Spoilers for Obsession (2025) below:
I just got home from re-watching this movie and wow, I'm stunned. I already loved it and had a good working theory of it on first pass, but really, this movie is so layered, it's so well made, Inde Navarrette gives a stellar performance (more on that later). Please go see this movie (warning: it has literally every content warning you can imagine)
Ok, here's why this movie is so smart and gut-wrenching and why so many people will misinterpret the movie.
So, the entire movie is framed around the main character Bear's decision to use this novelty toy that grants a wish to wish for the girl he likes, Nikki, to "love him more than anyone else in the world".
The fundamental crux of the movie is that decision, and the movie primes you so heavily to root for Bear and the fallout of that decision. The ten minutes up to that moment are seriously heartwarming, the movie develops the characters fast and endears you to the geniune friendship/relationiship between Nikki and Bear. It's clear they both are on some level endeared to them (does Nikki like Bear before the wish? idk, maybe, it's not actually that important), so it makes the decision for Bear to use the wish so disappointing and really hit, because he messed up his chance to ask Nikki out.
So Bear makes his wish and Nikki immediately starts acting weird, being very odd, confusing, playful, coming on to him, emotional, depreesed, borderline manipulative. The acting is bizarre and, quite importantly, comedic. Like, seriously, Nikki, her mannerisms, her actions, the timing, the editing. It is undiably funny. I know because people kept laughing, people would laugh like the entire time she was on screen.
And it's because she's acting funny but also because she's acting like a type of woman we've been taught to hate: a woman who is emotionally unstable, a woman who is obsessively attached to the guy she's dating, who has no personality otherwise; to be blunt: she is acting like a crazy bitch. The audience is seeing a crazy woman on screen doing crazy things, and the guy is getting tormented by it, and, no, this isn't what he actually wanted, so the audience ends up feeling bad for him.
But here's the thing: this is all masterful obfuscation on the movie part.
Halfway through the movie, via Bear making a customer service call to the manufacturers of the wish-making toy (another scene that is very comedic), the tone switches dramatically.
Bear asks the customer service rep: "is her love real?", because, even though this woman has been acting so different from the woman he's known for years, the woman who he's fallen in love with, he's so desperate to be with her romantically that he wants to salvage this wish. Actually, he calls the customer service rep, but not to cancel the wish, but to alter the wish. He's gotten this woman to behave exactly as he wished, but it's still not enough.
So he asks the rep if the love is real and he says "just because you made her love you doesn't make it any less real." And then (I don't totally remember how we get to this moment), he switches the line to Nikki, the real Nikki, the true honest Nikki who has had her body stripped of her possesion and turned into a puppet to fufill this guys wish, he puts that Nikki on the line and she is screaming. She is screaming bloody murder, she is desperate to stop what is happening to her, to get this violation to end.
And like, there's a lot of hints (actually more like very obvious moments) before this moment that Nikki is combatting what is happening to her, but they kind of can get played off as part of this new Nikki's unstable emotial state (women be crazy, am I right? and then all the men in the audience who had their wives laugh, and they keep laughing. they laugh the entire movie).
And that's the big reveal, that we've been watching this woman get completely and utterly abused, physically, mentally, sexually, and we've been made to laugh at her. And even after it is completely and utterly clear to anyone paying attention that this is happening to Nikki, the audience just keeps. fucking. laughing.
God, everyone in the theater just kept laughing at Nikki, the mannerisms, the craziness. But it was so clear, in hindsight and henceforth, that we have been watching a woman fighting.
I would postulate that whatever wish-demon-entity that posses Nicki's body when Bear makes his wish doesn't actually want to creep Bear out; I think it wants to be totally obedient and isn't responsible for the weird nature/creepiness that transpires as the wish progresses.
I think that's actually Nikki fighting back. She does break through a few times and gets a few "It's not me!" yells out before the wish retakes control, but I think she's doing that literally the entire time. Fighting back against this violation her body, of her autonomy by bending the rules. By interfering, by influencing the displays of love in ways that are weird, creepy, off-putting. She stands up in the middle of dinner and screams at Bear. She duck-tapes the front door so he can barely leave. She cooks his dead cat and serves it to him (the cat symbol is a whole different can of worms to be discussed sometime else). She's doing everything in her power to show Bear that isn't what he really wants, this isn't right, he needs to fix this.
But it doesn't work. He keeps trying to make it work, keeps shrugging off everyone around him that asks why Nikki is acting so weird. He's desperate to be with Nikki, and he doesn't even care that it's not the real Nikki.
Right before everything finally really goes to shit and people start dying, there's a scene where the wish-entity controlling Nikki is asleep and the real Nikki breaks through and talks to Bear, and she asks him to kill her. She has been fighting but can't any longer, and she needs this to end. But Bear doesn't consider this at all. He simply asks, "Is being with me really that bad?" (To which Nikki replies "You've never been with me Bear." and then Bear leaves and everything goes to shit to that. I won't fully spoil the ending, but nope, he never kills her, and he's a coward til the end.
Because, yes, this movie is titled "Obession", but the obsession at play is not Nikki's obsession for Bear; the movie makes it very clear at the start that the real her has a rich, complex life. But you know who doesn't? Bear. Bear is obsesesd with Nikki. It's like the only thing the movie tells us about him. Every thought, action, and word that comes out of his mouth is in someway tangetial to his crush. He is obsessed with this girl, can't muster the courage to ask her out, but wants her anyways, so he takes her from herself. He strips her of her identity, her agency, her personality; he rapes her.
And the audience just keeps laughing.
