow in two. Suddenly, Nikki seems much more interested in Bear. It’s fine at first, but as anyone would expect, that doesn’t last, and things start to get out of control as Bear’s wish holds a lot of baggage.

It’s a simple, familiar premise that is easy to understand and can create some fun horror. It’s the classic monkey’s paw or djinn wish scenario in that you can make a wish and it will come true, but at what cost? There are loads of different stories you could tell with this premise, and the story that Obsession tells is quite effective and entertaining because it very overtly plays the concepts of love and free will in interesting ways, while also being a scenario that many audiences can relate to of having a controlling and jealous lover.

I had a lot of fun with Obsession, due in no small part to Inde Navarrette’s performance. She does a phenomenal job of being extremely creepy while also being somewhat tragic. One of her big strengths in the role is how she’s able to contort her face in certain ways to make uncanny expressions that really emphasize the creepiness of the moment. Her sudden jolts of emotion make every scene with the new Nikki a wild-card experience because you don’t know if she’s going to freak out in a violent way or just retreat into a quiet, wounded state. She carries the film with how effective she is at being on the razor’s edge of doing something crazy. There are several sequences in which lighting and shadow are used to show just a few features of hers, like her lips or reflections off her eyes, while the rest of her remains in the dark, as though Bear is only talking to a shade of Nikki, rather than a real person.

The performances, the creative use of lighting, and the lo-fi musical score really help add to the atmosphere and the tension, which make up for the lack of character complexity and predictability. As soon as I saw the trailers for Obsession, I knew what I was getting, and I wasn’t really surprised by anything that happened. Likewise, aside from Nikki and Bear, the characters are mostly one-note. Bear’s not that complex either, but there are at least some pieces of dialogue and actions that he takes to clue you in to how much worse of a person he is than just a coward who cannot ask a girl out.

Bear is initially meant to be a sympathetic character in how he’s introduced and portrayed in the first act as a young guy who fears rejection. His prepping to ask out Nikki with a waitress in a restaurant is endearing in what he says and how the waitress reacts to his confessions of love. The following scene involving the tragic loss of a pet, a very relatable situation, is one in which we feel sympathy, but it’s also the first indication that Bear is not wholly innocent, with just a few minor details.

The way the pet dies suggests that Bear is not the most responsible individual and doesn’t take much accountability for how the pet died (because it is his fault). Also, while he’s grieving in his bedroom, he says, “Why can she just?” It’s an abridged line that we, as the audience, can understand and know who he’s referring to. It’s also a line that says a lot in a little. It tells us how much he’s thinking about Nikki, almost suggesting that he thinks about her in an aspect that you could interpret in multiple negative ways. As the story progresses, Bear makes more decisions and rationalizations that reveal what type of person he really is. Some of those moments include scenes that are effectively creepy or add to the mystical elements of the film’s premise. There is one in which Bear calls the support line for the One Wish Willow that does a bit of world-building, as well as adds to the horror of the story in a cool, simple way.

Where Obsession falters is only in minor nitpicks about where certain plot points or details come and go, seemingly out of nowhere. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to a lie that Nikki tells Bear about her dad, which is treated with a lot of gravity and seriousness, but Bear blows it off, and it eventually stops coming up. There’s also a detail about a past between Nikki and another character that is thrown in towards the end and really serves no significant purpose to the story. Otherwise, the script is relatively tight and works well to tell an entertaining story.

TL;DR

Obsession exploded at the box office and made a ton of money for simply being a good horror movie. It didn’t necessarily blow me away, as it was a pretty predictable affair, but it has a lot going for it in a good way. Great acting, interesting lighting, good direction, a solid musical score, a short runtime, and a relatable story all make Obsession an easy recommendation.

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