The Curse Was Never the Willow: On Obsession (2026)

20 July 2026

Every year I go looking for it — the movie of the year, the one I’ll still be thinking about in December when everyone’s doing their lists. Some years it finds me early. Sinners did that to me. The Substance did that to me. I fully meant to write about both of those here, sat down with good intentions more than once, and then — well, the blog sat untended for a while, the way blogs do when life gets loud and “I’ll write it properly later” quietly becomes never. (You know how it is. Or maybe you don’t, in which case, congratulations on your discipline, I hate that for you.)

Here’s my thing, though, and it’s probably why I keep circling back to movies like this instead of the ones everyone else is talking about that week: a lot of people watch movies to escape. I get that, I don’t judge it, sometimes I want that too. But my actual favourite kind of escape is a movie that makes me think — that has a point of view it’s trying to get across, a theme it’s actually chewing on, not just plot mechanics dressed up in a two-hour runtime.

Despite my previous love letter to the movie, Mandy, I think filmmaking is art, and I think art should have a reason to exist beyond “here is a sequence of events.” Something to say. An opinion being argued, even quietly. And Obsession — a horror movie about a cursed novelty item from a guy whose last big project was a YouTube short — is somehow the one that finally dragged me back to this blog to talk about it properly.

So here we are. Let’s talk about Bear Bailey.

Sweet, awkward, hopelessly pining Bear — the music store employee who’s loved Nikki from afar and just can’t seem to ask her out (relatable, honestly, right up until it isn’t). If you’ve watched even one romantic comedy made in the last three decades, you know this guy. He’s the protagonist. He’s the one we’re supposed to want to win. And that’s exactly the trap Curry Barker built Obsession to spring on you.

Also — his name is Bear. I refuse to believe that’s an accident in a movie this deliberate about its themes. We spent a solid cultural minute litigating “the man or the bear” as a hypothetical about who’s safer to be alone with. And Barker just names his monster Bear and lets you spend two hours finding out.

Here’s the setup: Bear finds a cursed little trinket called the One Wish Willow, snaps it in half (as one does), and wishes that Nikki would fall in love with him. She does. Instantly, violently, obsessively. And for about the first act, the movie plays it exactly the way every rom-com has trained us to expect a wish-fulfillment story to play — awkward guy finally gets the girl, cue the swelling music. Except the swelling music is actually a horror score, and it’s been telling on Bear the entire time.

The twist isn’t the twist you think it is

The genre convention here is The Monkey’s Paw — wish for something, suffer a horrifying unintended consequence, object was cursed all along, don’t mess with forces beyond your understanding, etc. Barker leans hard into that structure early, and it’s a great bit of misdirection, because it lets you keep believing Bear is the victim of the story. Except — and this is the part that makes the movie so much smarter than it lets on — Barker has said flat-out that the Willow isn’t actually cursed. The curse isn’t the object. The curse is the wish. Bear didn’t get unlucky. He got exactly what he asked for, and what he asked for was another person’s free will.

The lighting is doing narrative work

One of the sharpest visual choices is how differently “possessed” Nikki gets lit compared to the flickers of real Nikki underneath — there’s a version of her, caught at certain angles and in certain light, that reads as visibly off, a person wearing her own face wrong. It’s subtle enough that you could miss it, but it’s the film’s way of never fully letting you forget that there are two women occupying this performance: the one Bear wished for, and the one who’s still trapped in there screaming. The lighting is doing the thing the plot won’t say outright — reminding you, visually, that consent left the building the moment Bear broke that willow.

That’s what makes the “kill me” scene so devastating. Real Nikki claws her way to the surface long enough to beg Bear to end her life, and instead of hearing that as what it plainly is — a person telling him, as clearly as a human being can tell another human being anything, that this is unbearable — Bear processes it as a testament to how badly the curse has twisted her. Even her plea for death gets absorbed back into his narrative about how much she must be suffering with him, rather than because of him. It’s the “she doesn’t know what’s good for her yet” logic taken to its most literal, horrifying endpoint: even her explicit, desperate words aren’t enough to break through his conviction that he knows better.

The cat, and the smaller horror it points to

The cat’s death gets waved off as a household accident — meds left somewhere a cat could get into them — and it’s worth sitting with the fact that this isn’t a moment of malice. It’s carelessness. Bear didn’t mean for the cat to die; he just didn’t think hard enough about what he was leaving lying around to prevent it. Which is, in miniature, the whole movie. Nobody’s arguing Bear set out to hurt anyone. The horror of Obsession was never that its lead is secretly sinister — it’s that he’s the kind of thoughtless that gets other beings killed without ever registering as villainy to the person responsible. The cat is a small, ordinary tragedy, and that’s exactly why it fits: this is a story about the damage caused by someone who never had to think about consequences, not by someone actively choosing harm.

Which makes the cooking scene land so hard. If real Nikki is capable of clawing to the surface for a moment as desperate as “kill me,” then the unspeakable act of cooking the cat reads less like the curse acting through her and more like Nikki weaponising the one thing she still has some control over — trying to make herself so monstrous, so unlovable, that Bear will finally let her go. And the fact that he almost pushes past it anyway is the most damning beat in the whole film. Even confronted with something that horrific, some part of him is still doing the math on whether he can keep her.

This is what Bear wanted

When Nikki turns on Sarah, she says it directly to Bear: this is what you wanted. It’s the film’s thesis statement, delivered in the least subtle possible way, and it works anyway because by that point you’ve been shown enough to know she’s right. Nothing that’s happened is a deviation from what Bear asked for — it’s the wish, running to completion. He wanted a version of Nikki whose feelings for him overrode everything else, including her own judgment, including other people’s safety. He got exactly that. The violence isn’t the curse malfunctioning. It’s the curse working.

That line also retroactively reframes the Ian of it all. Ian spends the first part of the movie being the guy who helps Bear work up the nerve to go after Nikki (despite his own conditions and bad advise) — the supportive friend, cheering him on (even if he has his own agenda) — while apparently having hooked up with Nikki himself for years. It’s a strange, almost throwaway detail until you sit with what it implies: Ian knew, on some level, that Nikki was a person with her own desires and history that had nothing to do with Bear, and coached him toward her anyway. Bear “getting the girl” is kind of framed as the endpoint of the story rather than asking whether the girl was ever actually available to be gotten. Ian’s not the villain, but he’s proof the entitlement wasn’t just Bear’s private failing — it’s the water everyone in his world was swimming in.

Which brings me to the ending, and the detail that undid me most: Bear tries to kill himself before Nikki ever makes her own wish, and he can’t do it. Even faced with the full horror of what he’s caused, even wanting — or believing he wants — to undo it, his body won’t let him follow through. It’s the most honest moment in the film, because it refuses him the easy redemption of a guy who sees the truth and immediately sacrifices himself to fix it. He hesitates. The instinct for self-preservation, or maybe just the same refusal to let go that got Nikki into this in the first place, wins out even at the end. He doesn’t get to be a tragic hero who finally does the right thing. He gets to be a man who, even at rock bottom, still can’t quite manage it.

Obsession doesn’t need a mythology-heavy villain, because the real monster is a familiar archetype — the guy who never had to examine what “loving someone” meant to him — wearing a magic trinket instead of a grand gesture. The lighting, the “kill me” scene, the cat, the name, “this is what you wanted,” the father lie, the failed ending — none of it is there to shock you with new information. It’s there to make sure that by the time the movie’s done, you can’t pretend you weren’t shown, over and over, exactly what Bear was choosing not to see.

I know we are just past the halfway point of 2026, but this might be it folks — my movie of the year. If you know me even a little, this probably isn’t a surprise. Give me a movie that’s actually arguing something about consent, autonomy, who gets to be a person with their own will intact and I will follow it anywhere, cursed trinket and all. 

Obsession didn’t just ask me to watch, it made me reckon with something long after the credits rolled past. No notes.