There are two kinds of awards-season conversations: the ones about artistry, and the ones about categories. Obsession, Curry Barker’s supernatural horror smash, is now very much in the second lane. Focus Features is planning to campaign the film in the Golden Globes’ Musical or Comedy race, not Drama.
If you have seen Obsession, your eyebrows probably just did a little parkour. This is, after all, a movie that gets brutal and intense. It is also, to be abundantly clear, not a musical.
Why the label matters
The Golden Globes separate films into two tracks: Drama and Musical or Comedy. That split matters, because it changes what a movie is up against and how a campaign is built.
For a film like Obsession, the fork in the road is not just semantics. It is strategy.
A horror hit
Obsession was shot in Los Angeles in October 2024 on a $750,000 budget, then went on to gross $519 million worldwide. It set multiple box-office records as the tenth highest-grossing film of 2026 and, unadjusted for inflation, the fifth highest-grossing horror film of all time.
Barker wrote, directed, and edited the film, and the cast is anchored by Michael Johnston as Bear and Inde Navarrette as Nikki, with Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and Andy Richter in supporting roles.
Why Musical or Comedy
On paper, Obsession reads closer to Drama. It follows Bear (Johnston), a music store clerk nursing feelings for his friend and co-worker Nikki (Navarrette). After buying a novelty toy called a One Wish Willow, Bear breaks it and wishes that Nikki loved him more than anyone in the world. The wish takes, and Nikki’s devotion turns dangerous.
So why try Musical or Comedy? Because the Globes are a category game, and this is the kind of loophole studios like to exploit. The label does not suddenly make Obsession a comedy. It just puts it in a different lane, and sometimes a different lane is the whole point.
What it could mean for Navarrette
The clearest upside here is what this placement could do for Navarrette. Nikki is a demanding role that swings between intimacy and menace, vulnerability and volatility, and it asks for full-throttle commitment.
In this lane, Navarrette has a cleaner shot at not just a Best Actress nomination at the Globes, but maybe even a win.
Not the first stretch
If your instinct is to ask whether the Globes will accept a horror film in Musical or Comedy, the category has already shown it can be elastic. In recent years, films like The Substance, Get Out, and Poor Things have competed there. None of them are musicals, and their comedy, when it shows up, tends to be dark, sharp, or strange.
So Obsession is not reinventing the system so much as leaning into how it already works.
The basics on 'Obsession'
Obsession is a 2025 American supernatural horror film written, directed, and edited by Barker. It premiered on September 5, 2025, at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Focus Features acquired distribution rights for $14–15 million, the highest price commanded by a genre film in TIFF history. Jason Blum joined as an executive producer under Blumhouse Productions, and the film was theatrically released in the US on May 15, 2026. It received positive reviews.
The cast includes Johnston and Navarrette in the central roles, with Tomlinson, Lawless, and Richter supporting. Barker also voices the One Wish Willow customer service representative, a nasty little touch that fits the movie’s sense of humor.
The takeaway
I will not pretend that calling Obsession a Musical or Comedy makes intuitive sense. It does not. But it does make awards-season sense, at least in the pragmatic, loophole-hunting way studios tend to treat the Globes.
If the result is that more people end up checking out what Barker and this cast pulled off on a $750,000 shoot, then the category gymnastics may end up serving the movie after all.
