I finally watched Obsession last week and given all the hype around it, I already knew it was going to be good; I just didn’t expect to end up lying awake afterward thinking about a cinema hall in Pokhara from 2008. More on that in a bit.

If you’ve been anywhere near film Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, you already know about Obsession. It’s become one of the biggest surprise horror hits in recent memory. Made for something like $750,000, it’s grossed close to $400 million worldwide. That’s the cinematic equivalent of starting a small YouTube channel from your bedroom and ending up with more subscribers than MrBeast.

The setup: Bear (Michael Johnston), a socially awkward music-store employee, is hopelessly in love with his coworker Nikki (Inde Navarrette). Being a horror movie protagonist, and therefore constitutionally incapable of good decisions, Bear buys a novelty toy called the “One Wish Willow” from what appears to be a very ominous crystal shop, breaks it, and wishes for Nikki to love him “more than anyone else in the world.”

As literally anyone who has watched one supernatural movie in their life could have predicted, this goes catastrophically well, then catastrophically badly.

And somewhere around the part where Nikki’s affection curdles into something that would make even the most devoted girlfriend take a restraining order out on herself, my brain did this weird little jump-cut and went: wait. why am I thinking about Kagbeni right now.

Now, before anyone types “bro these are completely different films”; yes, I know. One is a 2026 American horror movie made by a YouTuber-turned-filmmaker. The other is a 2008 Nepali psychological drama shot in the high, wind-scoured beauty of Mustang, directed by a guy who, up to that point, only had music videos and television shows on his résumé.

But hear me out.

The one that made us go “wait, Nepali films can look like THIS?”

For anyone who wasn’t obsessively tracking Nepali cinema in the late 2000s (or was busy spending hours at the cyber café on Hi5 and Yahoo chat instead, no judgment), Kagbeni was one of those films. It came out in January 2008, directed by Bhusan Dahal, his debut, and it is loosely, lovingly adapted from W.W. Jacobs’ 1902 horror classic The Monkey’s Paw.

The story: childhood friends Ramesh (Saugat Malla), a small-time apple brandy maker, and Krishna (Nima Rumba), back home on holiday from a labor job in Malaysia, are hiking overnight to deliver a batch of brandy when they take shelter in a cave. There, they run into a wandering Jogi who, in exchange for Krishna lending him a blanket for the cold night, gifts him a thousand-year-old monkey’s paw. The Jogi’s warning is the whole film in one sentence: it grants wishes to its rightful owner, but brings disaster on anyone else who dares use it.

You already know where this goes. Nearly a decade later, Ramesh is finally married to Tara (Diya Maskey), the woman he’d quietly pined for since youth, with a young son. Life is finally, finally looking up for them, right when a mysterious guest turns up and every bit of that hard-won happiness starts unraveling.

Saugat Malla and Diya Maskey were relatively new faces back then. Looking back now, it’s honestly hard to imagine Nepali cinema without them.

I watched Kagbeni on the big screen, back in 2008, at Barahi Cinema Hall in Pokhara. And there’s this one moment I still remember clearly almost two decades later that the point where Krishna comes back into the story after everything that’s happened to him. I don’t know how else to put it except that the hall went dead quiet, and something about the way he’d changed, genuinely freaked me out in my seat. It’s the same specific kind of unease I got watching Nikki in Obsession — someone who’s supposed to be familiar and safe, standing right in front of you, except something underneath has clearly gone very wrong. That’s a hard feeling to manufacture in a horror film, and both of these managed it almost twenty years apart.

I haven’t actually rewatched Kagbeni since that night in Pokhara — but that feeling has stuck with me all these years. Writing this has made me think I should probably fix that; may be I will give be rewatching it some time soon.

Same old cursed object, completely different accent

Strip away the mountains and the music shop, and both films are telling the exact same ancient story: the “be careful what you wish for” tale that’s been circulating since Jacobs wrote his monkey’s paw in 1902, and probably long before that in some other cursed-object form.

Bear doesn’t really want love. He wants certainty. He wants to skip the awkward confession, skip the possibility of rejection, and have the universe do the emotional labor for him. And the universe, being the sarcastic entity it always is in horror movies, goes: “Sure. Here you go. Enjoy.” What follows is one of the more disturbing, oddly funny, and genuinely tragic horror performances I’ve seen in a while; Nikki swinging from heartbreakingly vulnerable to quietly, unsettlingly unhinged.

Kagbeni runs the same experiment with a completely different tone. No jump scares, no gore. Its horror is quieter; the slow, sinking realization that every wish comes with a bill attached, and that people are spectacularly, consistently bad at understanding what they actually want until it’s too late to give it back.

Two very different kinds of gambles

Here’s the part that actually made me grin while going down this rabbit hole.

Obsession was a genuine underdog story in the money sense, a tiny budget that turned into a festival phenomenon. It premiered in a midnight slot at TIFF and ended up selling for the highest price ever paid for a genre film at that festival, before turning into one of Focus Features’ biggest hits ever. A guy who made his name on YouTube shorts basically willed this thing into existence; reportedly recording some of the dialogue himself, from his bedroom, while editing.

Kagbeni wasn’t a scrappy shoestring production the way Obsession was, but it was a gamble of a different kind. It was the first digital film ever made in Nepal, shot on brand-new high-definition cameras imported from the US that literally nobody in the local industry knew how to operate yet. The crew reportedly had to walk hours to the nearest cyber café just to email the camera company for help whenever something broke. That’s a serious creative and technical risk to take as a debut director, and it paid off in a way that changed what people expected from Nepali cinema going forward; suddenly films didn’t have to look cheap, sound cheap, or tell the same three stories on rotation.

Everyone remembers 2012’s Loot, Nischal Basnet’s Loot, as the film that “saved” Nepali cinema. But four years before that, Kagbeni had already quietly laid the first brick for what was coming. Critics still describe the wave of arthouse and experimental films that followed as the “post-Kagbeni era.” Sit with that for a second; how many films get an entire era of a country’s cinema named after them?

Two debut directors who apparently enjoy making people suffer emotionally

It’s also worth noting: both of these are directorial debuts. Curry Barker had never made a feature before Obsession. Bhusan Dahal had never directed a film before Kagbeni, he came from music videos. Both walked in, picked “cursed wish, devastating consequences” as their opening statement to the world, and both nailed it well enough that people are still talking about their films: months later for Obsession, and going on two decades later for Kagbeni.

Kind of makes you wonder if “wishes going horribly wrong” is just the industry-standard starter pack for a director trying to announce themselves.

The real difference is what the wish is actually for

If I’m honest, the thing separating the two isn’t the setting, the year, or the effects budget;it’s what’s driving the wish in the first place. Obsession is about romantic obsession curdling into possession, very “modern situationship gone supernatural.” Kagbeni is about something quieter and more universal; old friendships, buried longing, the ache of leaving home to make a living abroad and coming back to find some things changed and some things exactly, painfully the same. One is about wanting someone too much. The other is about wanting a life you think you’re owed, or wanting a shortcut around fate itself; with Mustang’s rocky, indifferent landscape just sitting there in the background, watching it all happen the way it always has.

But strip away the streaming platforms, and the eighteen years between them, and you’re left with the same bruise: people reaching for something through a shortcut, and the shortcut always, always collecting its fee.

Maybe that’s why both stayed with me. Not because the plots are identical. Not because the style matches. But because they’re both telling the same story humans have been telling each other since we’ve had stories to tell: we think we know exactly what we want, and the universe responds by laughing, quietly, in the dark.

Anyway, watch Obsession if you haven’t. And if you somehow grew up without watching Kagbeni, fix that immediately. And the great thing is, it’s right there on YouTube, I’ll drop the link here for you, or just look it up yourself, it takes two seconds. It’s basically the origin story of modern Nepali cinema, and it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for.

And after all these years, thinking about Obsession and Kagbeni side by side, I’ve landed on a personal life philosophy: if a Jogi in a cave offers you a cursed artifact, or a crystal shop tries to upsell you a supernatural toy with its own customer service line, just say no. Go home. Put on a comedy film; or horror, whatever suits your mood; and just enjoy life. And leave fate alone.