Dr. Wife and I took a trip to the theater on Saturday to see the horror/psychological thriller/black comedy Obsession (2025-2026). Dr. Wife had seen it on social media, and Critical Drinker’s positive review clinched it.

The film is based on a familiar premise: be careful what you wish for. It’s essentially a “The Monkey’s Paw” with one wish instead of three. Naturally, the one wish goes horribly awry.

The protagonist, Bear, is deeply in love—obsessed—with his friend and co-worker Nikki. After a night out with their fellow co-workers Ian and Sandy, Bear drives Nikki home, and she pointedly asks Bear if he likes her, saying, “now’s the time to tell me.” Bear, who is a rather cowardly young man, sheepishly denies it.

Frustrated with his own spinelessness, he uses a “One-Wish Willow”—a novelty toy he purchased at a New Age shop as a gag—to wish that Nikki love him more than anything else in the world.

Well, it wouldn’t be a movie if the wish didn’t come true; it does, and what starts as a giddy romance quickly devolves into an obsessive, dangerously co-dependent relationship, amid which the “real” Nikki briefly “breaks through.” These episodes of lucidity show a woman desperately fighting to reassert herself against Bear’s wish, which has robbed her of her free will.

The film is all about the ride, and it is intense. The rapid unraveling of the wish forces Bear to consider the immorality of wishing for someone’s love against their will. He also is faced with paying the ultimate price to end the wish, and given his extreme moral and romantic weakness, it’s unclear if he’ll finally rise to the occasion and force himself and Nikki to endure the horrendous consequences of the wish.

Bear is a study in simpishness. The director (who also wrote the script) makes Bear into a fairly pathetic creature. He has one of those wet, half-curly haircuts that looks like he just crawled out of a pond. He wears 1990s-style Cosby sweaters. He schemes with Ian on how he can land the girl of his dreams (scheming in which Ian does not indulge) without taking any real action. And when faced with the point-black question from Nikki, he chickens out.

Believe me, as a man who’s been “friendzoned” many times, I get it. It’s a difficult thing when the object of your affection does not return it. It’s something that every man (and probably most women) has to figure out and navigate at some point. In matters of the heart, fortune favors the bold. The “magical intervention” fantasy is real, but (thank God) most of us never have the opportunity to indulge in it. Love, like anything worth doing, takes effort and courage; Bear takes the shortcut that most men can only enjoy with extreme wealth or extreme good looks (or both). He pays a terrible price for it.

The film takes place in the present-day, but it’s easy to forget. The two main characters and their two friends all work in a brick-and-mortar music store. Bear has a really cool analog stereo system. The whole visual aesthetic of the film is based in the 1990s (such as Bear’s aforementioned Cosby sweaters). Indeed, there was one moment that I thought the film took place in the 1990s, then a character whipped out a smartphone and reminded me that we were in the present.

I’m not sure if that aesthetic was purposeful or not. The main characters are somewhat what we used to call “hipsters,” and as early-twenty-somethings figuring out their lives, perhaps that aesthetic touchstone was meant to clue the audience in visually that these are “cool young people.”

The supporting cast is great, too. Ian delivered a number of pithy and hilarious observations about his friend’s obsession. Sarah, who improbably has a deep crush on Bear, is trying to get into tattoo art school (her dad owns the music store and is played by Andy Richter, who seems to have aged terribly).

The film gets very dark and very violent. There are times when Bear is legitimately terrified of Nikki’s “love”; it’s something anyone who has ever been in a co-dependent relationship will recognize. The film, in an exaggerated way, shows what these kinds of toxic relationships are like.

Dr. Wife and I loved the flick. I’m a horror aficionado; she is not. The fact that she enjoyed it helps explain, perhaps, the film’s broad popularity. Made on a budget of roughly $1,000,000, it’s grossed over $148 million at the time of writing—the kinds of returns film studios crave. Hopefully we’ll see more of these low-budget-but-well-made horror flicks going forward.

Time to find your new obsession: Obsession.