Obsession: a twisted love [Movie Review]

Obsession is a 2025 supernatural horror film with tinges of comedy. Bear, the protagonist, is unable to confess his unrequited love to Nikki, a friend and his fellow employee at a music store. He then wishes unbelieving that she would “love him more than anyone else in the world” over a one-wish willow, a magic trinket he bought from a metaphysical store. Immediately, the wish comes true and Nikki falls intensely in love with him and they begin dating whereupon Nikki begins acting increasingly erratic in pursuit of his love. She watches him while he sleeps, she makes him a sandwich using his dead cat’s remains, screaming and stabbing herself in the face at a party. One night when as Bear attempts to leave, a lucid Nikki speaks, claiming that her obsessive persona is asleep, and begs Bear to kill her. Bear refuses, offended that she would rather die than be with him. Increasingly destructive consequences ensue as Bear is unable to undo his wish and eventually he dies of overdose in order to break the spell. Obsession is not really a film about obsession in the ordinary sense. It is a film about what happens when a person is no longer permitted to remain singular. At first, the premise is simple: the wish is made and all of Nikki’s autonomy is overridden and Nikki is overwritten into compliance. But this summary begins to fail the moment the film introduces something more structurally unusual than coercion. It introduces division. Nikki does not simply become someone else. She becomes two women condemned to inhabit the same body. One remains herself trapped and powerless and the second which was manufactured to satisfy Bear’s wish. The rewritten Nikki genuinely consents and her preferences are internally consistent. But because there remains a portion of the original Nikki who is not replaced but merely displaced inside her own body, means that Nikki’s consent is built on top of an earlier self that did not choose the conditions of its own revision. What counts as the same person when mental continuity is interrupted, edited, or partially preserved? A cleaner version of this premise would eliminate this ambiguity. If Nikki were to have been fully overwritten, then in that case, the new agent would have no continuity, and no remaining claim from the prior self. Consent would then be internally coherent, and moral judgment would have to shift accordingly. Despite the fact that overwritten versions can access previous memories, the new version of Nikki genuinely would be able to consent in the same way that if two people swapped bodies they would be able to consent on behalf of their new bodies. The film consistently frames Bear’s actions as violation, particularly once he becomes aware that Nikki’s response is split between a reconstructed agent and a surviving continuity. But that framing depends on treating continuity as morally decisive, while the narrative simultaneously produces a version of Nikki for whom consent is fully coherent. The film’s persistence indicates that non-consent is morally decisive even in cases where consent later appears to exist, because the worst-case error is asymmetrical. Failing to engage with someone who would have consented is generally reversible or non-harmful, but engaging with someone who does not consent produces direct violation and potentially severe suffering. In contexts of intimacy, where the stakes of violation are higher and more personally invasive, this asymmetry becomes more pronounced rather than weaker. There is also something deeply uncomfortable about Bear’s character. Representing the incel nice guy archetype that has become so common in our society, Bear chooses to prioritize himself over the original Nikki. In fact, his obsession with preserving his fantasy is just that. Bear’s moral innocence expires until the moment when the original Nikki asks him to kill her. Inaction is a cowardly response in this situation since in both scenarios: if he killed her or himself he would have avoided much of the violence and bloodshed.
Of the two options killing himself is the option he eventually goes for but again his cowardice prevails and he means to vomit out the pills he took. [Analyze in more detail] In horror films, obsession is oft mistaken for love and violence for passion. Bear makes a rarer mistake: he imagines that consent can be manufactured simply by the rearrangement of desire. The film ultimately rejects that fantasy not because love cannot be compelled but because the original person remains inside Nikki and the person who he supposedly comes to love is no longer the one whose answer mattered in the first place.