Film Review: “Obsession” — The Horror of Dating for a New Generation
By Michael Morano
Curry Barker’s debut turns dating, consent, and loneliness into a bleak and deeply felt horror tragedy.
Obsession, directed by Curry Barker. Screening at Kendall Square Cinema, AMC Assembly Row 12, and AMC Boston Common 19 starting May 15.
Bear (played by Michael Johnston) in a scene from Obsession.
There’s been a lot of buzz for months in the genre press and on the festival circuit about newcomer writer/director Curry Barker’s horror flick Obsession. I’ve now seen Obsession twice, each time with two very different audiences, and each time it felt like two very different movies.
The first time I saw it was in a theater packed with a younger crowd, leaning Millennial/Gen Z. And the impact was Mack Truck-heavy. The crowd was scared, disturbed, and I even heard a few genuine screams. These people were shook.
The second time it was with an older crowd. I don’t think anyone there was under 30. The vibe was much more muted. Folks seemed to like it, and even my own reaction was softened, feeding off their vibes.
This, of course, got me thinking of Fatal Attraction.
Back in 1987, as a Gen X kid, my reaction to Fatal Attraction was, “Hey! That was pretty good. Play Misty for Me did it better, though. Any popcorn left?”
But the Boomers I knew?
They went out of their fucking minds over Fatal Attraction. It became a cultural phenomenon, landing on the covers of Time and People back when that actually meant something, making the term “fatal attraction” a True Crime and journalistic shorthand for “crazy, creepy, stalker-ish behavior.” To say nothing of the line, “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!” which became instantly iconic, even among people who’ve never seen the movie.
Context? Sure…
Fatal Attraction features Michael Douglas playing a lawyer and a paragon of successful, Reagan-era, suburban Dad energy (who is, in my opinion, kind of punchably smug). He has a fling with a book editor played by Glenn Close (who gives a performance for the ages) and then, like the real dick that he is, he cuts her off. Close goes off the rails, and there is an explosion of violence in an ending tacked on by the studio — far weaker than the original, more emotionally brutal version— but I digress.
Fatal Attraction was a vortex of Boomer anxiety. Close represents a newly empowered professional woman of the yuppie era who, as a threat to Douglas’s monolithic dad energy, must be seen as “crazy.” Worries about AIDS and herpes and the consequences of casual sex simmer just beneath the surface, along with unwanted pregnancy, dwindling abortion rights, the instability of new money, the marriage market, and untreated mental illness. The movie tweaked a lot of nerves, all related to Boomer ideas and experiences of relationships and sex. As Tom Hanks said in Sleepless in Seattle: “[Fatal Attraction] scared the shit out of me! It scared the shit out of every man in America!”
In much the same way, Obsession is a cauldron of dating and relationship anxieties among the Gen Z and Millennial crowd. It’ll punch their buttons hard, much the way Fatal Attraction punched the buttons of their parents and grandparents.
Billy Crudup lookalike Bear (Michael Johnston) has a massive crush on one of his best friends, Linda Cardellini lookalike Nikki (Inde Navarrette, who needs to win an Oscar for this performance). He’s too much of a chicken to flat out tell Nikki he has feelings for her. Rather than grow a pair and be honest, Bear takes an unorthodox route to win Nikki’s affections, and things, of course, go to utter shit.
What Gen Z/Millennial fears about dating, intimacy, and relationships does Obsession wrestle with? Well, it’s not just the anxiety of guys being “friend-zoned” by young women they like; there’s also the anxiety young women feel about “friend-zoning” the men in their lives. There’s the fear of being stuck in the same town, with the same dead-end job, the same circle of friends, going to the same Trivia Nights each Wednesday, and not realizing your ambitions. There are a lot of issues about consent to chew over in this flick, and about personal and psychological boundaries, as well as mental illness and drug use. Somebody’s going to write a master’s thesis about the film’s subtexts.
Is Obsession scary? Yes… I won’t go into details, but this tale of (maybe?) unrequited love is, above all else, really, really sad.
Obsession moves from one highly effective horror set piece to the next. You could argue that these sequences feel episodic, and perhaps they do — but that misses the point. Each one grows out of emotional, character-driven escalation, and in turn deepens the emotional groundwork for what follows.
More than a horror movie, Obsession is a tragedy. And it’s a very effective one. Bear’s tragic flaw is cowardice, but you can understand it. He’s living a crummy life, and even before the events of the movie, he’s stuck living alone in his late grandma’s house without a lot of prospects, and he loses one of his main emotional supports. But just as with Hamlet, Bear’s paralysis leads to suffering for nearly everyone around him. Both times I saw Obsession, I left the theater feeling massively bummed out.
I think Obsession might prove to be a classic because of how thoroughly it illustrates how messed up dating and loneliness have become for younger people today. I really hope Gen Z and Millennial young’uns can settle in and catch double features of Fatal Attraction and Obsession with the older people in their lives. It might lead to some fruitful family discussions. Or explosions of violence?
But even if it doesn’t prove to be a classic, there’s no denying Obsession delivers dump trucks of jolts, sharpened by a profound melancholy.
Author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano would love to take a print of Fatal Attraction for a free movie night at the Boomer retirement haven The Villages in Florida.
Tagged: "Fatal Attraction", "Obsession", Andy Richter, Cooper Tomlinson, Curry Barker, GenZ, Inde Navarrette, Megan Lawless, Michael Johnston, dating, dating anxiety, horror film
No Comments
Leave a Comment
I only left the cinema, and it has been one of the worst films I have ever watched. I am a Millennial, and I am 44. I didn’t enjoy it or got scared at all.
You are an expired 44 year old woman, barely a millennial, so your opinion on the 2026 dating world is irrelevant.
People don’t expire and are allowed to have an opinion about a movie. Some 44 year olds are still in the dating world btw.
Yup.
Is that sarcasm? Because otherwise, you sound like a bot or someone hiring for OpenAI.
Why is her opinion irrelevant? Explain in detail rather than making a blanket statement. Let’s hear it Mr. opinion police. I used to think like you when I was a boy before I became a man.
Same
Flabbergasted that they even made such trash. Bad acting and the actual wish phenomena not layed out in a logical, believable way. Characters had potential…..boo hoo
I thought this movie was terrible. If this is how Gen Z views intimacy and dating and male/female relations, as this terrain that is inevitably rife with fear and violation and sadism and that ends up terribly for all involved, I feel very sorry for them. Get your head out of your phones and try and have fun with dating. You might be surprised that it’s not as horrifying as you imagine.
Dude. You have truly missed the point of this film. It’s a scathing critique on men. It’s about consent, or lack thereof, and subjugation. Yes it has funny moments, and is campy and creepy and damned scary…but this at its core is a feminist work of art. Read this and watch it again: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2026/05/11982639/obsession-horror-film-review
Jwags, I think you’re right that consent and male entitlement are central to Obsession, but calling it only a “scathing critique on men” actually flattens what the movie is doing. The film is more uncomfortable, and more interesting, than a simple morality play about bad men and victimized women.
What Barker is dissecting is the entire ecosystem younger people are dating inside:
the paralysis around expressing desire
the fear of misreading signals
the terror of being misinterpreted
the way loneliness warps judgment
the way “friendship” becomes a holding pattern for unresolved longing
the way both men and women feel trapped by expectations they didn’t choose
Bear’s violation is real, and the film doesn’t excuse it. But the tragedy lands precisely because he isn’t a monster — he’s a weak, frightened person who makes a catastrophic choice. That’s why younger audiences feel it so viscerally. It’s not a fable about “bad men.” It’s a story about how badly people can break when they’re terrified of being honest.
The Refinery29 piece you linked makes good points, but it also reads the film through a single lens. Barker’s movie is doing something closer to Fatal Attraction for the app era: it exposes the mutual anxieties, distortions, and emotional malnutrition that define modern dating.
If anything, Obsession is a tragedy about what happens when two people who genuinely care about each other are so emotionally stunted by their environment that they can’t communicate without hurting each other.
That’s why it hits younger viewers harder than older ones. It’s not just feminist. It’s diagnostic.
Yeah I think that’s just a bad woke-y analysis of it, and if that’s what the filmmaker was going after I think it’s a really limiting lens. Also it’s using a completely imaginary supernatural scenario, where you make a wish with a gift shop trinket that someone likes you back, and it not only comes true but they become psychotically obsessed with you, as some sort of metaphor or stand in for what, male coercion and obsession? It’s so dumb and overwrought. Stop being influenced by bad woke-y online content. If this were just a straight up horror film maybe they could’ve had fun with the weirdness of it, and taken it to some entertaining conclusion. But to instead make it about some deeper “feminists” themes (yet the movie was made by a man) is just inartful filmmaking.
So just to be clear… you’re critiquing the film for being slightly imaginative whilst also relevant to modern dating.
It sounds like you would prefer a plain fun horror movie that is neutral, but these can be bland or unmemorable as a result.
Dark romance horrors tend to work best when they are relevant to current times. Phobias, recent tragedies etc or you can feel a connection with the characters.
It sounds like you are not the target audience if you can’t relate to young dating issues or any similar toxic relationships. It has nothing to do with wokeism or feminism.
It follows is a good film that is more neutral whilst still relatively modern. And yet look at the public reception compared to Obsession. Obsession is relevant now and has subtle hints of political themes. But they don’t detract from the film in anyway to someone that is not actively looking for these issues. If it was that much of an issue or decisive the public reviews would be much more split and lower than 8.2 on imdb.
The reviews speak for themselves.
People can get a movie even if they’re not part of the target audience. I watch Hitchcock movies and still get the subtext.
The movie is not about dating. It has nothing to do with dating. It’s a look at what would happen if you over write someone’s free will.
In the movie Aladdin, the Genie tells Aladdin that he can’t grant a wish that makes someone love you. Obsession shows you EXACTLY why.
So yeah, this article title is misleading
As a 22 year old female who’s diagnosed with BPD (borderline Personality Disorder), I left the theater disturbed. This movie was done exceptionally well, the main female actor portrayed everything so well that I was uncomfortable and scared. The way she acted in this film is exactly how a person with extreme BPD acts, especially when they are unmedicated with no proper treatment. Now, of course, I understand that the movie was not based on that but it’s scary seeing things that are very real being portrayed in a movie. Again, this movie was done very very well but it is disturbing and I will not watch again due to fear