My Theater Laughed Through Obsession. That's the Point.

Rating: 9/10 ⭐️

Somewhere in the second act of Obsession, the man two seats from me laughed. Not a chuckle. A full laugh, the kind that escapes when something is too much to hold in quietly, and within seconds half the theater had joined him.

This is a horror movie. It carries a Rotten Tomatoes score parked in the mid-90s, one of the best-reviewed films of 2026 so far, and I walked out mostly agreeing with the hype.

I gave it a 9/10. My screening still laughed through long stretches of it, and I think that laughter is the most accurate review this film will ever get.

Is Obsession a horror comedy?

No. Obsession is a horror film that swaps jump scares for sustained social discomfort. The laughter you hear in theaters is a nervous-system response to scenes too tense and too awkward to sit through in silence.

The film invites that reaction deliberately, but the laughs are never punchlines.

It helps to know who made it. Curry Barker spent years making sketch comedy on YouTube before this, and sketch comedy lives or dies on timing.

Barker kept the timing and changed the payload. Where a sketch would land a joke, Obsession lands something wrong, and your body responds the way it would to a joke because the rhythm told it one was coming.

The setup is simple. Bear, a shy music store employee, breaks a novelty charm called a One Wish Willow and wishes that his friend Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world.

The wish works. That is the entire horror.

The laughter is a defense mechanism

Think about the last time you laughed at something that wasn't funny. A speech going wrong at a wedding. A silence at dinner that stretches a beat too long.

That laugh isn't amusement, it's pressure escaping, and Obsession is built almost entirely out of moments engineered to produce it.

There's a party game scene, one of those Jenga setups where every brick has a dare written on it, and Bear pulls the one that tells him to kiss the girl on his left. That girl is their friend Sarah. Before anything can happen, Nikki walks over, pulls Sarah back, and kisses Bear herself.

The detail that broke my theater was her face. She wears a sad little smile through the whole kiss, then spends the rest of the party making everyone uncomfortable with her declarations of love. My theater laughed because the only other option was squirming.

Or the boys' night. Bear waits until Nikki is in the shower, then asks through the bathroom door whether he can go out, and you can hear in his voice that he's hoping the closed door and the running water will let him get away with it. They don't.

The shower cuts off mid-stream, and she screams. No build-up, no warning, a switch flipping at a speed no human switch should flip. I laughed at the speed of it, and three seconds later I noticed my shoulders were up around my ears.

And then there's the cat. After Bear's cat dies, Nikki builds it a little shrine, which is already a lot, and then she packs him a Tupperware lunch with a sweet note inside. Earlier, Bear had confided that he dreams of being a food critic, so the sandwich is for him to review, and it's made from the dead cat.

The reveal is grotesque and the timing is pure sketch comedy, and my row didn't know whether to gag or laugh, so it did both.

Inde Navarrette is the reason all of this works. When Nikki is in the light, her expressions sit in an uncanny zone, creepy and funny at the same time, and you understand within seconds that something is very wrong with her.

When the film wants to scare you instead, it puts her face in shadow, and not being able to read her is worse than anything it could have shown you. Your mind fills the dark with something, and whatever you come up with is meaner than the movie would dare to be.

Restraint is the scare

The possession behavior shows up far less often than the trailer suggests. Barker rations it.

Long stretches play as an awkward, sad relationship story, so when Nikki moves the wrong way or says something no person would say, it cuts straight through. A lesser film would reach for that material every five minutes and dull it through repetition.

The sound follows the same rule. Most of the film sits at conversation volume, but when things don't go Nikki's way, she screams, and the mix makes no attempt to keep that scream comfortable.

It's loud in a way that feels almost rude. People around me flinched first and laughed second.

The film almost never reaches for a jump scare. It was reportedly made for under a million dollars, and the restraint reads as a choice rather than a budget apology. Dread comes from behavior, from what she says and the unnatural way she moves, not from cats bursting out of cupboards.

That's also why I'd push you toward seeing it in a theater while you still can. This is a film that works on a crowd. The shared flinching, the nervous laughter rolling across the rows, the stranger next to you holding his breath at the same moment you are.

At home, some of that pressure leaks away. If it lands for you, I've rounded up more in Movies Like Obsession (For When Discomfort Beats Jump Scares), films that trade jump scares for the same slow discomfort.

So is it overhyped?

A backlash is forming online, and it usually goes like this: the plot reveals itself inside 20 minutes and never surprises you again. I half agree with the observation and fully disagree with the conclusion.

Yes, you can see where the story is going. Obsession isn't selling a twist. It's selling escalation, the slow turning of a screw you already know is there, and judging it for predictability is like judging a rollercoaster for running on rails.

If you walk in expecting to be scared in the conventional sense, you may walk out underwhelmed, because fear isn't really what the film is aiming at. It's aiming at discomfort, which is harder to manufacture and lasts longer, and I pull that thread further in Is Obsession Actually Scary? No — It's Worse.

On that measure, the hype is correct. Not inflated, correct.

My 9/10 isn't a grade for scariness. It's a grade for how completely the film controls what your body does for 108 minutes, whether that's flinching, laughing, or both within the same breath.

The laughter ended with the credits. The discomfort didn't. Three days on, I can still see her standing in that shadow, and I'd trade a hundred forgettable jump scares for one image that refuses to leave.