Peter Timberlake: The Invisible VFX of Obsession

This interview was conducted in partnership with VIEW Conference. Peter Timberlake will be a featured speaker at VIEW Conference 2026, taking place October 12–16 in Turin, Italy.

Obsession by Curry Barker has captivated the audience this year in an unexpected way. Its worldwide success comes from a deeply meaningful and multifaceted story of a wish come true gone wrong, which has a subliminality that brings a sense of unease that is hard to comprehend. At first, Freaky Nikki seems like the villain to watch out for, but the real monster is Bear. Her desperate call for help underneath the skin is right in front of the audience’s eyes, but it’s so subtle that it feels even more disturbing at a subconscious level. The true magic behind the One Wish Willow is Queen Studio, who pushed Barker’s twisted vision into the uncanny valley. VFX supervisor Peter Timberlake recalls that phone call with the director like it was yesterday. The request was simple: they needed someone who could deliver the visual effects with a low budget and a tight four-week deadline just in time for TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). The decision could have been a pass, but Timberlake confessed that due to his “lifelong friendship with [director of photography] Taylor Clemons, I had to make sure that this was a success for him. We took it on the chin and did it for the project.” Obsession got picked up by Focus Features and Blumhouse, and the rest is history.

At the core of Obsession is an incredible performance by Inde Navarrette. Nikki went through hell and back since Bear snapped his One Wish Willow. As soon as the evil entity took over her body, Navarrette transformed her character into an obsessively dangerous girlfriend who just can’t separate from Bear. Instead of leaning too much into the classic horror tropes of demonic possessions (which was Queen Studio’s first approach), Barker crafted a complex tension between the two sides of Nikki that throws the audience off in every key moment. The unexpected behavior is accentuated by unnatural physicality and especially by contradicting microexpressions: “For our first round of VFX, we basically accentuated facial expressions. Where Nikki was making her eyes very wide, they’d be wider; if she was smiling, she’d be smiling more; if she was frowning, she would be frowning more, etc. Curry looked at them and took a moment to contemplate and realized that what we needed to be doing was actually going the opposite way. If Nikki’s eyes were wide open, then we would close them. If she was frowning, we would tip her lips up and vice versa. What that gives you is an incongruity with what her face is doing and what her actual emotions are under the surface,” Timberlake revealed.

The perfect example is the iconic moment at the restaurant where Nikki makes a scene in front of everyone after hearing Bear’s question about her father. In the original performance, Nikki is looking at the camera with a mischievous smile, but in post-production the director asked Queen Studio to “take her lips and tilt them downwards so that she’s frowning, but you get the sense that she’s smiling.” This mismatch is a glimpse of the internal fight between the two personas, in this case the evil host trying to suppress Nikki’s smile at the revelation of her lies. The VFX supervisor added that most of Inde Navarrette’s performance was Freaky Nikki (besides the initial transition after the wish was granted, in which both versions of the character were intercut throughout the scene), and that “there was never a conversation about a CG or an AI face. It was always about wanting her to have the ring of some codependent couples that you’ve known or maybe even been a part of, with this supernatural layer underpinning it, rather than it being this demonic possession.”

Queen Studio ended up working on 136 shots–some aiding the practical effects for the most violent, gory scenes (like the death of Sarah), others enhancing exuberant moments such as Ian’s billion dollar wish, but there was one invisible VFX that was essential to the end of Obsession: Bear’s last breath. Timberlake said that “the shot was coming off of these big performances by the actors … It’s very physical. Bear is breathing really heavily, and it was absolutely essential to the story that he wasn’t. We had to make his chest stable, which sounds like an easy task, but we also had to consider a camera move and Nikki wrestling with his shirt (she throws a gun on him). There’s all of these other factors that you can’t just take a frame and track it in–you have to manually affect only certain areas, not affecting others, and it becomes complex very quickly, especially for a super long shot.”

Peter Timberlake ended the interview sharing his approach to VFX after working at big studios all over the world, priding himself for choosing a flexibility of workflow–the ability to configure Queen Studio to the project: “I think that paradigm enabled us to do [Obsession]. It doesn’t have traditional roles, other artists and supervisors can hop in, do a little bit of work on the project, email or upload something to the client, pop back over to their other project that they’re doing that’s a more typical budgeted project. We can keep the flow going without having to allocate a producer, coordinator, composer, VFX supervisors, or 3D lead.” He added, “It’s something that I believe in strongly because we’re entering into a world where Curry Barkers are the most prized directors in the world, and these are people who are editing their own movies, they probably know a good amount about VFX, they might even have a music background (Curry has all of these), and they are going to be wanting to work in that more flexible way rather than this strictly, scaffolded, rigid format.”

For more insights on the VFX of Obsession, join the conversation at VIEW Conference 2026 October 12–16 in Turin, Italy.