Low-Budget Horror 'Him and I' Sparks Backlash Over Its Selfish Take on Love

A $750,000 thriller pulling in over $150 million at the global box office with a 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — that gap alone is newsworthy. But what really makes "Him and I" so unsettling isn't the effects or the twists. It's how the film writes "love" as a wish-fulfillment clause: the one who makes the wish gets everything, while the one wished upon loses even control of their own mind.

The wish male lead Bear makes on the mysterious artifact known as the wishing willow is simple: make Nikki love him more than anyone else in the world. It sounds like a romantic line, but in practice it turns a living person into a device that obeys without any will of her own. The film opens with the line "This is a love story, not a romance story," and it's only here that the line reveals its true bite — Bear can't tell the difference between love and romance. He thinks confessing feelings, going on dates, and being together automatically add up to love, without ever stopping to ask whether the other person still has room to choose.

What Exactly Makes Bear the Worst: Three Moments He Couldn't Face

Audiences are nearly unanimous in their verdict on Bear: trash. But his real flaw isn't cowardice or being too scared to confess his feelings — it's that every time he's forced to make a real choice, he turns and walks away. When the customer service line puts him through to Nikki and he hears her screaming in agony, he just hangs up, never once pushing further for a solution. When he goes to a strange shop looking for answers and the clerk mocks him a bit, his response is to apologize instead of pressing for the actual answer. The harshest moment comes right before he goes to find Sarah — a lucid Nikki could have actually called out for help then, her only real chance to break free from the curse, but Bear, too wounded by his own bruised ego, just turns and leaves.

Michael Johnston, who plays Bear, spelled the character out clearly in an interview: a guy with zero self-awareness and low emotional intelligence, fixated on the idea that "if I just get this one thing, my whole life will change," never once treating Nikki as a person with her own agency. He even said that if Bear got a chance to make the wish again, he wouldn't undo it — he'd just word it more precisely. That line is more chilling than any bloody scene in the film.

One Simple Prop Carries the Film's Entire Visual Tension

Inde Navarrette, who plays Nikki, makes "possessed love" utterly convincing — holding an eerie smile for extended stretches, smashing a bottle against her own face — all through precise physical control rather than layers of effects. Director Curry Barker deliberately avoided leaning on CGI, using old-school shooting techniques to force the fear to feel real. The wishing willow prop that runs through the entire film was designed by the director and his mother together, packaged to look like an ordinary, harmless toy with a deliberately vague sense of era. That contrast — something that looks completely benign but is actually the source of the curse — is the film's most effective visual strategy.

Curry Barker, 26, previously ran the YouTube channel "that's a bad idea," which has 1.22 million subscribers. This is his feature film debut, and he took on directing, writing, editing, and acting all at once. The film earned him three awards at Sitges Film Festival and landed him the directing gig on A24's upcoming reboot of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." "Him and I" opened in Taiwan on August 7.