Movie Review – Obsession (2025)

Bear (Michael Johnston) has had a huge crush on Nikki (Navarrette) for several years with the love unrequited as they are close friends. After purchasing a wishing willow and frustrated with his inability to voice his feelings, Bear makes haphazard wish for Nikki to love him “more than anything.” Everything changes as Nikki becomes infatuated with Bear and their friendship turns into a sweet romance, but the red flags start rising fast as Nikki’s love becomes dangerously obsessive, putting the socially awkward Bear into a conflict that has every chance of going from worse to deadly.

Barker’s script is smartly written and unsettling with his direction even more so, filling scenes with a creeping amount of tension or turning a seemingly comfortable scene into something very twisted with the drop of a hat. Even a light and comedic scene where the focus is on Johnston’s Bear and his friend played by Cooper Tomlinson retains some level of tension as Navarrette’s Nikki remains a blurred figure in the background, clearly never taking her eyes off Bear throughout the scene’s length.

Johnston gives a nice and relatable performance as Bear in the good and bad sense. On one hand, you feel for Bear due to his awkwardness and nice qualities, such as his loyalty and care for his friends, but on the other Bear is seemingly the ‘nice guy’ who is often warned about as even years after knowing Nikki and building up a close friendship he has not let go of his longtime crush and accepted that maybe they are just better off as friends. It is something a lot of women will have had experience with among guy friends and is a very interesting deconstruction of the nice guy trope, one that gets even more intriguing as Bear ignores the blatantly obvious signs his wish has made Nikki increasingly unhinged.

Perhaps unhinged is too weak a word as Navarrette completely transforms herself throughout the film. There is plenty of nuance in her performance from the way she uses her voice, body language and especially facial expressions to convey Nikki’s growing instability. Her ability to go from a sweet moment at dinner to eerie stillness with wide-eyed manic is nothing short of stellar as her mere presence can be unsettling with the question of what she is going to do next always hanging in the air in uncomfortable fashion.

Part of what makes the character of Nikki and Navarrette’s performance so successful is how Barker chooses to utilize her through the lighting or other means. In many scenes Navarrette is lit in such a way that only her silhouette or the barest glimpse of her eyes and face can be seen. Barker leaves much to the imagination of the audience which can be much more terrifying than actually showing Nikki during some of her anxiety-inducing episodes. Not all of the horror is implied though as there are several shocking and bloody moments as Bear and Nikki’s relationship becomes even more twisted in a great use of make up, visuals and steady build up of everything going wrong.

Obsession contains a great blend of light humour and disturbing tension as Bear and Nikki’s relationship takes turn after turn. Johnston, Navarrette and their co-stars Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless form an excellent core group with authentic chemistry while Navarrette steals the show. For Barker’s first feature film, he shows a great understanding of story and technical aspects that makes his debut quite a memorable and terrifying outing.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Ricky Church – Follow me on Bluesky for more movie news and nerd talk.