Seriously great movie. I saw it this weekend and now have been telling all my friends to watch it so I have people to discuss it with. The problem is that since it’s a horror movie, a lot of people I’ve told are just hard passing.
They’re missing out. It’s scary, but it’s also a legit good movie. The scariness in the movie isn’t really like that from cheap jump scares like most movies, but just from this weird sense of something being very, very wrong.
I watched with my girlfriend and we felt really weird after. It really played with stereotypes like the “crazy girlfriend” and the “poor nice guy”. He is portrayed as the victim most of the movie, which we found very strange. The movie is very well made with some nice effects and new ideas, but it really felt odd for 2026.
Edit: as you are describing the movie things come to my mind again, I could originally only recall that “feeling” it left me with. Of course he is portrayed as the villain, I was wrong with that take. Yes we have the hotline call, the “please kill me” scene and the end scene. Still I felt the female perspective was totally underrepresented in the movie. Nikki has not a real back story, she is just the crazy bitch for the guy wishing the monkeys paw wish getting wrong.
I know, it is a horror movie and it’s for entertainment, but I found the male/female stereotypes boring. In the end for me it is a male fantasy movie and I find the message very shallow.
There are many scenes which make it clear that in fact she is the victim. Theres a permament latent layer of meaning which shows that his only problem is her strange behaviour and not her suffering, he adressed that in many scenes. Even when she talks to him with clear mind in her sleep begging to just kill her all he answers is “is it so bad to be with me”.
Also when the one whish willow hotline askes if he wants to talk to the in the background crying and suffering " real nikki" he just denies.
Pretty much every scene has these two layers: the classic horror where the crazy nikki hunts her victim and the layer of bear clearly knowing he just trapped this girl against her will for selfish reasons.
It shows very subtle in the beginning of the movie and gets more obvious in the further course…
I didnt recognize many of the more subtle signs in the first third of the movie until i saw it a second time, i can really recommend to do this (if you two find the time) and rewatch with another perspective, its very well done! Also after i saw it the second time i watched some analsysis and it showed even more details i didnt see the second time, i love how much love went into the details and the social relation between the four friends and what happens in the (sometimes blurred) background.
He knows the girl he’s with is not Nikki. He knows she’s an unstable psychopath. He still goes to the car to talk to Sarah and even shared a romantic moment with her.
He has caused so much pain and suffering with his wish for “love”. And here he is being even more selfish and stupid. Sarah’s death was his fault.
If we’re being charitable in our reading of Bear, he’s only sympathetic because he’s not outright evil. But really he represents a lazy evil that emerges from mediocrity and cowardice. There is a mild redemption arc at work, but the film doesn’t let us accept Bear’s resolution. The audience always knows that he’s not the true victim but the film also makes the point to demonstrate that nothing is ever as straightforward as we want it to be. Watching demands a lot from the viewer.
He is the villain. He’s not pure evil, he’s just a bit of a loser and lacks self confidence, but many times he is given a choice to do the right thing or the thing that benefits his own wants, he makes the selfish choice.
That’s why he’s the villain. Little by little he knows things are going wrong, but he’s a “nice guy” and surely he deserves something he wants because he’s “nice.”
The movie is a fantastic depiction of what is wrong with NiceGuys™ and that they actually don’t care nearly as much about the other person as they think they do.
The director himself said it best, “The One Wish Willow isn’t cursed, the shop owner is meant to demonstrate that you can make your wish and live a fine life after. Bear is cursed because the wish he makes is cursed.”
I’ve been obsessed (pun intended) with watching different people’s takes on the movie. I just saw this one yesterday that hit on that Nice Guy™ point that you mentioned:
I think if you watch it again you’d realize he is meant to be the villain. The scene where he calls tech support and doesn’t want to cancel his wish, just tone it down a little. Followed by him hearing her screaming in pain knowing the girl he’s with does not have the soul of the girl he had a crush on.
Even after that call, he’s trying to salvage this thing. Knowing what he knew, he would live the rest of his life with this thing so long as it toned down the weirdness.
I loved that the movie didn’t bash you over the head with this message, but it’s 100% in there.
I’ve heard this movie is being used as a litmus test by women to see if a man is boyfriend material. If they don’t recognize that Bear is the villain, they are out!
Double edit: lol the dude’s down voting this definitely missed the point of the movie and are wondering why girls don’t date them even though they’re Nice Guys ™
Ironically, I feel if I found out that I was shown the movie for that reason, it would immediately catapult a person out of any potential relationship.
Like, I could never lose the feeling of being tested and judged at all times, just ask me a question for Christ’s sake. This subtle probing shit is not any better than what the guy does for half the movie.
He’s definitely played as a tragic villain for the entirety of the film. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m questioning if commenters like this ever watched the movie.
Yeah, that was a wildly poor take from the previous commenter. Even if you only had a fraction more than a superficial glance at the film, the roles are very clear.
yeah, the only thought i had during and especially at the end of the movie was “and now that poor girl is traumatized for the rest of her life and will most likely be in prison for double homicide for several years just bcs this dude wanted to get his dick wet”
I get that you didnt like the movie too much and i dont wanna be that movie defending fangirl but there a a few scenes where we learn things about nikkis past and future plans, her view of love and relationship… we dont learn that about bear (maybe indirectly). She also has a relationship to her male an female friends which exists and is shown outside bears perspective. I miss the female characters perspektive in many movies (most slightly older movies, weve come a long way lol) but that movie didnt give me that feeling… But maybe thats just my subjective experience.
Yeah its still a horror movie where things before and after the story are not presented in detail but i think nikkis view was given at least as much room than the male co protagonists view. Maybe sometimes more subtle, because she is obsessed most time… What still haunts me are her eyes in the first sex scene (or rape scene, depends on how much knowlege you grant bear in the beginning).
I want to add that “friends of nikki” is mabye wrong, she is totaly alone, which i find interesting: bear lies about nikki to the other two, and obviously isnt truely interested in her wellbeing. Ian had an affair with nikki but is just interested in her wellbeing when he uses it to shoot against baer who he envies. Sarah is in love with bear and is totally toxic against nikki, victimblaming her.
Ok maybe bear is very central in these relationships bur maybe not less central than nikki…
It’s a classic, straightforward “love potion” trope story, which is itself a subset of the broader “monkey’s paw” trope. A portion of the internet wants to turn it into a gender wars issue because that’s what the internet does. You can swap either or both genders and the story still mostly works.
It’s NOT a monkey’s paw, though. If anything it is maybe a deconstruction of a monkey’s paw trope.
See, the One Wish Willow does not manipulate your wish to give you something you didn’t ask for, nor does it backlash. Bear wished for a selfish wish. There were a ton of people throughout the film that wished for things and got exactly what they wished for. Heck, Bear’s friend gets a billion dollars.
Like, I get that Bear’s wish is corrupted, but he could’ve wished to be someone that Nikki liked. He could’ve wished to be better at talking to girls. He could’ve wished to be less cowardly. Those are less selfish versions of the same wish.
It wasn’t the act of wishing that ruined his wish, but that he used his wish to manipulate someone else. He was the reason his wish was ruined.
“Monkey’s paw” does not necessarily require an evil twist. The whole point, the lesson to be learned from the fable, is that our own desires and fantasies often clash with reality and end in disaster. It shows how are own fantasies are poorly thought out, short-sighted whims.
That’s why I said its a “love potion” trope- those very often do not have any sort of “twist” or “gotcha” to them either. It stems from a paradox at the heart of what love is. We want someone else to love us, and we want that tk.be secured and guaranteed and unconditional. But we also.want it to be CHOSEN. True love requires the freedom of.its own non-existence. Without that freedom, it is meaningless. Philosophers have talked about this for centuries, pehaps.most notably Sartre. So the lesson from these sorts of love potion stories is that free will is an important component of love. It is risk and vulnerability and its terrifying, but necessary.
The love potion trope is fictional of course. One Wish Willoows do not exist. If the lesson Obsession is trying to teach its audience is “be careful.what you do with magical artifacts” the I think that’s a pretty silly lesson. What these stories are really metaphors for is all of the other ways that people can subtly try to influence each other into “love”, and the pitfalls of that. The man who earns money and becomes wary of “gold diggers”, or the woman who tries to use her looks to “snag” a man only to worry how she ages. The person who changes themselves to attract the person they like. The man who uses violence and abuse to force a woman to stay with him. The woman who gets pregnant hoping the child will convince the man to stay. There’s tons of these too that all have the same theme.
Another clear distinction that I don’t see anywhere is that Bear, even as he makes his wish, does not believe in it. He is clearly skeptical and only buys it because he thinks Nikki will like it. Then when he fumbles the conversation he breaks it himself, not in an act of desperation but in an act of futility. He could have chosen to save it tk.give it to her another time, but instead choses to literally break it to symnokizd giving up.on that idea. Movies also use this trope all the time:throw away the flowers before she seeds he bought them, eat the chocolate himself, etc. He expresses what he wants in a moment of privacy, and he is completely unaware in that moment that his expression will actually influence the world at all. He does not wish for Nikki to be possessed by what is basically a demon. In that sense, he does NOT get what he wished for because the real Nikki herself says she was never with him.
The phone call with the company gets brought up a lot. He’s clearly still skeptical at that point but desperate. What the audience does not get to see is… How did Bear want to “alter” his wish? My guess is.that he wanted a solution to the paradox of love- he wanted something that could never exist. Immediately when told that is impossible, he instead asks to cancel it. He buys another one and tries to use it to cancel the first wish. He tries to get Ian to undo it (low key Ian is probably the most malicious person in the movie, sabotaging Bear’s attempt to ask Nikki out for his own selfish reasons). At last, when he is out of options, Bear finally chooses to end his own life to free Nikki. The tragic lesson learned.
Ian is NOT the most malicious person in the movie because Bear literally rapes Nikki repeatedly. That isn’t to say Ian is a good person, just that there is definitely a worse person in the movie.
Bear does NOT end his own life on purpose at the end of the movie, either. Bear tries to throw up the medicine to save himself and is only stopped because Wish-Nikki makes her own wish that inadvertently stops him.
Hell, the lesson of the movie isn’t even to not wish for love! He could have wished for love! The point is that Bear never actually loved Nikki. Every scene reinforces that he doesn’t actually care about her, that he doesn’t really know anything about her. He doesn’t even care that the Nikki inside of Wish-Nikki is being tormented. He tries everything to make Nikki into the person he wants instead of freeing her. He only cares about himself, and it isn’t even until Wish-Nikki starts literally killing people that he even bothers to actually try to undo his wish.
Ian is NOT the most malicious person in the movie because Bear literally rapes Nikki repeatedly. That isn’t to say Ian is a good person, just that there is definitely a worse person in the movie
Look at how their relationship progresses. From the very beginning when she insists on coming back to his house, he is hesitant and uncomforabtle, and only agrees because she’s clearly unhinged and does not want to be alone. He initially gives her his bed and plans to sleep on his couch, until she asks him to share a bed with her. He turns away when she takes her shirt off and leaves his own clothes on. Then she starts making out with him and he is hesitant at first. Finally, the true Nikki is able to “break through” and says “what the fuck?”, and as soon as that happens Bear backs the fuck off and says “you made me feel like I did something you didn’t like”, and fake Nikki regains control, plays it off as a panic attack. Bear is still freaked out and at that point gets out of the bed and sleeps on the floor instead.
After this, we see Bear look on the internet to see whether One Wish Willows might actually work. He finds mixed results and no satisfactory answer.
Then she comes back the next day to apologize for and excuse her odd behavior, assure him that she consented and he did not take advantage of her, and says that she likes him. Not just that, but Bear specifically asks how long she has felt that way and she says “It just happened over time. Started over Christmas”. Which, to me, seems a whole lot like Bear was trying to figure out whether this was fron the One Wish Willow or not, and the fake Nikki’s answer assures him that it was not. It is only AFTER that when they have sex, then a montage of what looks like a few weeks of the two of them being happy together. That ends with the date scene where Ian calls and starts to sew doubts in Bear’s mind again. That night is when he catches fake Nikki watching him sleep, and her behavior starts to devolve after that (taping the door shut, cooking his cat for lunch, we see her standing unable to move while he is at work, etc). He has more conversations with Ian and Sarah that sows more doubt into his mind, and then he calls the customer support line. Which ends with the representative saying “seems like you have a moral obligation to be there for her”. Then he goes inside and eventually they go to the party.
After the party scene he takes her to the hospital, then has a conversation with her about her behavior and tries to pump the brakes and stay the night at Ian’s. She convinces him to stay by guilt tripping him about how lonely she will feel. Then Sarah texts him, he gets to leave, and finally the real Nikki is able to ask him to kill her and says “I haven’t been with you Bear”.
Maybe it’s just that I recently watched Severance too, but it seems to me like the One Wish Willow effectively created a second consciousness that possessed Nikki’s body and pushed down her own. Bear does not know this at any point that he has sex with her, but they also are not shown having sex at any point after he starts doubting her authenticity. Nikki herself later says “I’ve never been with you Bear”. Like Severance, this show asks some uncomfortable questions about how consent can work if two minds share a body. I have seen some people claim Obsession is really about the horrors of Borderline Personality Disorder. I do not agree with those takes, but I do think it’s important to realize that for most of the middle of the movie Bear thinks that Nikki is behaving strangely for natural, not supernatural reasons.
Bear does NOT end his own life on purpose at the end of the movie, either. Bear tries to throw up the medicine to save himself and is only stopped because Wish-Nikki makes her own wish that inadvertently stops him.
He stops when he hears her open the box, not knowing what she is going to wish for, presumably because he wants to stop her.
Hell, the lesson of the movie isn’t even to not wish for love! He could have wished for love! The point is that Bear never actually loved Nikki. Every scene reinforces that he doesn’t actually care about her, that he doesn’t really know anything about her. He doesn’t even care that the Nikki inside of Wish-Nikki is being tormented. He tries everything to make Nikki into the person he wants instead of freeing her. He only cares about himself, and it isn’t even until Wish-Nikki starts literally killing people that he even bothers to actually try to undo his wish.
The very first scene of the movie is Bear opening up about his feelings for Nikki and explaining why he feels that way, specifically citing how she helped him to cope with his grandmother’s death. He isn’t some “incel” or “alpha male” who thinks that women are objects for his desires. He’s a weak, insecure person who has become attached to someone who has already shown him support in the past. He is slow to understand what is truly happening and does not make perfect decisions (he should have called someone else, probably Sarah, to hang out with Nikki that first night. He should have taken her to a mental health professional at some point, etc). If characters were not flawed and made perfect decisions, movies wouldn’t ever last more than 10 minutes. His wish is not to change her, but to be loved by who she is at the time he made the wish.
You say that he “tries everything” to “make Nikki into the person he wants”. What exactly does he try and who is this person that he wants her to be? For the first half of the movie, his actions are him trying to slow things down while the fake Nikki tries to re-assure him. At a certain point, if Bear were to refuse to believe her that would be undermining her own agency and infantilizing her.
You say that he “only cares for himself”, but he seems pretty concerned about Nikki’s wellbeing too. As her behavior escalates he becomes worried that there is something wrong with her. The fake Nikko’s manipulation turns into guilt tripping Bear about how lonely she feels without him, so he tries to accomodate her. If he were selfish, he would have gone to Ian’s party without her. If he were selfish, he would have stayed the night at Ian’s after that incident at the party. We also see that he cares about Sarah, especially in the scene after she is dead where he reads that she had gotten into Luther.
I never said the lesson was “not to wish for love”. I actually said the opposite- the lesson SHOULD not be that because wishes are a work of fiction and that would be a useless lesson. The lesson is that love requires free will in order to be real and fulfilling. And he tries to cancel the wish over the phone before Nikko starts killing people. It’s true that he does not immediately commit suicide himself like the representative implies, but… Well first of all we have another 45 minutes of screentime to fill, but also because he still does not fully believe the wish worked yet. It would be extreme and shark jumping if he killed himself jjsy because some bored and helpful dude working at a call center told him to.
I don’t know which movie you watched, but you’re just fucking wrong.
I’m not going to debate your whole post, but just imagine that it’s as wrong as everything else I point out, and we can move on.
He stops when he hears her open the box, not knowing what she is going to wish for, presumably because he wants to stop her.
Insanely wrong, like didn’t-watch-the-same-movie wrong. It is heavily implied that she wished for Bear to feel the same way. His face changes to the lovestruck face, he stops what he’s doing, and they start to act lovey dovey. Combine that with and earlier statement where she says that he doesn’t feel the same way about her as she does about him, and the obvious answer is that she did the same to him.
But that’s kid stuff. Do you seriously believe Bear did not rape Nikki, or are you suggesting that he didn’t know he was raping Nikki?
Because the implications throughout the movie is that Nikki is getting pieces of herself past Wish-Nikki. When Bear finds out that Nikki’s dad doesn’t have cancer, and he knows something is definitely fucking wrong with Nikki, the smash cut to him raping her is supposed to clue you in that he doesn’t care. She is absolutely messed up, and she doesn’t have any real ability to consent regardless of if she is possessed by a wish or if she is on drugs or if she is having a manic episode, so any sex he has would 100% be rape. I get that that’s a hard thing to learn, but that’s how it is, and debating that makes you an incel because that is what incels would do. I don’t make the rules on that last part.
It is weird you think he cares about her because he brings her to the hospital when there is the long pause where he zones the fuck out while people are yelling at him to bring her to a hospital after she smashes herself in the face with a brick after telling everyone her poem about incest (ya know, because she thinks of Bear like a brother.)
Bear is the villain of the movie. Just because he doesn’t seem like the villain at first doesn’t mean he is a good guy. He makes many, many awful decisions that firmly make him the monster. In the opening scene, he doesn’t say a single thing about who Nikki is for why he likes her. He only says things about himself. He says she makes him feel good, that she was there for him. But he doesn’t say anything about her that doesn’t involve him. Because he doesn’t love her.
Gotta see obsession. Best horror movie I’ve ever seen.
Seriously great movie. I saw it this weekend and now have been telling all my friends to watch it so I have people to discuss it with. The problem is that since it’s a horror movie, a lot of people I’ve told are just hard passing.
They’re missing out. It’s scary, but it’s also a legit good movie. The scariness in the movie isn’t really like that from cheap jump scares like most movies, but just from this weird sense of something being very, very wrong.
You need new friends! Find a one wish willow and wish that all your friends loved horror movies more than anything in the world. That won’t backfire.
I watched with my girlfriend and we felt really weird after. It really played with stereotypes like the “crazy girlfriend” and the “poor nice guy”. He is portrayed as the victim most of the movie, which we found very strange. The movie is very well made with some nice effects and new ideas, but it really felt odd for 2026.
Edit: as you are describing the movie things come to my mind again, I could originally only recall that “feeling” it left me with. Of course he is portrayed as the villain, I was wrong with that take. Yes we have the hotline call, the “please kill me” scene and the end scene. Still I felt the female perspective was totally underrepresented in the movie. Nikki has not a real back story, she is just the crazy bitch for the guy wishing the monkeys paw wish getting wrong.
I know, it is a horror movie and it’s for entertainment, but I found the male/female stereotypes boring. In the end for me it is a male fantasy movie and I find the message very shallow.
There are many scenes which make it clear that in fact she is the victim. Theres a permament latent layer of meaning which shows that his only problem is her strange behaviour and not her suffering, he adressed that in many scenes. Even when she talks to him with clear mind in her sleep begging to just kill her all he answers is “is it so bad to be with me”. Also when the one whish willow hotline askes if he wants to talk to the in the background crying and suffering " real nikki" he just denies. Pretty much every scene has these two layers: the classic horror where the crazy nikki hunts her victim and the layer of bear clearly knowing he just trapped this girl against her will for selfish reasons. It shows very subtle in the beginning of the movie and gets more obvious in the further course… I didnt recognize many of the more subtle signs in the first third of the movie until i saw it a second time, i can really recommend to do this (if you two find the time) and rewatch with another perspective, its very well done! Also after i saw it the second time i watched some analsysis and it showed even more details i didnt see the second time, i love how much love went into the details and the social relation between the four friends and what happens in the (sometimes blurred) background.
He knows the girl he’s with is not Nikki. He knows she’s an unstable psychopath. He still goes to the car to talk to Sarah and even shared a romantic moment with her.
He has caused so much pain and suffering with his wish for “love”. And here he is being even more selfish and stupid. Sarah’s death was his fault.
This movie is an onion.
If we’re being charitable in our reading of Bear, he’s only sympathetic because he’s not outright evil. But really he represents a lazy evil that emerges from mediocrity and cowardice. There is a mild redemption arc at work, but the film doesn’t let us accept Bear’s resolution. The audience always knows that he’s not the true victim but the film also makes the point to demonstrate that nothing is ever as straightforward as we want it to be. Watching demands a lot from the viewer.
He is the villain. He’s not pure evil, he’s just a bit of a loser and lacks self confidence, but many times he is given a choice to do the right thing or the thing that benefits his own wants, he makes the selfish choice.
That’s why he’s the villain. Little by little he knows things are going wrong, but he’s a “nice guy” and surely he deserves something he wants because he’s “nice.”
The movie is a fantastic depiction of what is wrong with NiceGuys™ and that they actually don’t care nearly as much about the other person as they think they do.
The director himself said it best, “The One Wish Willow isn’t cursed, the shop owner is meant to demonstrate that you can make your wish and live a fine life after. Bear is cursed because the wish he makes is cursed.”
I’ve been obsessed (pun intended) with watching different people’s takes on the movie. I just saw this one yesterday that hit on that Nice Guy™ point that you mentioned:
https://youtu.be/u37_WlsREM4
I think if you watch it again you’d realize he is meant to be the villain. The scene where he calls tech support and doesn’t want to cancel his wish, just tone it down a little. Followed by him hearing her screaming in pain knowing the girl he’s with does not have the soul of the girl he had a crush on.
Even after that call, he’s trying to salvage this thing. Knowing what he knew, he would live the rest of his life with this thing so long as it toned down the weirdness.
I loved that the movie didn’t bash you over the head with this message, but it’s 100% in there.
I’ve heard this movie is being used as a litmus test by women to see if a man is boyfriend material. If they don’t recognize that Bear is the villain, they are out!
Edit: https://youtu.be/BY7wr47w3jM
Double edit: lol the dude’s down voting this definitely missed the point of the movie and are wondering why girls don’t date them even though they’re Nice Guys ™
Ironically, I feel if I found out that I was shown the movie for that reason, it would immediately catapult a person out of any potential relationship.
Like, I could never lose the feeling of being tested and judged at all times, just ask me a question for Christ’s sake. This subtle probing shit is not any better than what the guy does for half the movie.
Lol, I could see this. If they think Bear is innocent, RUN!
He’s definitely played as a tragic villain for the entirety of the film. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m questioning if commenters like this ever watched the movie.
Yeah, that was a wildly poor take from the previous commenter. Even if you only had a fraction more than a superficial glance at the film, the roles are very clear.
I think the movie was very subtle about these things. It’s 100% there, but if you’re not in the specific mindset to notice then, it’s easy to miss.
Especially if you think wishing a girl loved you should work. If his wish is reasonable, then the rest of the movie is unfair to him.
genuinely baffled how you got this. it was immediately clear to me & my partner that he was a selfish, feckless loser who brought it on himself.
yeah, the only thought i had during and especially at the end of the movie was “and now that poor girl is traumatized for the rest of her life and will most likely be in prison for double homicide for several years just bcs this dude wanted to get his dick wet”
I get that you didnt like the movie too much and i dont wanna be that movie defending fangirl but there a a few scenes where we learn things about nikkis past and future plans, her view of love and relationship… we dont learn that about bear (maybe indirectly). She also has a relationship to her male an female friends which exists and is shown outside bears perspective. I miss the female characters perspektive in many movies (most slightly older movies, weve come a long way lol) but that movie didnt give me that feeling… But maybe thats just my subjective experience. Yeah its still a horror movie where things before and after the story are not presented in detail but i think nikkis view was given at least as much room than the male co protagonists view. Maybe sometimes more subtle, because she is obsessed most time… What still haunts me are her eyes in the first sex scene (or rape scene, depends on how much knowlege you grant bear in the beginning).
I want to add that “friends of nikki” is mabye wrong, she is totaly alone, which i find interesting: bear lies about nikki to the other two, and obviously isnt truely interested in her wellbeing. Ian had an affair with nikki but is just interested in her wellbeing when he uses it to shoot against baer who he envies. Sarah is in love with bear and is totally toxic against nikki, victimblaming her. Ok maybe bear is very central in these relationships bur maybe not less central than nikki…
You may find this video essay by Jessie Gender to be enlightening - https://youtu.be/Ta51v9tW3CA
Yes, it’s 3 hours long. Yes, it’s worth it.
It’s a classic, straightforward “love potion” trope story, which is itself a subset of the broader “monkey’s paw” trope. A portion of the internet wants to turn it into a gender wars issue because that’s what the internet does. You can swap either or both genders and the story still mostly works.
It’s NOT a monkey’s paw, though. If anything it is maybe a deconstruction of a monkey’s paw trope.
See, the One Wish Willow does not manipulate your wish to give you something you didn’t ask for, nor does it backlash. Bear wished for a selfish wish. There were a ton of people throughout the film that wished for things and got exactly what they wished for. Heck, Bear’s friend gets a billion dollars.
Like, I get that Bear’s wish is corrupted, but he could’ve wished to be someone that Nikki liked. He could’ve wished to be better at talking to girls. He could’ve wished to be less cowardly. Those are less selfish versions of the same wish.
It wasn’t the act of wishing that ruined his wish, but that he used his wish to manipulate someone else. He was the reason his wish was ruined.
“Monkey’s paw” does not necessarily require an evil twist. The whole point, the lesson to be learned from the fable, is that our own desires and fantasies often clash with reality and end in disaster. It shows how are own fantasies are poorly thought out, short-sighted whims.
That’s why I said its a “love potion” trope- those very often do not have any sort of “twist” or “gotcha” to them either. It stems from a paradox at the heart of what love is. We want someone else to love us, and we want that tk.be secured and guaranteed and unconditional. But we also.want it to be CHOSEN. True love requires the freedom of.its own non-existence. Without that freedom, it is meaningless. Philosophers have talked about this for centuries, pehaps.most notably Sartre. So the lesson from these sorts of love potion stories is that free will is an important component of love. It is risk and vulnerability and its terrifying, but necessary.
The love potion trope is fictional of course. One Wish Willoows do not exist. If the lesson Obsession is trying to teach its audience is “be careful.what you do with magical artifacts” the I think that’s a pretty silly lesson. What these stories are really metaphors for is all of the other ways that people can subtly try to influence each other into “love”, and the pitfalls of that. The man who earns money and becomes wary of “gold diggers”, or the woman who tries to use her looks to “snag” a man only to worry how she ages. The person who changes themselves to attract the person they like. The man who uses violence and abuse to force a woman to stay with him. The woman who gets pregnant hoping the child will convince the man to stay. There’s tons of these too that all have the same theme.
Another clear distinction that I don’t see anywhere is that Bear, even as he makes his wish, does not believe in it. He is clearly skeptical and only buys it because he thinks Nikki will like it. Then when he fumbles the conversation he breaks it himself, not in an act of desperation but in an act of futility. He could have chosen to save it tk.give it to her another time, but instead choses to literally break it to symnokizd giving up.on that idea. Movies also use this trope all the time:throw away the flowers before she seeds he bought them, eat the chocolate himself, etc. He expresses what he wants in a moment of privacy, and he is completely unaware in that moment that his expression will actually influence the world at all. He does not wish for Nikki to be possessed by what is basically a demon. In that sense, he does NOT get what he wished for because the real Nikki herself says she was never with him.
The phone call with the company gets brought up a lot. He’s clearly still skeptical at that point but desperate. What the audience does not get to see is… How did Bear want to “alter” his wish? My guess is.that he wanted a solution to the paradox of love- he wanted something that could never exist. Immediately when told that is impossible, he instead asks to cancel it. He buys another one and tries to use it to cancel the first wish. He tries to get Ian to undo it (low key Ian is probably the most malicious person in the movie, sabotaging Bear’s attempt to ask Nikki out for his own selfish reasons). At last, when he is out of options, Bear finally chooses to end his own life to free Nikki. The tragic lesson learned.
Great post and analysis
There’s a lot to disagree with here.
Ian is NOT the most malicious person in the movie because Bear literally rapes Nikki repeatedly. That isn’t to say Ian is a good person, just that there is definitely a worse person in the movie.
Bear does NOT end his own life on purpose at the end of the movie, either. Bear tries to throw up the medicine to save himself and is only stopped because Wish-Nikki makes her own wish that inadvertently stops him.
Hell, the lesson of the movie isn’t even to not wish for love! He could have wished for love! The point is that Bear never actually loved Nikki. Every scene reinforces that he doesn’t actually care about her, that he doesn’t really know anything about her. He doesn’t even care that the Nikki inside of Wish-Nikki is being tormented. He tries everything to make Nikki into the person he wants instead of freeing her. He only cares about himself, and it isn’t even until Wish-Nikki starts literally killing people that he even bothers to actually try to undo his wish.
Look at how their relationship progresses. From the very beginning when she insists on coming back to his house, he is hesitant and uncomforabtle, and only agrees because she’s clearly unhinged and does not want to be alone. He initially gives her his bed and plans to sleep on his couch, until she asks him to share a bed with her. He turns away when she takes her shirt off and leaves his own clothes on. Then she starts making out with him and he is hesitant at first. Finally, the true Nikki is able to “break through” and says “what the fuck?”, and as soon as that happens Bear backs the fuck off and says “you made me feel like I did something you didn’t like”, and fake Nikki regains control, plays it off as a panic attack. Bear is still freaked out and at that point gets out of the bed and sleeps on the floor instead.
After this, we see Bear look on the internet to see whether One Wish Willows might actually work. He finds mixed results and no satisfactory answer.
Then she comes back the next day to apologize for and excuse her odd behavior, assure him that she consented and he did not take advantage of her, and says that she likes him. Not just that, but Bear specifically asks how long she has felt that way and she says “It just happened over time. Started over Christmas”. Which, to me, seems a whole lot like Bear was trying to figure out whether this was fron the One Wish Willow or not, and the fake Nikki’s answer assures him that it was not. It is only AFTER that when they have sex, then a montage of what looks like a few weeks of the two of them being happy together. That ends with the date scene where Ian calls and starts to sew doubts in Bear’s mind again. That night is when he catches fake Nikki watching him sleep, and her behavior starts to devolve after that (taping the door shut, cooking his cat for lunch, we see her standing unable to move while he is at work, etc). He has more conversations with Ian and Sarah that sows more doubt into his mind, and then he calls the customer support line. Which ends with the representative saying “seems like you have a moral obligation to be there for her”. Then he goes inside and eventually they go to the party.
After the party scene he takes her to the hospital, then has a conversation with her about her behavior and tries to pump the brakes and stay the night at Ian’s. She convinces him to stay by guilt tripping him about how lonely she will feel. Then Sarah texts him, he gets to leave, and finally the real Nikki is able to ask him to kill her and says “I haven’t been with you Bear”.
Maybe it’s just that I recently watched Severance too, but it seems to me like the One Wish Willow effectively created a second consciousness that possessed Nikki’s body and pushed down her own. Bear does not know this at any point that he has sex with her, but they also are not shown having sex at any point after he starts doubting her authenticity. Nikki herself later says “I’ve never been with you Bear”. Like Severance, this show asks some uncomfortable questions about how consent can work if two minds share a body. I have seen some people claim Obsession is really about the horrors of Borderline Personality Disorder. I do not agree with those takes, but I do think it’s important to realize that for most of the middle of the movie Bear thinks that Nikki is behaving strangely for natural, not supernatural reasons.
He stops when he hears her open the box, not knowing what she is going to wish for, presumably because he wants to stop her.
The very first scene of the movie is Bear opening up about his feelings for Nikki and explaining why he feels that way, specifically citing how she helped him to cope with his grandmother’s death. He isn’t some “incel” or “alpha male” who thinks that women are objects for his desires. He’s a weak, insecure person who has become attached to someone who has already shown him support in the past. He is slow to understand what is truly happening and does not make perfect decisions (he should have called someone else, probably Sarah, to hang out with Nikki that first night. He should have taken her to a mental health professional at some point, etc). If characters were not flawed and made perfect decisions, movies wouldn’t ever last more than 10 minutes. His wish is not to change her, but to be loved by who she is at the time he made the wish.
You say that he “tries everything” to “make Nikki into the person he wants”. What exactly does he try and who is this person that he wants her to be? For the first half of the movie, his actions are him trying to slow things down while the fake Nikki tries to re-assure him. At a certain point, if Bear were to refuse to believe her that would be undermining her own agency and infantilizing her.
You say that he “only cares for himself”, but he seems pretty concerned about Nikki’s wellbeing too. As her behavior escalates he becomes worried that there is something wrong with her. The fake Nikko’s manipulation turns into guilt tripping Bear about how lonely she feels without him, so he tries to accomodate her. If he were selfish, he would have gone to Ian’s party without her. If he were selfish, he would have stayed the night at Ian’s after that incident at the party. We also see that he cares about Sarah, especially in the scene after she is dead where he reads that she had gotten into Luther.
I never said the lesson was “not to wish for love”. I actually said the opposite- the lesson SHOULD not be that because wishes are a work of fiction and that would be a useless lesson. The lesson is that love requires free will in order to be real and fulfilling. And he tries to cancel the wish over the phone before Nikko starts killing people. It’s true that he does not immediately commit suicide himself like the representative implies, but… Well first of all we have another 45 minutes of screentime to fill, but also because he still does not fully believe the wish worked yet. It would be extreme and shark jumping if he killed himself jjsy because some bored and helpful dude working at a call center told him to.
I don’t know which movie you watched, but you’re just fucking wrong.
I’m not going to debate your whole post, but just imagine that it’s as wrong as everything else I point out, and we can move on.
Insanely wrong, like didn’t-watch-the-same-movie wrong. It is heavily implied that she wished for Bear to feel the same way. His face changes to the lovestruck face, he stops what he’s doing, and they start to act lovey dovey. Combine that with and earlier statement where she says that he doesn’t feel the same way about her as she does about him, and the obvious answer is that she did the same to him.
But that’s kid stuff. Do you seriously believe Bear did not rape Nikki, or are you suggesting that he didn’t know he was raping Nikki?
Because the implications throughout the movie is that Nikki is getting pieces of herself past Wish-Nikki. When Bear finds out that Nikki’s dad doesn’t have cancer, and he knows something is definitely fucking wrong with Nikki, the smash cut to him raping her is supposed to clue you in that he doesn’t care. She is absolutely messed up, and she doesn’t have any real ability to consent regardless of if she is possessed by a wish or if she is on drugs or if she is having a manic episode, so any sex he has would 100% be rape. I get that that’s a hard thing to learn, but that’s how it is, and debating that makes you an incel because that is what incels would do. I don’t make the rules on that last part.
It is weird you think he cares about her because he brings her to the hospital when there is the long pause where he zones the fuck out while people are yelling at him to bring her to a hospital after she smashes herself in the face with a brick after telling everyone her poem about incest (ya know, because she thinks of Bear like a brother.)
Bear is the villain of the movie. Just because he doesn’t seem like the villain at first doesn’t mean he is a good guy. He makes many, many awful decisions that firmly make him the monster. In the opening scene, he doesn’t say a single thing about who Nikki is for why he likes her. He only says things about himself. He says she makes him feel good, that she was there for him. But he doesn’t say anything about her that doesn’t involve him. Because he doesn’t love her.