Curry Barker's follow-up to his acclaimed micro-budget debut Milk & Serial arrives in theaters on May 15, 2026, carrying a premise that strips the romantic fantasy of wish fulfillment down to something considerably darker. Obsession is a horror film about what happens when desire overrides consent - and its streaming future is already taking shape for audiences who want to watch from home or from anywhere in the world.
What Obsession Is Actually About
The film centers on Bear, a soft-spoken music store employee who uses a novelty toy called a "One Wish Willow" to make his longtime friend and co-worker Nikki fall in love with him. The wish works. What follows is not a romance. Stripped of her free will, Nikki becomes consumed by a violent, unnatural compulsion to remain near him - a transformation that turns Bear's fantasy into something he cannot control and cannot undo.
Barker has been candid about the film's thematic core in interviews. He told TIME that "any time you wish for something, it's probably going to be selfish," and framed the film's moral as a straightforward proposition: love should be earned. Speaking to DiscussingFilm, he emphasized that the goal was for the film to "feel grounded," resisting any temptation to over-explain the magical mechanics in favor of dwelling on the human damage they produce. The possession, in other words, is not the tragedy. Bear's refusal to relinquish the artificial relationship he manufactured is.
That focus on psychological and emotional realism, rather than spectacle for its own sake, places Obsession in a particular lineage of horror - films that use the genre's tools to interrogate control, obsession, and the ethical violence of treating another person as an object of desire rather than an autonomous human being.
Where and When You Can Stream Obsession
Obsession is a theatrical release distributed under the Focus Features and Universal Pictures umbrella. Both labels share a corporate parent in NBCUniversal, and their theatrical releases have consistently migrated to Peacock once their cinema runs conclude. Based on that established pattern, Obsession is expected to arrive on Peacock sometime around August 2026, roughly two months after its May 15 theatrical debut.
For viewers who prefer not to wait, pre-orders are already live on PVOD platforms in the United Kingdom, priced at £17.99. Wider digital availability has not yet been formally announced.
Peacock offers three subscription tiers for US-based subscribers:
- Select ($7.99/month or $79.99/year): Ad-supported entry tier covering new NBC and Bravo seasons and partial access to Peacock Originals.
- Premium ($10.99/month or $109.99/year): Full originals library, next-day NBC and Bravo episodes, movies, and live sports coverage.
- Premium Plus ($16.99/month or $169.99/year): Ad-free viewing, offline downloads, and a live local NBC feed. Some live events may retain minor ads due to rights constraints.
Using a VPN to Watch From Outside the US
Peacock is geographically restricted and available primarily to viewers in the United States. For audiences in other countries - or for US subscribers who find themselves abroad - a VPN offers the most practical workaround.
A Virtual Private Network routes your internet connection through a server in a location of your choosing, masking your actual IP address and making it appear as though you are browsing from that server's region. This allows access to content that is restricted to specific territories. Beyond geographic unlocking, VPNs also encrypt outgoing traffic, which protects browsing data from interception by internet service providers, public Wi-Fi operators, and other third parties. Some providers also help reduce ISP throttling - the practice by which some internet service providers deliberately slow streaming traffic - which can meaningfully improve video quality.
Not all VPNs perform equally for streaming. The two most relevant factors are server count and connection reliability. Services with large global server networks tend to maintain more consistent speeds, which matters for HD and 4K playback. Encryption overhead is real, though on modern consumer hardware and with current VPN protocols, the practical slowdown is usually minimal on a stable broadband connection.
Among the widely used options:
- ExpressVPN: A well-established provider with over 3,000 servers across numerous countries, optimized for streaming with consistent performance at HD and 4K quality.
- VeePN: A more affordable alternative with over 2,600 servers globally, suited to viewers who want reliable streaming access without paying premium rates.
- NordVPN: Strong on security features with dependable speeds.
- Surfshark: Allows unlimited simultaneous device connections, useful for households with multiple viewers.
- CyberGhost: Known for consistent global performance.
- Private Internet Access: Feature-rich with a pronounced focus on user privacy.
One practical note: streaming platforms actively work to detect and block VPN traffic, so no single provider guarantees uninterrupted access at all times. Switching to a different server within the same country is usually enough to resolve a blocked connection. Paid VPN services generally maintain this more reliably than free alternatives, which tend to have fewer servers, lower speeds, and less frequent updates to their IP address pools.
Whether Obsession ultimately justifies the effort will depend on how far Barker's grounded psychological horror lands with audiences primed, or unsettled, by the premise. The wish-gone-wrong premise has served horror well for decades. Rarely does it arrive with this much explicit interest in what the wish reveals about the person who made it.
