What Is the “One Wish Willow” Based On? In OBSESSION Movie’s Plot
If you’re interested in the concept of the One Wish Willow from Curry Barker’s horror film OBSESSION, it’s not just a one-off novelty gift from a New Age crystal shop. The concept of granting one wish with invariably miserable consequences goes back millennia. Here are some of those tales—and the film’s ending—explained.
Faux advertisement for the novelty item “One Wish Willow” from the film OBSESSION.
A warning: because I talk about the plot of OBSESSION in detail, there are spoilers ahead. As the retail worker says in the film, “There are warnings all over the box.”
OBSESSION Movie’s Plot Summary / Synopsis
Twenty-something Baron (Michael Johnston) is infatuated with his music-store co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), and he has finally decided to tell her how he feels. Because he hears Nikki lose her crystal necklace down the drain, he stops into a New Age shop to get her a replacement. They don’t carry exactly what he wants, so he settles on a different gift, a One-Wish Willow. Despite every opportunity to profess his love that evening, Baron just can’t bring himself to verbalize it, not even when she asks him, as he drops her off at her house, “Do you like me? Now’s the time to say.” He waits until she’s inside, then he pulls out the One Wish Willow. He snaps it in half and says, “I wish Nikki Freeman would love me more than anyone else in the world.” He gets his wish—but she doesn’t just love him. Nikki becomes obsessed, jealous, and, honestly, weird. Not like herself at all….
Trailer for Curry Barker’s 2026 horror film, OBSESSION.
There are several elements in that synopsis that render OBSESSION a retelling of a Tale as Old as Time—and yes, I did invoke Disney intentionally. In Aladdin, what is the second of the Genie’s three rules? “I can’t make anyone fall in love.”
That’s the first trope: wishing for love. After bringing people back from the dead, it’s the thing people wish for the most. At least, it’s a common enough occurrence that he made it an outright rule. (I won’t mention how the Minotaur came to be, but you can check it out here if you’re inclined. It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but if you liked OBSESSION, it might interest you.)
The second, not heeding the very clear warnings.
The third, your wish spectacularly backfiring: not only does getting what you ask for not make you happy, it makes you more miserable.
These three elements are ancient, but they’ve become cliché for a reason: clearly, wanting what you can’t have is a very integral part of human nature. (Especially someone you can’t have.) And it always has been. It probably always will be.
Unbelieved Prophecy / Warnings
The allusions to Greek Myth abound everywhere, but especially in the movie OBSESSION. The first example I saw was when Baron visited the crystal shop. The cashier warns him that people try to return that item all the time. They want to undo their wish. Plus, as a different cashier tells him later, “There are warnings all over the box.” To me, that smells like Cassandra.
In Greco-Roman mythology, Cassandra spurned Poseidon’s romantic advances. Poseidon, the ever-petty God of the sea, cursed her with the gift of true prophecy that no one would believe.
But that’s assuming a lot of the cashier who is on an earbud phonecall during their whole conversation. Shifting focus onto Baron, we get notes of both Agamemnon and Odysseus.
It’s no coincidence that Agamemnon took Cassandra as his concubine/slave, and she predicted that they would both be murdered by his wife. He did not believe her; they were in fact murdered.
Speaking of spoilers, the blind prophet Tiresias (no stranger to divine curses) tells Odysseus at the beginning of The Odyssey* that he will make it home to Ithaca after a difficult journey, and he’ll live to be old. Iff he does not touch the sun god’s sheep. If he does that, his whole crew will die before he eventually arrive home way later, alone, on a foreign ship. And, well, you know what happens there. Or you’ve at least seen the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Those are just the few examples I remembered off the top of my head. There are many more throughout mythology, literature, even TV and pop culture. Don’t even get me started on how trying to prevent a prophecy from happening inevitably causes it to come true.
Inde Navarrette stars as Nikki and Michael Johnston as Bear in OBSESSION, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
You Get What You Want, Literally... And It’s Not What You Want, Actually.
The thing about wishes is, you got to be careful how you word things. Most of the time, at least in stories, when you phrase it incorrectly, you get what you ask for, but you don’t get what you really want. You usually get the opposite of what you actually want.
Let’s talk about King Midas. He’s the guy in Greek myth who wanted to be rich, so he wished for everything he touched to turn to gold. That happened, and literally everything he touched turned to gold. In the original myth, he basically starved because he couldn’t eat food that turned to gold.
In the version I grew up knowing, which was apparently a reimagining by Nathaniel Hawthorne, King Midas’ touch turned his roses to gold. His daughter was sad that they lost their smell, and when he reached to comfort her, he turned her into gold as well.
You might also recall a turn-of-the-century short story in which this happens, as well. Remember “The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs? Sergeant-Major Morris brings a mummified monkey’s paw to dinner at his friends’ house. He warns them that a fakir (from his service to the British Army in India) enchanted the paw so that it will grant three wishes, but only with hellish consequences. Morris throws it into the fire because of his own experience, but Mr. White, the host, retrieves it. He has almost everything he wants, but he could use £200 to pay off his mortgage.
The next day, the Whites learn that their adult son has died in an accident that mutilated his body, and although the company the son worked for denies responsibility, they do issue a £200 bereavement payment. Mr. White has two more wishes. You can guess how that goes. Or you can read it for yourself!
Again, these are just the allusions that popped into my head. They’re like 3000 years apart (although, one could argue the tighter cause-and-effect narratives really happened at the beginning of the 20th century), and there are tons more in between.
Speaking of mythologies referenced in OBSESSION, there are a couple bonus allusions that I want to mention, too.
Inde Navarrette stars as Nikki and Michael Johnston as Bear in OBSESSION, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Romeo & Juliet—at least, an homage to their tragic double-suicide
Probably every viewer clocked that leftover oxycodone in Baron’s grandma’s broken medicine cabinet. And probably everyone clocked that the customer service rep told Baron over the phone that the wish lasts “as long as he lives.” They make a moment of it. Completing suicide is even presented as an option, but only after “You have a moral imperative to be there for (Nikki), since it was your Wish.”
When, finally, Baron realizes he can buy another wish—despite the title of the toy, “One Wish Willow”—he gets another I-told-you-so reprimand from the second cashier, among some other suggestions, like asking other people to make the wish for him. Nikki, in particular, since it “sounds like she’d do anything for you.”
What shakes out is different, though: after Baron takes the fatal dose, New Nikki makes her own Wish. It’s for Baron to fall in love with her. He wanders moony-eyed out of the bathroom to find his horrific beloved for just a moment before he passes out.
Then we get the Romeo and Juliet allusion: Nikki realizes Baron is dead and reaches for the gun. The spell wears off just a moment before she pulls the trigger to realize the same ending.
And when it does wear off…
We get to my favorite mythologic allusion.
Zombi—as in, the true, original Voodoo meaning of the term
When New Nikki “breaks” character, we can see that Original Nikki is somehow still in there. She’s not aware of what her body/New Nikki is doing, though. At least, Original Nikki seems completely confused during the break-throughs. Or violent.
That’s an allusion to the Zombi.
Not the Night-of-the-Living-Dead ghoul. No, the original, Voodoo meaning of the term.
In Race, Oppression, and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, film scholar David Inglis states, “the cultural roots of the zombie in Haiti are very much connected to ex-slaves’ fears of a return to an enslaved condition.” And while OBSESSION does not address enslavement or race relations at all, it’s that concept that funds Nikki’s character.
Essentially, according to Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston, Voodoo priests make zombies to do what they want. That is exactly what happens to Nikki.
And when the curser—in this case Baron—dies, the curse is lifted, and the human spirit returns to its body.
Anyway, that’s not to say OBSESSION is not a unique take on an old story. It totally is.
OBSESSION releases in theaters Friday, May 15.
If this story stuck with you, then you might like…
-- The Roots Of GET OUT Run Long, Deep… And Undead
-- Retellings and Reimaginings of MACBETH’s Weird Sisters
-- The 10 Biggest Horror Moments In Robert Eggers’ New Viking Film, THE NORTHMAN
