Years before ‘Obsession’ turned her into an overnight sensation, horror’s latest breakout star, Inde Navarette, featured in a low-budget romantic short film directed by filmmaker Shubham Sanjay Shevade. Long before Hollywood began hailing her as the new scream queen, Inde Navarette quietly did an unlikely creative detour.
Today, Navarette is everywhere on account of ‘Obsession’, the low-budget psychological horror phenomenon that has turned into 2026’s most unexpected box-office crowd puller. However, years before blood-soaked close-ups and viral fan edits, the star appeared in a little-seen romantic short film called ‘Cross Words Together’, directed by Shubham Sanjay Shevade, an Indian filmmaker.
The independent production collaboration in 2018 had Inde involved while she was still mostly unknown outside of audition rooms and brief TV appearances. The film, with a limited budget, focused on the embarrassing fragility of modern relationships, teenage desire, and emotional misreading, essentially an emotional antithesis of Obsession, in which love turns into something so sinister.
Neither the actress nor the director was even remotely close to being popular at the time. Outside Bollywood’s glitzy machinery, Shubham was part of a new generation of independent Indian filmmakers experimenting with cross-cultural storytelling. On the other hand, Inde was still years away from becoming well-known on television and, later, in horror films.
The rediscovery of ‘Cross Words Together’ now feels almost surreal as Navarrette’s screen presence has transformed so drastically. In Obsession, she plays Nikki Freeman, a young woman trapped inside a terrifying supernatural spiral as her best friend uses a cursed object to force her into loving him. What begins as romantic fantasy rapidly turns violent, obsessive, and grotesque.
Directed by Curry Barker, Obsession was initially viewed as just another micro-budget horror gamble. However, upon release, it exploded into one of 2026’s biggest surprise hits, reportedly earning more than $100 million worldwide against a tiny production budget. Critics and audiences especially singled out Navarrette’s performance, praising how she balanced vulnerability, rage, horror, and emotional collapse without turning Nikki into a caricature.
Source: Indian Express
