Bear In The Mirror: An Analysis of Obsession and Various Responses
“…you proved Obsession’s point better than I ever could.”
2026 blockbuster Obsession stands alongside Backrooms and Weapons as a testament to a newer wave of horror filmmakers, aiming to tell stories that play to the themes and fears of the youth’s zeitgeist. Whereas Backrooms is an exploration of so-called “liminal spaces” and our culture of nostalgia and Weapons is a film dedicated to the childhood traumas and loss, Curry Barker‘s theatrical debut is unambiguously centered around what I’d refer to as “romantic horror,” playing off of fears around intimacy and relationships in the age of Tinder.
To quickly summarize the film, Obsession follows a young man named “Bear” Bailey, who uses a supposedly “mystical” toy, named the One Wish Willow, to obtain his one true desire—the love and affection of his childhood crush, Nikki Freeman. Breaking this stick, obtained from a store selling various spiritually-themed items, grants him his wish, leading to a somewhat-predictable retelling of “The Monkey’s Paw.” Barker’s marriage of tropes, “The Monkey’s Paw” and “Love Potion #9” specifically, creates the environment for a deeply unsettling and morose tale of, well, obsession. The attachment that this item induces is a depraved, violent form of limerence that drives Nikki, or whoever now has control, to act erratic at best and bloodthirsty at worst.
The film frames this story from Bear’s perspective from the beginning, with him attempting to practice his admission of feelings for Nikki in the first scene. This framing makes it easy, at first, to empathize or sympathize with his rom-com adjacent woes as he attempts to face his fears despite warnings from his best friend, Ian. This framing is, in my opinion, an incredibly effective choice as we watch him fumble his chance to come clean with his crush, make his wish for her to love him “more than anyone else in the fucking world,” and receive the macabre results of this action. Slowly, as the film unravels, you see his wish, and his desire for Nikki, turn into a living Hell as Nikki exhumes his dead cat multiple times, threatens violence, and generally acts fucking crazy.
It’s hard though to continue to empathize or sympathize with Bear as you realize his desire has relegated Nikki to be locked in her own body, now controlled by something else entirely, robbing her of any and all autonomy. This filmmaking choice illustrates to the audience a very frightening aspect of Bear’s psychology: behind his supposed love for Nikki and his shy demeanor, he is more than willing to regulate her to something closer to a possession than a partner. Look at the scene where she stays home on her day off from work as Bear goes in: she stays in one place and proceeds to defecate, urinate, and vomit onto the ground. This part works two-fold to shock and frighten the audience while also drawing a comparison between Nikki’s place in this relationship and the place of a pet—the kind of creature or companion who would be prone to shitting and pissing all over the carpet. Look too to the scenes of Bear realizing that this wish has forced her into a place that she, clearly from the beginning of the movie, did not want to be while still trying to make the wish work out for them (read: him).
This is all to say that, just as much as Obsession centers around the fear of being in a romantic relationship with whatever the fuck kind of spirit takes control of Nikki, it also explores the place that women often take in relationships with men: more of an object than an equal. In this way, Obsession can easily be read through a feminist lens and interpreted as such. Bear doesn’t need to be willingly malicious to take advantage of someone he claimed to be a friend to, he just needs to let his cowardice and selfishness take control.
The movie alludes to sexual assault regularly throughout its run-time. When possessed Nikki attempts to convince Bear that she was acting strange due to taking MDMA, she goes out of her way to emphasize that Bear didn’t take advantage of her in a particularly unconvincing way. Ian, when confronting Bear about the situation and the strangeness of it, tells him that the situation looks like he’s taking advantage of her from the outside. Sarah, another friend and co-worker of the central group, clearly has feelings for Bear and, as such, reads the situation as Nikki taking advantage of him. All of this dancing around the topic of taking advantage of others then clearly relates to Bear making out and eventually having sex with Nikki while she’s possessed, setting the stage for us, as an audience, to read this situation as sexual assault. Frankly, I’m not even really sure this is up for debate or other interpretations, as the film is incredibly purposeful, to the point of being on the nose at times, about how to read Bear’s actions.
With these allusions to SA in the runtime of the film, combined with the central theme of a woman in a relationship without any agency whatsoever, it’s hard to read the relationship spurred by the “One Wish Willow” as anything other than a tale of controlling infatuation masquerading as “love,” with the implicit nature of this coming from Bear leading to the explicit execution of this from fake-Nikki. In a sense, the events that play out in this movie feel as if the nature of Bear’s actions are being turned around back onto him in a disturbing form of poetic justice. Even the ending of the film, which sees Bear attempting to kill himself (which he is told is the only way to cancel the wish) in the same way his cat kills itself at the beginning of the movie (not without attempting to chicken out), can been seen as the controlling male figure in the relationship leaving the relationship, with Nikki being burdened with putting the pieces back together once she regains control of her body.
I don’t think that the point of Obsession, or any serious feminist and/or male-critical works, is to portray all men as vindictive abusers. I don’t even think the point is to view Bear in that way. Bear is a frightening antagonist because of his lack of malevolent intent; he represents a negative traditional male role in a romantic relationship that, purposefully or not, robs the other of agency and self-determination. This is why I think framing the movie around Bear is so effective: your original sympathies give way to disgust in his actions, especially in a scene like the one where he speaks to the real Nikki, stuck now as a captive in her own body, and asks her if it’s “really so bad to be with him,” and, in response, forces the audience to reckon with their own viewpoints on relationship dynamics and how western culture often thoughtlessly commits the same sins of male-centered selfishness in the stories it tells and the world it builds. If even one person, male, female, or whatever else, re-evaluates their own relationships, how they have carried themselves through them, and how popular stories have reaffirmed gender roles, it has done its job exceptionally.
It’s for this reason that I’ve found myself perplexed by analysis from creators and commentators such as Alex Meyers and others. Much of their discussion around interpretations of this movie through the stated lenses is rooted in a strangely strong desire to exonerate Bear on a moral level (while also working in gross quips, unnerving screeds about women, and generally unserious means of communication).
Much of these works and discussions center around a few general points as I see it:
A) Bear was not as aware of the results of his wish as quote-unquote “hysterical” people would have you believe.
B) Bear did not assault Nikki in the scenes where they are intimate.
C) Bear is a victim of the “One Wish Willow” as well and not the supposed malicious villain of the narrative.
The idea that Bear is unaware of his wish working is a point that maybe holds water towards the very beginning of the events, but it’s something that only becomes less and less true as the film goes on. By the time Bear says “What’s so wrong about being with me?,” he’s had the entirety of the wish and its rules explained to him over the phone and is currently talking to someone claiming not to be the same person as the Nikki he’s been with. By the time Bear and Nikki have sex, he’s realized clearly at the dinner that his wish had worked (which is communicated to us by the filmmaking choices) and/or has reason to believe that she is seriously unwell and should be more concerned about her regular outbursts, deranged acts, and risk-taking behaviors. Even before this, he’s clearly suppressing his own anxieties on the cause of the sudden change and how it relates to his wish. You can argue that, in the real world, a wish would not be expected to work and it’s unreasonable for us to expect this, but I find this argument frustrating—it feels unnecessarily literal and ignores the ideas and themes that the movie is getting at.
As mentioned previously, by the time things get sexual between the two, the filmmaking choices have clearly stated that Bear should, at the very least, observe that something is clearly wrong with Nikki as he has known her for a large amount of his life (which could be seen as more indication that he is not cognizant of the actual person that he pines after). Others have argued that he plausibly could have not noticed, yet wouldn’t this also speak to a sort of ambivalence towards her role in this relationship? The film frames our experience and isolates us from Nikki’s, depicting this dichotomy of focus in Bear’s head.
This leads me to the last point: I will partially give it to you, Bear is not some fantastical supervillain and I think referring to him in different synonyms of “good guy” or “bad guy” are ultimately reductive. At the same time, defenses of Bear’s actions take the form of ignoring, de-emphasizing, and omitting his worst moments, while drawing attention to his character flaws as parts of a regular human. What this framing misses is that his flaws, that seem more benign on the surface, lead to real, tangible harm through action and inaction alike. The fact that he is a quote-unquote “normal guy” is what makes Bear so interesting from storytelling and analytical perspectives: he’s a culmination of the expectations and attitudes held up by society through culture and treatment. He doesn’t need to be some mustache twirling ne’er-do-well tying Nikki to the train tracks in order to cause harm to those around him.
Longform critiques of discussion, such as from Meyers and other content creators, espouse these general ideas while also working in awkward humor, personal insults, and what I can only describe as thought-terminating attempts at shutting down others’ voices. As often happens on social media platforms (intentionally), any attempts at really looking at the ideas of the movie devolved into petty attempts at dunks, admittedly from both sides. The result of this is more time spent in these various conversations and videos calling others stupid or hivemind-ed for reading Bear in the way that the text itself portrays him as. It results in works that feel unnecessary and uninterested in viewing the movie as anything more than pictures on a screen. Art has meanings and messages and those meanings and messages are worth exploring!
After all, as stated previously, this movie lulls you into the place of Bear in terms of being our pitiful and seemingly-well-meaning protagonist before we see his world fall apart at the hand of his own mistakes. I think that, in many cases, people who desperately desire to vindicate Bear relate to his inability to act on his romantic desires, while also having been created as products of a society that values the autonomy and agency of men far more than women. I don’t mean to say that any of these people are even remotely close to Bear in terms of his various unethical acts, but I do feel like there is an aspect of reflection that the movie asks you to think on that many are unwilling to give the time of day. It, almost to the point of being on the nose, emphasizes that Bear hurts and violates Nikki, whether intended or not. I genuinely get frustrated at this lack of curiosity when it comes to breaking down a piece of art like Obsession, one with such depth of detail in terms of ideas and symbolism.
And it’s that mirroring between real life attitudes and attitudes depicted in the film that I find so interesting. As we watch some try to stand up for Bear (while also claiming not to do so in an empty manner), they prove the cultural attitudes that the film attempts to depict true to life. I think it’s worth paying attention to how Nikki is regularly treated as a possession or object by both Bear and the wish itself, the former of which being a man who claims to be a friend but desires a relationship despite not knowing much about her compared to his other coworkers. Ironically enough, these themes are only boosted by fictionalized views on a woman’s place in a relationship becoming reality in these underdeveloped counter-analyses. So, in those regards, I guess I have to thank you for your reactionary content; you proved Obsession’s point better than I ever could.
