OBSESSION (Curry Baker, 2025) is a supernatural horror that is currently being much praised and which I intensely disliked watching. The praise is easy to understand: It’s an imaginatively directed and expressively lit film that takes an old trope (what you wish for now might become your worst nightmare) and adds a new twist (where is consent when another is tricked or bewitched into loving?); it is efficient at creating tension, creeping one out and making audience members practically jump off their seats. An achievement in itself and made more so considering the film’s budget was under $1 million. What I disliked about it was that the source of terror is that old misogynist trope of the unknowable, out of control, hysterical harridan – unleashed. The film begins with a sweet young man (Bear, played by Michael Johnston) unable to tell a girl (Nickki, played by Inde Navarrette) that he likes her; he can’t even do it when she asks him flat out; so he resorts to tricks. One of the reasons the film is so interesting is that it begins with male obsession, then more than suggests that that hysterical harridan is a male projection, something men call up even as it might eventually kill them. It is objectively a very interesting film. I personally couldn’t stomach it because watching that sexist male projection for 97 minutes was hard to take, particularly as played by Narvarrette, very pretty and effectively deployed, to suggests a woman dispossessed of herself, and the male projection that’s possessed her, but in my perhaps solitary view, not quite skilled enough. It might be argued that what I disliked so much about it is due to its effectiveness. Curry Barker is certainly a director to watch.

José Arroyo