Did We Watch the Same Film?
Updated: Sep 9
Obsession makes Nikki terrifying. But the more I think about the film, the less convinced I am that Nikki is the thing we should be most afraid of. The real horror begins much earlier — with a man who cannot accept that another person’s feelings belong to her
Trigger warning: This essay contains spoilers for Obsession and discusses coercive control, loss of autonomy and consent, self-harm, suicide, graphic violence and murder, mental-health distress, animal death and disturbing sexual and incestuous material.
There are films where I finish watching, go online, read what everybody else apparently took from them and have the very disorienting experience of wondering whether we were all shown the same cut.
Obsession did that to me.
Because yes, obviously Nikki is terrifying. The film is not remotely subtle about that. She becomes jealous, possessive, volatile, manipulative and increasingly violent. By the time the film reaches its worst moments, Nikki is the thing moving around the screen like a horror-movie threat. You do not need a degree in film studies to identify the obsession when it is smashing things, screaming and making everybody in the room visibly afraid.
But Nikki is not the scariest thing about Obsession.
Bear is.
The more I think about him, the less interested I become in the obvious question — how dangerous does Nikki’s obsession become? — and the more interested I am in the one sitting underneath it: why are we so much better at recognising obsession when it looks like Nikki than when it looks like Bear?
Because Bear’s obsession is there before Nikki’s ever exists. It just arrives wearing much nicer clothes.
Bear Looks Like the Romantic Lead
The film initially makes Bear very easy to sympathise with. He is shy, awkward and desperately in love with his friend. Early on, he is practising his confession to a waitress sitting across from him while Ian gives him advice, and it is funny because Bear is so painfully incapable of just saying what he feels to the actual woman concerned.
There is nothing inherently sinister about that. People have unrequited crushes. People practise conversations. People become terrified that telling a friend they love them will destroy the friendship. Bear being nervous is not the problem.
The problem is what happens when reality does not cooperate with the story Bear has been telling himself.
And Nikki is not exactly leaving him with a great deal of romantic ambiguity.
At one point Bear tells her that he does not have feelings for her, and Nikki responds with an incredibly relieved version of “Okay, good.”
The delivery matters.
She does not sound disappointed. She does not give him the wounded little look films use when somebody is pretending not to care. She does not sound like a woman secretly praying that Bear will admit he loves her.
It has the unmistakable energy of okay, good, glad we cleared that up, now we can move on from this.
That should be the end of it.
Not necessarily the end of Bear’s feelings. Human beings do not have an off switch. He is allowed to be disappointed. He is allowed to need time. He is allowed to privately wish the situation were different.
What he is not entitled to is a different answer from Nikki.
Human beings are inconvenient like that. Sometimes you can love somebody enormously, understand them, admire them, believe the two of you would be wonderful together and still receive the deeply unsatisfying answer of no.
And “no” remains a complete answer even when you think the person giving it is wrong.
Sarah Is Already Living Bear’s Problem
What makes this even more interesting is that Bear is not the only person in the group dealing with unrequited love.
Sarah is very obviously in love with Bear.
And Sarah is basically living Bear’s exact romantic predicament: she wants somebody whose attention is fixed on somebody else.
Yet somehow she manages to experience that without acquiring enchanted horticulture and altering his emotional state.
This is important because it gives the film a control group.
Sarah shows us what unrequited love looks like when the person experiencing it accepts that the other person remains a separate human being. She can want Bear. She can be hurt that Bear wants Nikki. She can wish he would look at her differently.
She cannot make him.
And I want to be careful here, because the answer is not Bear should have chosen Sarah. That would undermine everything I am saying about Nikki. Bear does not owe Sarah a relationship because Sarah loves him any more than Nikki owes Bear one because Bear loves her.
But Sarah exposes something about Bear’s fixation.
If what he really wants is simply to be seen, understood and loved, somebody already sees him.
It just does not count because she is not Nikki.
Bear does not merely want somebody to love him.
He wants Nikki to be the person who loves him.
Those are not the same thing.
The Wish Is Already Horrifying Before Nikki Does Anything
This is where I think a lot of discussion around the One Wish Willow lets Bear off far too easily.
The common explanation is that the willow is cursed. Bear makes a wish. Evil magical object twists innocent wish. Horrible things happen.
Except listen to the actual wish.
Bear says:
“I wish Nikki Freeman would love me more than anyone else in the fucking world.”
Sir.
The horror is already inside the sentence.
Nikki does not love Bear romantically. We have already established that. So for this wish to come true, her feelings have to be changed. Something that belongs entirely to Nikki — her attraction, affection, emotional life, ability to decide whom she wants — has to be rewritten without her permission.
Her autonomy is compromised before she frightens anybody.
But Bear does not even wish for Nikki simply to love him. He wishes that she will love him more than anyone else in the world.
Think about what that actually means.
More than her friends. More than her family. More than anybody she has loved before. More than anybody she might love in the future. And, depending on how literally you want to take the emotional hierarchy he has demanded, perhaps more than she loves herself.
That is an astonishingly selfish thing to ask of another human being.
And this is not me retroactively imposing an autonomy reading onto a silly cursed-object movie. Curry Barker has explicitly pushed back against the idea that the willow itself is the cursed thing. He has said the problem is what Bear wishes for: taking away another person’s autonomy and sense of self. In other words, the willow does not maliciously corrupt some beautiful, harmless request. Bear gives it the problem.
That changes the entire film for me.
The wish does not go horribly wrong because Bear failed to lawyer his way through the wording carefully enough.
It goes horribly right.
He asked to become the centre of Nikki’s emotional universe.
So he does.
Nikki Was About to Choose Herself
There is another detail that becomes particularly horrible when you place it beside the wish.
Nikki has plans.
She is leaving the music shop and wants to devote herself to writing. Whatever the practicality of that decision, she is making an enormous choice about the direction of her own life. She is taking herself seriously enough to risk something.
And on the same stretch of road where Nikki is trying to decide who she is going to become, Bear decides what she is going to feel.
That is the autonomy violation on a much bigger scale.
The wish does not merely change whether Nikki wants to kiss Bear. It makes Bear the organising principle of a life that, hours earlier, Nikki was trying to reorganise around herself.
That is part of why I struggle with readings of the film that treat Wish Nikki as though she is simply Nikki with the volume turned up. Nikki had an interior life before Bear. She had ambitions before Bear. She had friendships before Bear. She had a future that did not require Bear to occupy its centre.
Then he wishes himself into the middle of all of it.
Bear Gets What He Asked For
Initially, Bear likes it.
Of course he does.
Nikki suddenly wants him. The impossible thing he has spent so long imagining is now happening. For a brief period, Bear gets to live inside the fantasy without having to look too closely at what was required to create it.
Then Nikki starts becoming strange.
Then frightening.
Then impossible to ignore.
And this is where Bear’s behaviour becomes much more revealing to me than the original wish alone.
Because making one reckless magical decision in a moment of emotional desperation is one thing.
What Bear does after he knows something is wrong tells us much more about him.
Bear Lets Everybody Think Nikki Is the Problem
Nikki’s personality changes so radically that the people around them notice.
Of course they do.
This woman who was very recently relieved to establish that she and Bear were not romantically involved is suddenly attached to him, behaving erratically and presenting a completely different relationship to the one everybody else thought existed.
Bear knows the missing piece.
His friends do not.
He knows that immediately before Nikki transformed into this version of herself, he snapped a magical object and asked for Nikki Freeman to love him more than anyone else in the world.
And he does not tell them.
Instead, he allows a version of events to form in which Nikki is simply behaving strangely. Nikki is unstable. Nikki is lying. Nikki is “crazy.” There are even implications around what exactly has happened between them sexually that Bear does not exactly rush to clear up.
This is not merely lying in the traditional sense. It is controlling the information everybody else is allowed to use to interpret Nikki.
And Nikki takes the reputational damage for something Bear did to her.
That is extraordinary.
Bear strips Nikki of her autonomy and then allows everybody around them to interpret the consequences as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with Nikki.
But this cover story is also bizarrely counterproductive.
Because if Bear genuinely expects everyone to believe that Nikki has suddenly become psychologically unstable for reasons entirely unrelated to him, he still does not look good.
If the woman you supposedly love is experiencing an unexplained crisis this severe, why are you not desperately trying to get her help?
You cannot simultaneously tell everybody Nikki has a problem and then behave like her problem is merely an inconvenience happening near you.
The Customer Service Call Tells on Him
And then Bear calls customer service.
This scene is one of the reasons I cannot accept the reading that he quickly realises the ethical horror of what he has done and spends the rest of the film desperately trying to free Nikki.
Because that is not what he asks for first.
He asks whether he can alter the wish.
Not cancel it.
Alter it.
I need everybody to sit with that for a second.
Nikki is frightening him. Her behaviour has become grotesque. Bear knows this began immediately after he magically altered her feelings.
And his first instinct is essentially to ask whether the settings can be adjusted.
The problem is not yet I have taken away this woman’s ability to determine her own emotional life.
The problem is the version of Nikki I asked for is behaving weirdly.
Only when he is told that the wish cannot be altered does he ask whether it can be cancelled.
I remain convinced that the order matters. Maybe Bear could have asked for cancellation if cancellation had been his original request; maybe he could not. The film does not hand us a customer-service handbook with the full magical returns policy.
But even if my theory about the mechanics is completely wrong, the character point is unaffected.
Alteration was his first choice. Liberation was not.
He wanted Nikki to want him.
He simply did not want her to want him like this.
Then Nikki Tells Everybody Something Is Wrong
Ian’s party is where the film becomes especially difficult for me to watch, because for a brief moment the person underneath the wish appears to break through publicly.
Until then, Bear has been the person with the most information. He knows about the wish. He has witnessed Nikki’s increasingly frightening behaviour. He has spoken to customer service.
Then, at the party, Nikki screams:
“It’s not me.”
And she means it enough to make what follows horrifying.
She grabs a bottle, breaks it against the edge of the table and repeatedly injures her own face with the broken glass.
Everybody around her panics.
People are horrified. They are concerned for Nikki. They yell at Bear to do something.
And Bear sits there frowning.
That reaction bothers me enormously.
Because he looks almost like another confused observer witnessing Nikki’s inexplicable breakdown rather than the only person in that room who knows the chain of events that led to it.
For a moment, Nikki is telling everybody exactly what Bear has refused to tell them: something has happened to me. This is not who I am.
The film repeatedly gives us glimpses of a Nikki horrified by the state she has been forced into. The party makes that horror visible to other people.
And suddenly Nikki is not the monster in that scene.
She is somebody trapped inside one.
If Nikki Is “Crazy”, Why Isn’t Bear Trying Harder to Help Her?
Bear does eventually get Nikki to hospital.
That matters. I am not going to pretend he does literally nothing.
Nor can Bear simply force a competent adult to accept medical treatment. If Nikki refuses care, there are limits to what another person can make her do.
But there is a vast space between I cannot legally compel Nikki to receive treatment and I delivered her to a hospital, therefore my responsibility here is complete.
This woman has just repeatedly injured her face with broken glass.
If Bear genuinely believes the explanation he has allowed everybody else to believe — that Nikki has suddenly become seriously mentally unwell — then surely his concern should extend beyond getting her through the doors.
Has her face been treated? Is she safe? Has somebody assessed the risk that she might hurt herself again? Is somebody staying with her? Does her family know? Is she in a condition to leave?
And Bear, uniquely, knows something even more important than all of them.
He knows this is not an unexplained crisis.
He knows the cause.
Which is why I keep coming back to this:
Bear wants everybody to believe Nikki has a problem, but he does not behave like somebody frightened for a woman with a problem. He behaves like somebody frightened of the consequences of one he created.
Later, Bear asks Nikki what is so bad about being with him, and Nikki has to remind him of something extraordinarily simple: she has never been with him.
Bear is speaking as though they are a couple having problems. Nikki is speaking from reality. There was never a relationship she chose. There was Bear wanting her, Nikki not wanting him, and then a wish that replaced her answer.
And shortly afterwards, Nikki’s desperation becomes even clearer. She begs Bear to kill her.
That matters because it destroys the idea that this obsessive version of Nikki is somehow the “true” Nikki finally admitting what she always wanted. The real Nikki is not enjoying this. She is trapped inside it. She is desperate enough to want the entire thing — including herself — to stop.
And then Bear leaves.
And Then He Leaves Nikki to Meet Sarah
Which brings us back to Sarah.
Because after all of this — after Bear wished for Nikki to love him, after Nikki became increasingly unstable, after the customer-service call, after the horror at Ian’s party — Bear still leaves Nikki and goes to meet Sarah.
The woman he supposedly wanted more than anything now wants him more than anything.
And Bear is reconsidering his options.
Sarah tells him that maybe he does not deserve someone like Nikki. Maybe he needs somebody more chill.
Bear looks like he is actually considering it.
The hell, my dude?
You override this woman’s autonomy because apparently Nikki is the one. You get exactly what you asked for. The resulting woman becomes difficult, frightening and inconvenient, and suddenly another option starts looking attractive?
That tells me something uncomfortable about what Bear wanted in the first place.
His fixation is incredibly specific while Nikki is unattainable.
Once he possesses the fantasy, he discovers he does not actually enjoy the reality.
That is not proof that Bear should have loved Sarah all along. Again: Sarah is not entitled to him.
But it is evidence that Bear’s desire for Nikki has always been tied to the fact that Nikki is the person who did not choose him.
Sarah Knows What Unrequited Love Actually Requires
Sarah makes the moral comparison even sharper because she is in Bear’s position without behaving like Bear.
She loves somebody who wants somebody else.
She lives with it.
Maybe imperfectly. Maybe painfully. Maybe while secretly hoping things will change.
But she does not decide that Bear’s feelings are defective because they are inconvenient to her.
And Sarah has a life beyond this triangle too. She has artistic ambitions. She wants a future for herself.
Which makes what happens to her genuinely devastating.
She dies.
And with her goes everything she might have become.
The fact that Bear later learns she had been accepted into the programme she wanted only makes it crueler. He gets to know that Sarah had somewhere to go next.
Sarah never does.
So by this point, Obsession has given us two young women with creative futures existing outside Bear — Nikki with her writing and Sarah with her art — and both of those futures are destroyed by the consequences of a wish built around Bear’s refusal to accept one woman’s autonomy.
That is much scarier to me than “crazy girlfriend kills people.”
Nikki and Sarah are not merely romantic satellites around Bear.
They had somewhere else to go.
Exhibit 672: The Remaining Willows
And somehow Bear is still not finished making this worse.
Members of the jury, I would now like to direct your attention to Exhibit 672 in The People v. Bear: the remaining One Wish Willows.
Bear buys three.
At one point, the suggestion is made that Nikki could make a wish herself if she is really so devoted to Bear.
And my immediate reaction was: absolutely not.
Have you met current Nikki?
The wish has altered the very thing she would need in order to make a meaningful decision about escaping it. Nikki is not going to calmly pick up a willow and wish away the obsessive devotion currently controlling her.
So Bear goes to Ian.
And now, finally, he has an opportunity to demonstrate that he understands the actual problem.
Ian can make a wish.
Bear could ask him to free Nikki.
He could ask him to restore Nikki’s original feelings.
He could ask for Bear’s wish to stop affecting her.
He could formulate almost anything centred around Nikki getting Nikki back.
Instead, he wants Ian to wish that Bear never made a wish.
My guy.
That is a reset.
And after the customer-service conversation, I cannot treat that distinction as meaningless.
Bear has already shown us that his first response to an unacceptable Nikki was to ask whether she could be altered.
Now, given another opportunity, he wants to return himself to the point before the mistake.
That does not sound like somebody whose moral revelation is simply I should never have done this to Nikki.
Because if that is the lesson, there is no need for Bear to have another turn.
Free Nikki.
Accept what she originally felt.
Live with it.
Yes, the Wording Was the Problem
This is the one place where I would now change my own earlier reading of the film.
The problem was the wording.
Just not in the way people usually mean when they say that.
Bear does not phrase an innocent wish badly and accidentally trigger a loophole. The wording is a problem because the wording reveals the desire underneath it.
“I wish Nikki Freeman would love me more than anyone else in the fucking world.”
There it is.
Possession.
Hierarchy.
Exclusivity.
Her feelings reorganised around him.
The willow does not introduce those ideas. Bear does.
That is exactly why Barker’s insistence that the One Wish Willow itself is not inherently cursed matters. The magical object is not sitting there maliciously waiting to punish somebody for forgetting a comma. Barker has said that somebody could potentially make a successful wish; what makes Bear’s wish cursed is the fact that it takes away another person’s autonomy.
Most of the “the willow was cursed” defence therefore misses what I think the film is actually doing.
The supernatural object is not the moral agent.
Bear is.
Nikki Is the Horror You Can See
And that brings me back to the thing that bothered me after the credits rolled.
Nikki is horrifying.
I am not disputing that. The violence is horrifying. Her jealousy is horrifying. Her behaviour becomes unpredictable and terrifying. If I saw that version of Nikki walking towards me, there would be a Nikki-shaped hole in the nearest wall because I would already be three streets away.
But Nikki is the visible horror.
Bear’s is quieter.
His looks like longing. Insecurity. Devotion. Romantic persistence. The sad nice guy who wishes the woman he loves could simply see what he sees.
We have cultural language for making that sympathetic.
We are far less comfortable calling it obsession until it starts behaving like Nikki.
And perhaps that is the most frightening thing Obsession does.
It gives us a woman behaving monstrously and asks us to notice the man whose desire made monstrosity possible.
Bear does not intend every consequence. He does not wish for Sarah’s death. He does not sit in his car carefully planning for Nikki to hurt herself or terrorise his friends. Responsibility is not the same thing as omniscience.
But he does choose the first violation.
And then, at almost every stage afterwards, the film gives him another choice.
Tell the truth.
Free Nikki.
Get her help.
Centre what is happening to her rather than what it means for him.
Accept the answer she gave him before any of this started.
Again and again, Bear struggles to do that.
That is ultimately why Nikki is not the scariest thing about Obsession to me.
Nikki never chose her obsession.
Bear did.
Whatever Nikki becomes after the wish, something has been imposed upon her. Her emotions have been altered. Her relationships have been reordered. Her sense of self has been invaded. The life she was preparing to build is interrupted by a feeling she never asked to have.
Bear begins with something Nikki does not.
Agency.
He wants her.
She does not choose him.
He is given the power to make her answer irrelevant.
And he uses it.
Perhaps that is why I came away from Obsession thinking about Bear far more than the woman whose face will inevitably end up on the horror posters.
The film shows us one obsession and makes it grotesque enough that nobody could possibly miss it.
Then it gives us another one first.
Quieter.
Sadder.
More familiar.
And asks how long it takes before we become frightened of that one too.
For me, the answer is somewhere around:
“I wish Nikki Freeman would love me more than anyone else in the fucking world.”
Nikki is terrifying.
But Nikki is not the scariest thing about Obsession.
The scariest thing is how easily Bear’s obsession can be mistaken for love.
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