Obsession finally lands where Broomfield can actually watch it, and the timing couldn't be better
If you've been circling the horror shelf at the Redbox outside King Soopers or scrolling past it on your streaming service of choice without committing, here's your nudge: “Obsession,” the 2025 supernatural horror film from writer-director Curry Barker, has had five months since its May release to work its way onto home platforms, and with October now underway and Broomfield settling into that stretch of shorter days and porch-light evenings that makes a horror movie feel appropriate again, this is as good a week as any to finally press play. You don't need a theater for this one. You need a dark living room and a little patience.
The real story behind “Obsession” isn't a production scandal or a decade-long delay, it's that this is a genuinely small, independent genre picture that had to earn its audience the hard way, through festival buzz and word of mouth rather than a marketing blitz. Barker wrote, directed, and edited the film himself, which is the kind of triple duty that either signals a singular vision or a budget too tight to hire more hands, and in this case it's probably both. That do-it-yourself DNA matters when you're watching it, because the movie has the rough, personal texture of someone trying to say something specific rather than hit genre beats for a studio note sheet.
The premise is simple and a little uncomfortable, which is exactly what you want from this kind of horror. Bear, a shop clerk with an unremarkable life, makes an offhand wish, the kind of thing you'd mutter to yourself without expecting consequences. His friend Nikki takes that wish and runs with it in the worst possible direction, falling into an obsessive, dangerous love for him that escalates in ways the film is clearly more interested in than any traditional scares. Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless carry the central dynamic, with Andy Richter popping up in a supporting role that longtime comedy fans will recognize instantly, a bit of casting that adds an unexpected layer of “wait, that guy's in this?” to the proceedings.
Here's the honest part. I went into this without any critic aggregate to lean on, no Rotten Tomatoes score, no Metacritic number, nothing to triangulate against, which actually made me watch it more carefully than I might have otherwise. And what I found is a movie that's better at discomfort than it is at dread. The “be careful what you wish for” setup is familiar territory, but Barker wrings real unease out of Nikki's escalating fixation precisely because the film treats it as plausible rather than cartoonish. The problem is pacing. The middle stretch sags in a way that a tighter edit, maybe from someone other than the director himself, might have fixed. Richter's scenes land some of the only moments of genuine release, and the ending, without spoiling it, goes for ambiguity when it probably should have gone for commitment.
My verdict: “Obsession” is a modest, uneven horror film with a genuinely creepy central idea that it doesn't fully know how to sustain across its runtime, and I'd call it a decent one-time watch for genre fans rather than a must-see. It's worth your Friday night if you're in the mood for something smaller and stranger than the big studio horror machine tends to produce, but go in adjusting your expectations accordingly. This isn't a film that's going to haunt Broomfield's dinner-table conversations the way a bigger release might, and that's fine. Not everything needs to be an event. Sometimes a flawed, personal little scare movie streaming on a quiet October night is exactly enough.
Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.