It’s been one year and six days since Obsession premiered at the 50th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025, but for the film’s director, Curry Barker, and its Oscar-contending star, Inde Navarrette, that year has marked some earth-shattering changes.
“It’s insane,” Barker said in front of a sold-out crowd at this year’s festival ahead of a victory lap anniversary screening of Obsession. “Even the plane ride here was different. I’m looking at the same buildings, but I’m not in the same hotel.”
“We shared a room at TIFF the first time around,” Navarrette added later. That’s certainly not the case this year.
Since Obsession played at 11:59 p.m. on September 5, 2025, as part of TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, the film has become a global phenomenon. It was purchased by Focus Features in a bidding war for $15 million last October and officially released in May. It earned a respectable $17.2 million in its first week at the box office, but then became a word-of-mouth sensation, earning upwards of $512 million worldwide.
In the last year, Barker not only shot his upcoming third film, Anything But Ghosts, which Focus Features will also release, but agreed to direct a reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with A24 as well as another original horror film with Universal. Meanwhile, Navarrette signed on to play Mystique in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men reboot (a topic that went unmentioned during the panel), and also nabbed a starring role in an Apple TV sci-fi film called The Waffle House Index. Additionally, she’s hosting this year’s Halloween episode of Saturday Night Live.
In other words, neither Barker nor Navarrette will be flying economy or sharing a hotel room anytime soon.
“TIFF will go down in history for me,” said Barker. “It was actually the first time I ever left the [U.S.], and now I’ve been to London, Paris, Italy, and Mexico just in this year.”
As part of their Obsession victory lap and the start of their awards campaign, the pair swung by the John W. H. Bassett Theatre for a talk with Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky. Their conversation with looking back years before the fateful TIFF premiere, back when Navarrette auditioned for the role of Nikki.
“I did a Zoom. I thought I bombed it. I felt electrocuted,” Navarrette remembered. “I was lucky enough that [Barker] saw something in me that I didn’t feel like I had shown.”
She felt much better about her eventual chemistry read with Michael Johnston, who would go on to play Bear. “The words just made sense when he was there,” she told the audience.
Even with the instant connection she felt with Johnston, Navarrette and Barker worked on the bold choices for her character in secret.
“I kindly asked Curry if we could not show Michael anything,” she remembered about some of her now iconic line readings. “Even though it doesn’t really seem like it, I am quite shy. With trying things I’d never done before, I felt like if I showed it too early, I would overanalyze the preconceived notions of what I thought [the other cast members] were thinking, and it would eat my performance.”
As a bonus, Johnston was often reacting genuinely to acting choices made by Navarrette because he didn’t know what was coming.
Interestingly enough, the version of Obsession that was originally submitted to and accepted for TIFF wasn’t the version that eventually made it to the festival. During the talk, Kuplowsky revealed that he’s one of the lucky few who has seen both versions of the movie, because Barker and his team filmed reshoots during the summer before the film was released.
“When we did the test screening,” Barker says. “People were frustrated with Bear and didn’t understand why he didn’t do more to [fix his bad wish]. Why isn’t he going back to the crystal shop? Why isn’t he doing more research?”
But rather than show Bear trying to reverse the wish he made to initiate Nikki’s obsession, Barker added scenes to show Bear explicitly not wanting to break the curse. The scene where Bear calls the One Wish Willow support line not to cancel the wish but to modify it was moved forward in the second version of the film so audiences could see Bear’s darker motives sooner.
“I think there’s a stigma around the word ‘reshoots,’” noted Barker. “It’s beautiful if you have the opportunity to go back and fix things you didn’t have time for or weren’t thinking about.”
Navarrette does point out, though, that she was fresh off a camping trip during the reshoots and so is much tanner in certain scenes than others if you look closely.
In the four months since the film’s release, opportunities have come rolling in for Barker and Navarrette, who are both dreaming big for their futures.
“I’m now in rooms that I could never even have imagined,” said Navarrette, who is currently sitting at No. 2 in Gold Derby’s experts-only Best Actress leaderboard. “I now am pitching my own projects and hopefully going to produce and direct my own stuff.” She also said that she wants to take more big acting swings.
“I really want to wear a pixie cut for one movie. Bleached eyebrows. Piercings. Tattoos. How can I become a completely different person?” she revealed. “I really want to challenge myself because I did that on Obsession and it worked.”
For Barker, the fame brings a bit more trepidation. He said that Obsession was only made because it was a great idea, and it only became successful because it was well made. Now, however, he can get anything greenlit regardless of quality, and the pressure to perform is higher than ever.
“It’s a little intimidating,” he says. “Now I can do anything — but what do I really want to do?”
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