SPOILER ALERT: Read only if you’re okay knowing the entire plot.
A guy’s got to man up—that’s all there is to it. But that proves nearly impossible for Bear, this film’s protagonist, a nice guy who can’t work up the courage to speak his mind. Men, as the adage goes, prove themselves worthy by conquering fear; self-assurance mixed with tenderness is what women these days find attractive. By the conventional script, men pursue and women choose whose advances to accept. Fear of rejection has done in many a man, Bear among them; by that metric, he doesn’t make the cut.
Obsession, arguably the most talked-about film in years, has become a cultural phenomenon—a micro-budget picture that has broken a slew of box-office records and grossed over $370 million worldwide to date. It’s a well-told, harrowing tale, written, directed, and edited by Curry Barker, an Alabama-born Gen Z comedian whose YouTube channel has over a million followers.
The film touches on a trend some call “heteropessimism”—women grappling with the suspicion that men might not be worth the bother, though mostly they keep dating them anyway. Heteropessimism raises questions about the self-centered motives of men: the decisions nice guys make that leave women to suffer the consequences while the men claim innocence. Art means many things, so I won’t claim this is what the film is about, but it’s a useful lens for thinking about the film.
As the film opens, Bear pours his heart out to his crush, Nikki: “You’re all I think about.” Then the camera pulls back and we discover he’s only rehearsing, with a stand-in and his friend Ian critiquing the performance, urging him to tone down the sentimentality—foreshadowing the film’s “what is real” theme.
Bear is decent-looking, lovelorn, twenty-five, who wallows in self-pity. He pines for Nikki but can’t tell her so, even when she hands him the opening: “Do you like me? If so, now is the time to tell me.” He answers: “I think we’re good friends.”
Bear’s plaintive, incel-sounding question—”What’s so bad about being with me?”—seems destined to join the ranks of classic film lines, because it cuts to the heart of the matter. It voices a subtle, unconscious and insidious male assumption many men struggle against: that women exist to service men, and what, exactly, is so bad about that? Bear would love it if Nikki loved him, but who would he be loving if love asked nothing of him—if he weren’t obliged to love her for who she is, rather than simply as the woman who loves him and, in loving him, affirms him?
The plot turns on a magical curiosity. Nikki mentions that her favorite crystal necklace has fallen down a drain. Bear goes to a crystal shop to purchase a replacement but comes away instead with a One Wish Willow, which grants a single, irrevocable wish when snapped. The shopkeeper warns of its potential ill effects, but Bear—forewarned—buys it anyway. He’d entered the shop with Nikki in mind and left with something he will use himself—a telling swap.
“I wish Nikki Freeman loved me more than anyone else in the fucking world.” That’s how Bear phrases it. He could have wished simply for her to love him, or, wiser still, to become someone she’d love. Instead he seeks to change her, not himself, and greedily reaches for the moon: a wish that will capture Nikki, strip her of her will, and hollow her out.
This plot reminds me of a novel I read at fourteen: John Fowles’s The Collector, in which Frederick, a socially isolated man obsessed with a young art student named Miranda, abducts and imprisons her, convinced that once she gets to know him, she’ll fall in love with him. He considers himself a considerate captor, providing for her every need but freedom. Miranda tries to escape, then tries seduction, which repulses him; when she falls gravely ill, he delays getting help for fear of exposure, and she dies. The novel ends with him stalking his next victim, a woman who reminds him of her. The story is all about perversion.
The fantasy of capturing a woman reflects a defense against vulnerability and the terror of rejection—the impulse to possess and control that bypasses her say entirely, her wants, her consent, so the man can have his way without risking refusal. It’s like drugging a woman as preclude to date rape.
Miranda had her Frederick, Beauty had her Beast, Christine had her Phantom, and Nikki Freeman has Bear Bailey—though it’s really the other way around. Instead of working up the nerve to ask her out, Bear finds a work around, rigging the system at her expense.
Once Bear makes his wish, Nikki starts acting strangely. He has just driven her home; she’s about to unlock her front door when the spell hits, and she freezes. A moment later she’s at his car, uncharacteristically forward, entranced and coming on to him hard. He’s leery, keeps his distance, tells her she’s drunk and needs sleep—this isn’t like her at all. She doesn’t relent, and he eventually gives in, though he suspects it would be best if he didn’t.
The turning point comes when the two are out to dinner. Bear has just learned that her estranged father, whom she’d claimed was dying, isn’t ill at all, and he says as much. Nikki explodes—first an unsettling chuckle, then she screams shrilly: “Don’t do that. Why does it matter? I thought we were having a nice date.” This unnerves Bear enough that he backs down just to calm her—his signature move.
The screenplay fills in Barker’s thinking here: “lost in thought, Bear realizes his yearning for her overshadows everything; her lies, her strangeness, all of it fades—only her presence matters. It’s a moment that reveals a man with a studied disregard for truth, willing to look past anything for the sake of being wanted.”
Moments later, the two are home having sex, and Nikki seems somewhere else.
If the story were simple, complete possession, it wouldn’t be half as unsettling. What makes it genuinely disturbing is that Nikki loses, regains, and loses herself time and again. Each time she “comes to” and finds herself doing something she abhors, the audience is as startled as she is—a credit to Inde Navarrette, who handles the swings between eerie infatuation and horrified self-awareness expertly.
Nikki’s friends notice something is terribly wrong with her. They confront Bear, accusing him of taking advantage of someone clearly not in her right mind. Theories circulate: her father’s supposed illness, drug use, a bad breakup with Ian. Everyone guesses. Only Bear knows what’s up.
Over and over, Bear sees that part of her—the “real” Nikki—does not want what entranced Nikki wants, but he presses on, nonetheless. Some viewers understandable liken this to date rape with an incapacitated partner.
Bear suspects the truth almost immediately. The screenplay makes that crystal clear, though the film leaves the matter ambiguous for a time to achieve an optimal dramatic effect. Suspicious, Bear googles “One Wish Willow.” Further along, he calls the number on the package, begging to find some way to soften the wish rather than cancel it outright. The voice on the other end tells him neither is possible: “Just because you chose this doesn’t make it any less real.” “So she’s fucked forever?” Bear asks. “As long as you are alive,” the voice says, indicating the spell can only be broken upon Bear’s passing.
Nikki’s devotion curdles into something pathetic and frightening in equal measure. She waits outside the bathroom door Bear just closed, demands he stay when he tries to get out of bed, tapes the front door shut to keep him from leaving for work. When Ian throws a boys’ night out party that excludes her, meaning to show Bear just how dependent she’s become, she guilt trips through the shower door: “If you wanted me to go, you would have asked me to.” Again, Bear relents.
At the party, Nikki’s eyes are glued on Bear. When another guest asks what spell he’s put on her, Bear boasts, “I can be hard to resist,” and Nikki chimes in, “So true,” before turning to the room and announcing, in a voice gone menacing: “No one on this earth will ever comprehend what it feels like to love someone as much as I love you.” Suddenly she snaps out of it, grabs a vodka bottle, smashes it, and stabs herself in the face. YIKES!
The film’s most devastating exchange comes near the end. The entranced Nikki is asleep, but the real Nikki is briefly awake, pleading softly: “Kill me, Bear. Please.” He recognizes the voice as hers, asks what she said; she shushes him—don’t wake the other one—and repeats the request. In a moment of staggering obliviousness, Bear asks, “What’s so bad about being with me,” clueless about the extent of her suffering. Her answer is the film’s coldest line: “I’ve never been with you, Bear.” He turns and leaves the room, showing no empathy.
Shortly after, while Bear and Sarah sit talking in her SUV, Nikki runs headfirst through the car window and beats Sarah’s face to a pulp with a brick. Turning to Bear, she apologizes for what he’d just witnessed—”but it’s kinda your fault. My heart took a path I never chose. But I forgive you. I won’t hold it against you.” Now, they have to dispose of the body.
Bear runs to the crystal shop and buys two more willows, hoping to undo what he’s unleashed. He can’t wish again, so he rushes to Ian’s place and begs him to wish that Bear had never made the original wish. Instead, Ian wishes for a billion dollars, which comes pouring from the ceiling—doubling down on the film’s heteropessimism: men reliably put themselves first.
Bear runs home to find Sarah’s body propped in the corner. Nikki puts a gun to her own chin and threatens to shoot herself unless Bear shouts “I LOVE YOU!” Suddenly, Ian is letting himself in; Nikki shoots him. Bear locks himself in the bathroom with her gun but muster the courage to pull the trigger, so he swallows a bottle of OxyContin instead. Nikki uses the last willow to wish that he’d love her back in equal measure.
Bear emerges and collapses, dying. With his death the original wish will break, freeing Nikki—whether that’s what he intended, or he simply wanted a way out, is never made clear. Nikki puts the gun to her own head, ready to pull the trigger (which she does in the original screenplay), then snaps back to herself, and surveys the scene: her three closest friends physically present and utterly gone. The film ends with her sobbing. As the credits roll, we hear the song: Hold me. Thrill Me, which opens with “Make me tell you I’m in love with you,” and ends with: Never, Never, Never Let Me Go.”
One controversy surrounding the film is the tendency of some viewers to let Bear off the hook: he couldn’t have foreseen the consequences of his wish, so how is he to blame? Just like men to stand up for one another. Rewind the tape and Bear’s actions look more insidious. He knew he was taking advantage of Nikki and did so anyway, didn’t return to the shop to undo the spell until the last possible minute, ignored every glaring sign that she wasn’t acting of her own volition. It’s all there on the screen, if you’re willing to see it.
Obsession’s popularity isn’t attributable solely to fine filmmaking and a strong premise. Its appeal also lies in what it says about certain male tendencies: entitlement, the impulse to possess and control women, the belief that women exist to service men, difficulty accepting responsibility, trouble tolerating vulnerability and rejection. It also taps into the present heteropessimist thinking, with its nagging question of what good men are, exactly. Whatever else it means, Obsession offers pointed commentary on male psychology, right in step with the moment.