Obsession Film Review (2026)

​I actually cannot stop shaking.

​I’m literally sitting on my bedroom floor right now, the keys on my laptop are clicking way too loud because my hands are still doing that weird, post-adrenaline tremor thing, and honestly? I don't even know where to start.

Official Poster

​I just got back from a 9:45 PM screening of Obsession (2026). The theater was mostly empty—just me, a couple three rows down who whispered through the first ten minutes and then went dead silent for the rest of the night, and some guy in the back who I think was having a literal existential crisis because I could hear him groaning at the screen during the third act. And honestly? I don't blame him. I wanted to scream. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.

​If you had told me this morning that a psychological thriller from Curry Barker was going to completely ruin my week, I probably would’ve laughed. I saw the poster. You know the one. With Michael Johnston in the car, looking down at that weirdly nondescript packet, looking completely hollow, while that terrifying, warm-lit doorway glows in the background with a silhouette just... standing there. It looked cool. It looked moody. I thought, Okay, neat, a classic Blumhouse slow-burn stalker thing. I like those. I’ll get some popcorn.

​I was so wrong. It’s not just a stalker movie. It is an absolute assault on your nervous system.

​Let me try to get my thoughts straight because right now they’re just bouncing around my head like pinballs.

​That opening scene... what the hell?

​Okay, so the movie starts. No logos. No loud, obnoxious studio fanfares. Just... black. And this incredibly low, rhythmic, deep thrumming sound. Like a heartbeat, but too slow. It was so quiet at first I thought something was wrong with the theater's speakers. I actually saw the couple in front of me look around.

​And then we cut to the inside of the car. It’s the shot from the poster, but in motion. It's raining—not a dramatic, cinematic downpour, but that miserable, misting kind of rain that just makes everything look blurry and greasy through a dirty windshield. Michael Johnston's character (Leo) is just sitting there. He doesn't move. For three minutes.

​Three. Entire. Minutes.

​In a modern movie! You expect a cut, or a line of dialogue, or a radio turning on. But no. Curry Barker just makes you sit there in the dark with this man while he breathes. And the way Johnston acts with just his breathing is insane. You can see his collarbone rising and falling, getting faster, then stuttering. He’s holding this tiny, creased paper packet—we don't even know what’s in it yet—and his fingers are twitching against the cardboard.

​I found myself holding my breath. I am not exaggerating. I realized my chest was tight and I had to actively force myself to inhale.

​And then, out of nowhere, the car’s defroster kicks on. It’s so loud. It sounded like a jet engine in that quiet theater. The guy behind me literally let out a sharp "Jesus!" and I jumped so hard I spilled half my M&Ms.

​That’s how this movie gets you. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares with loud violin screeches. It just builds this suffocating, unbearable silence and then lets the mundane world break it in the most jarring way possible.

​What is this movie even about? (Without giving away the things that ruined my brain)

​I’m not going to write a standard plot summary. If you want that, go to Wikipedia or something. I don’t even think I could explain the plot logically right now because the film operates on this bizarre, nightmarish dream-logic that only makes sense while you’re drowning in it.

​But the basic setup... Leo is a guy who is grieving. Or at least, we think he is. We find out very slowly—almost too slowly, to the point where I was getting frustrated, but now I realize it was intentional—that his sister went missing a year ago.

​And then he gets this packet.

​It’s just a small, white paper sleeve with some faded red text. Inside are these old, dusty matches from a diner called "The Whispering Pines" that burned down in the nineties. It’s the packet he’s holding on the poster.

​But here’s the thing: every time he lights one of those matches, he sees things.

​Not "oh, look, a spooky ghost!" kind of things. It’s much more insidious. The match burns for maybe ten seconds. And during those ten seconds, the world around him changes. The air gets incredibly heavy. The color drains out of the room. And he can see her. Or rather, he can see the shadow of what happened to her.

​But it’s not a superpower. It’s a literal addiction.

​The movie turns into this horrifying metaphor for how we cling to grief, how we would rather burn our lives to the ground just to hold onto a fleeting, painful memory for ten more seconds.

​There’s this one sequence—I think it was about forty minutes in—where Leo is in his kitchen. He’s completely run out of food. The house is a total disaster. The dishes are piled up, covered in mold. He looks like he hasn't slept in a month. His skin is grey. And he’s just staring at the last three matches in that packet.

​He strikes one.

​The sound design in this scene... oh my god. Rick Burwell, whoever you are, you are a madman. The sound of the match striking is amplified to this agonizing degree. It sounds like bones scraping together. And then, as the flame flares up, the ambient sound of the house—the hum of the fridge, the distant traffic—just dies. It’s a total auditory vacuum.

​And then we see Inde Navarrette's character, Maya. She plays his childhood friend who is desperately trying to keep him anchored to reality. She’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. But she’s not really there. She’s a memory. Or a projection.

​She looks at him and says, "You're going to burn your eyes out, Leo."

​And the way she says it... it wasn't scary. It was just so incredibly sad. It felt like a punch to the gut. I actually felt tears hotting up in my eyes because it was just so lonely. That’s the word for this movie: it is lonely. It’s the loneliest horror movie I have ever seen.

​Let’s talk about Michael Johnston because... wow.

​Can we please talk about this performance? Because if this movie doesn't get talked about at the end of the year just because it’s a genre film, I’m going to lose my mind.

​Michael Johnston is on screen for basically 95% of the runtime. And for a lot of it, he is alone in a room or a car. How do you pull that off without it becoming boring?

​I don’t know, but he does it.

​His face is like a landscape of pure, unadulterated desperation. There’s this scene where he’s trying not to light a match. He’s sitting on his bathroom floor, clutching the packet to his chest, crying. But it’s not a pretty, Hollywood cry. It’s that ugly, snotty, hyperventilating kind of sobbing where you can’t get enough air.

​He’s physically shaking, trying to force his hands to put the matches in the cabinet. He even locks them in a metal lockbox. And then... three minutes later, he’s using a hammer to smash the box open. The sheer ferocity with which he was hitting that metal—I could see the muscles in his back straining, his knuckles bleeding—it was terrifying. He looked like an animal trying to get out of a cage.

​And the camera just stays there. It doesn’t edit around it. It doesn’t do a flashy montage. Curry Barker just sets the camera on the floor and lets us watch this man destroy his own hands for a tiny sliver of a dream.

​It was so uncomfortable to watch. I wanted to look away. I wanted to check my phone. I actually felt this weird, itchy sensation on the back of my neck like I was intruding on something deeply private and shameful.

​I’ve never had a movie make me feel that exact kind of discomfort before. It wasn’t gore. It wasn't violence. It was just the raw, naked exposure of a human soul completely collapsing.

​The Editing is Jarring (In a Good Way, Mostly?)

​Curry Barker directed this, but he also edited it. And you can tell.

​Usually, when a director edits their own film, it can get a little self-indulgent. Things drag on. But here, the editing style is almost violent.

​There are these sudden, hard cuts that happen mid-sentence.

​Like, Maya will be talking to him, trying to convince him to go outside, to get some air. She’s saying, "Leo, we can go to the park, we can just sit in the—"

​BAM. Cut to Leo sitting in his dark car, staring at the empty house across the street. No transition. No fade. Just a brutal, sudden shift in time and space.

​It mimics how his brain is working. He can’t focus on the present. His mind is constantly skipping, jumping back to the obsession, back to that house, back to the matches.

​It’s disorienting. At first, I thought maybe the theater’s projector was skipping frames. I was literally about to get up and complain. But then I realized: oh, no, this is what it feels like to lose your mind. You don't get smooth transitions. You just wake up in a different room, staring at a different wall, wondering where the last four hours went.

​There is a downside to this, though. I have to be honest. Around the middle of the second act, the pacing got a little too disorienting. There was a stretch of about fifteen minutes where I genuinely didn't know what was real, what was a memory, or what was happening in the present.

​And not in a fun, mystery-solving way. It just felt a bit like we were spinning our wheels.

​I wrote down in my notes (well, I didn't write notes, I just typed a frantic text to myself during the film): Is he still in the kitchen? Why is Maya suddenly wearing a blue sweater? Wait, did she leave?

​But honestly, looking back on it now, even that frustration feels like part of the design. You are supposed to feel trapped in his mental loop. You are supposed to want to scream "Just make up your mind!" at the screen.

​The Sound Design is a Literal Nightmare

​I mentioned the score earlier, but I need to dive deeper into it because it’s still ringing in my ears.

​Rick Burwell did the music, but calling it "music" feels wrong. It’s more like an environmental hazard.

​There are no hummable melodies. There are no swelling orchestras to tell you when to feel sad or scared. Instead, it’s this incredibly dense, textured wall of sound.

​It sounds like a mixture of cello strings being dragged across rusted metal, low-frequency industrial hums, and occasionally, this incredibly distant, distorted sound of children laughing—but slowed down so much it sounds like a dying whale.

​It is deeply, deeply upsetting.

​And the way they use silence!

​There is this one scene—and this is the scene that is going to keep me awake tonight, I already know it—where Leo finally decides to go across the street. To the house. The one from the poster.

​He’s walking across the asphalt. It’s pitch black outside, except for the sickly yellow streetlights.

​As he gets closer to the front door, the movie’s audio starts to slowly strip away. First, the sound of the wind dies. Then, the sound of his footsteps on the gravel disappears. By the time he reaches the porch, there is no sound at all.

​Not even the ambient hiss that you usually get in a silent theater. It was a complete, digital silence.

​I could hear the person next to me swallow. I could hear my own heart thudding in my ears. It was so intense that when Leo finally reached out his hand and touched the brass doorknob, and we heard this tiny, sharp click, everyone in the theater gasped.

​It was a masterclass in tension. It proved that you don't need a hundred-million-dollar budget or crazy CGI monsters to terrify people. You just need to understand how human senses work, and how to starve them.

​That Mid-Point Twist (No Spoilers, I Promise)

​Okay, I’m not going to spoil anything. I hate people who spoil movies. But we have to talk about the shift that happens about an hour in.

​Up until that point, you think you understand what kind of movie you're watching. You think it's a tragic story about a guy who found a supernatural item that lets him see his dead sister, and he’s destroying himself to do it.

​But then... something happens.

​A character we haven't seen in a while comes back. Or rather, we see them in a different light.

​And suddenly, the entire premise of the matches gets flipped on its head.

​I remember sitting there, my mouth literally hanging open. I was holding my box of candy and I just... let it rest on my lap. My brain was scramblingly trying to re-contextualize every single scene that had come before.

​Wait, if that's true, then what was he doing in the car?

Who was he looking at in the window?

Who is actually in the house?

​It’s one of those twists that doesn't feel cheap. It’s not a "gotcha!" twist where the director reveals he was a ghost the whole time or something stupid like that. It’s a twist that makes perfect, devastating sense based on everything we’ve seen of Leo’s psychology.

​It makes the movie ten times sadder.

​I actually felt this wave of intense grief wash over the theater. You could feel the energy in the room change. It went from "ooh, creepy mystery" to "oh... oh no. This is tragedy. This is real tragedy."

​And Michael Johnston's reaction in that scene... man. The way his face just falls apart. He doesn't scream. He doesn't make a sound. He just looks at the camera, and his eyes... they just go completely dead. Like the lights in his brain were shut off one by one.

​It was devastating. Truly devastating.

​Let’s Talk About the House

​The house on the poster.

​It’s such a simple, suburban house. It looks like the kind of house you’d see in any middle-class neighborhood. It’s got that little front porch, the warm light inside, the yellow glow.

​But the way Taylor Clemons (the Director of Photography) shoots it... it looks like a mouth.

​Seriously. There’s a shot where the camera is positioned low, right at the edge of the driveway, looking up at the house. The roofline looks like a heavy brow, and the lit doorway looks like this glowing, hungry throat waiting to swallow Leo whole.

​The color contrast is incredible. The blue-grey of the night air, the fog that seems to cling to the wet grass, and then that stark, orange-yellow light bleeding out of the open door.

​It’s beautiful. In a really sick, twisted way, it is one of the most visually striking movies of the year. Every frame looks like a painting you’d want to hang on your wall, but also a painting that would give you nightmares if you stared at it too long.

​There’s this recurring shot of the silhouette in the doorway.

​Throughout the movie, Leo is staring at this silhouette from his car. He never sees their face. It’s just this dark shape against the light.

​And you start to project your own fears onto that shape.

​Is it his sister? Is it some demonic force? Is it Maya? Is it... him?

​The movie plays with that ambiguity so well. It forces you to become obsessed along with Leo. You find yourself squinting at the screen, trying to see if the silhouette is moving, trying to see if there’s a face hidden in the shadows.

​I caught myself leaning forward in my seat, my eyes straining so hard they were watering, just trying to make out a detail. Anything.

​And then the silhouette would just... step back into the house and the door would close.

​And you’d feel this sudden, crushing disappointment. You wanted to see. You needed to see.

​That’s when I realized: Oh. He’s got me. The director has me. I’m doing it too. I’m obsessed.

​Maya and the Frustration of Loving Someone in Freefall

​I need to talk about Inde Navarrette’s performance because it’s the heart of the movie, even if Johnston gets the flashy, dramatic breakdown scenes.

​Maya is the only character who feels real in Leo's world. Everyone else is a shadow, a memory, or a voice on the phone.

​But Maya is physical. She has this warm, grounded presence.

​And she is trying so hard to save him.

​But the tragedy of the movie is that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. You can't pull someone out of a black hole if they’re in love with the gravity.

​There’s a scene where she comes over to his house and finds the matchbook. She doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's the center of whatever is destroying him.

​She tries to take it.

​The ensuing argument... it wasn't a movie argument. It didn't have witty retorts or perfectly structured sentences. It was ugly. It was repetitive. They were talking over each other, screaming the same three words over and over.

​"Give it to me."

"No."

"Leo, please."

"No!"

​It felt so real it was painful. Anyone who has ever had a family member or a friend struggle with addiction or severe, crippling depression—you will know this argument. You have lived this argument.

​The sheer frustration in Maya’s voice... you could hear her vocal cords straining, cracking under the weight of her helplessness. She looked so small next to him, but she was standing her ground.

​And then Leo does something. He doesn't hit her. He doesn't do anything physically violent. But he says something to her. Something so incredibly cruel, so specifically designed to hurt her, that the entire theater went "Oof."

​It was like watching a car crash. You saw it coming, you knew it was going to happen, but the impact still made you flinch.

​And the silence that followed that comment... it went on for so long. Maya just stood there. She didn't cry. She just looked at him with this expression of complete, quiet defeat.

​And then she walked out.

​And you realized: That's it. He’s alone now. He has successfully pushed away the last person who cared.

​And the camera just stays on Leo’s face as the front door clicks shut. And for a second—just a fraction of a second—you see this flash of absolute terror in his eyes. He realizes what he’s done. But then he looks down at the matchbook in his hand.

​And the terror fades. It gets replaced by this cold, dead satisfaction.

​It made me sick. I actually felt a physical wave of nausea. Because I realized at that moment that there was no saving him. The movie wasn't going to have a happy ending. There was no magic cure. He was going down, and he was going down fast.

​A Few Things That Didn't Quite Work... I Guess?

​I’m trying to be objective here, even though I’m a total emotional wreck right now.

​Is the movie perfect?

​No. Probably not.

​Like I said, the middle section drags a bit. There’s a subplot involving a local cop who is investigating the sister's disappearance, and honestly? It felt like it belonged in a different movie.

​Every time the cop showed up, the tension just... evaporated. It felt like the movie was trying to be a standard procedural detective thriller for five minutes, and it just didn't fit with the hallucinatory, claustrophobic tone of the rest of the film.

​I didn't care about the police reports. I didn't care about the search grids.

​I just wanted to get back to the car. I wanted to get back to that foggy street.

​Fortunately, the cop character isn't in it much. I think he has maybe three scenes total. But they felt jarring in a bad way, unlike the editing which was jarring in a good way. It felt like a studio note. You know, like some executive saw an early cut and said, "We need a character who explains the plot to the audience because they’re going to be confused."

​Yeah, well, we were confused, but that was the point! We didn't need the cop to explain the timeline. It just slowed things down.

​Also, there’s a scene near the end involving a fire.

​The CGI in that scene was... a bit noticeable?

​For a movie that relies so heavily on practical, gritty, real-world textures—dirty glass, wet concrete, peeling wallpaper—the sudden inclusion of what looked like digital flames was a bit of a letdown. It broke the spell for a second.

​I found myself thinking, Oh, that's a green screen, instead of Oh my god, he's burning. But it’s a minor gripe. Truly. It lasts for maybe thirty seconds, and then we are right back into the raw, practical terror of Johnston’s performance.

​Rick Burwell’s Score Needs To Be Talked About More

​I know I already talked about the sound design, but the music itself is just... it deserves its own chapter in my brain.

​There’s this one track that plays during the final walk to the house. It’s not even a song. It’s just this single, sustained, vibrating bass note.

​But it has this weird filter on it that makes it sound like it’s rotating. Like the sound is physically spinning around your head.

​In the theater, with the surround sound, it actually made me feel dizzy. I had to grip the armrests of my seat. It was a physical sensation of vertigo, induced entirely by audio.

​I’ve never experienced anything like that. It was like the movie was physically reaching out of the screen and shaking my inner ear.

​And then, when the note finally stops... the relief is indescribable. Your body just automatically relaxes. And then Barker hits you with a visual image that makes you tense up all over again.

​It is a deeply manipulative movie. But in the best way possible. It knows exactly how to play your body like an instrument.

​That Ending... I Wasn't Ready.

​I am not going to talk about what happens. I can’t.

​If I tell you even a single detail of the last fifteen minutes, I will ruin the entire experience for you, and I’m not going to be that person.

​But I will talk about how it made me feel.

​The final sequence of this movie is one of the most intense, heart-stopping, agonizing things I have ever sat through.

​The pacing goes from that slow, deliberate, agonizing burn to this hyper-speed, chaotic, claustrophobic rush.

​It felt like being trapped in a car that is rolling down a hill and you can’t find the brakes.

​I was literally clutching my face. I had my hands over my mouth, my fingers pressing into my cheeks, just staring at the screen through my fingers.

​The couple in front of me? The girl was leaning against her boyfriend, hiding her face in his neck, and he was just staring at the screen with this wide-eyed, pale look. No one was eating popcorn. The entire theater was just frozen.

​And then... the final shot.

​It’s a long shot. It doesn't cut away.

​It just stays there.

​And the credits start to roll. In complete silence.

​No music. No sound. Just white text on a black screen.

​Nobody moved.

​Usually, as soon as the credits start, people are up, grabbing their coats, looking at their phones. But tonight?

​Nobody. Moved.

​We all just sat there in the dark, watching these names crawl up the screen, just trying to process what we had just witnessed.

​We sat through the entire credits. All five minutes of them.

​And then, when the house lights finally came on, everyone just stood up slowly, like we were all recovering from a collective car accident. We didn't look at each other. We didn't talk. We just shuffled out of the theater into the cold night air.

​Final Thoughts (If you can call them that)

​I’m looking back over what I just wrote and it’s a mess.

​My sentences are half-finished, my grammar is probably terrible, and I’ve repeated myself about five times.

​But I don’t care.

​This is the most honest review I can give you. Obsession (2026) isn't just a movie you watch and then rate on Letterboxd and move on with your life. It’s a movie that gets under your skin. It’s a parasite.

​It’s been three hours since the movie ended, and I’m still staring at the dark corners of my bedroom, wondering if the shadows are moving.

​I’m still hearing that low, vibrating bass note in my head.

​It is a masterpiece of psychological horror. It is mean, it is depressing, it is lonely, and it is absolutely brilliant.

​But please... if you go see it, be prepared.

​Don't go with a big group of friends looking for a fun night out.

​Go alone. Or go with someone who doesn't mind you squeezing their hand until it goes numb.

​And maybe... don't look too closely at the doorway when you get home.

​Maybe after a few days I'll feel differently about this movie. Maybe I'll think it was too manipulative, or too bleak, or that the middle section was too messy.

​But right now?

​It’s still sitting in my head.

​And I don’t think it’s leaving anytime soon.

​Written in a state of mild panic on June 4, 2026.