{"id":83524,"date":"2026-10-24T09:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T01:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=83524"},"modified":"2026-10-24T09:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T01:03:12","slug":"obsession-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=83524","title":{"rendered":"Obsession (2025)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For a time after its release, Obsession<\/em> was all everyone could talk about on the Internet so I unavoidably absorbed some spoilers through osmosis. So I already knew going in that Bear is the real villain. Despite the lack of surprises, I enjoyed this a great deal for its near perfect execution which successfully invokes horror with little need for complicated special effects. More importantly, its conception of the character of Bear is superlative, the archetypal nice guy who is actually cowardly and selfish. My only issue is that a world in which the One Wish Willow exists and is widely known about ought to way weirder than what we see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Bear Bailey is obsessively in love with his friend and coworker Nikki Freeman but is too timid to act on it. Hearing that she has lost a crystal necklace, he goes to a New Age shop to get a replacement for her but ends up buying a One Wish Willow instead which promises to grant whoever breaks it a single wish once. He drives Nikki home after a trivia night at a bar with their other coworkers from the music store but hesitates to admit his feelings even when she calls him out. He ends up breaking the willow himself and wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone else in the world. To his shock, Nikki’s behavior instantly changes and asks to follow him to his house. He hesitantly agrees but when she suddenly screams while kissing him in bed only to excuse herself later. She justifies her erratic behavior by saying that her father has cancer and that she is on MDMA. They start dating but everyone else is similarly weirded out by her abrupt personality change and Ian learns that her father doesn’t have cancer at all. Bear becomes increasingly fearful of her as she duct tapes the door of his house closed to prevent him from leaving and cooks his recently deceased cat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the situation devolves into murderous violence as it inevitably must, it’s almost a letdown because the buildup is so very good. The retelling of Hansel and Gretel that Nikki recounts to a shocked audience of party-goers is probably the most erotic and disturbing reading I’ve seen on film. Director Curry Barker wrote the script himself and his writing is simply brilliant. Something as simple as having Nikki stand in the corner of the bedroom at night while Bear sleeps is creepier than anything you could achieve with special effects. Inde Navarrette deserves all of the success she has earned with her performance here with her comically exaggerated frowns and sudden on-and-off stop motion movements. Even when she isn’t visible onscreen, her maniacal screaming and wailing and Bear’s panicked reactions are terrifying. Want how to shape how audiences feel? Instead of relying on music, Barker shows how the people around her react instead. The wish might be supernatural but the single-minded obsession Nikki displays is plausibly rooted in reality and something audiences might recognize in their own relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The immense popularity of this film among younger audiences have sparked speculation about it being baby’s first horror film and their introduction to media literacy. It’s hardly deep to understand that Bear is the true villain of the film as his first choice was to alter the wish to make it work better than to cancel it. What is great is that it consistently shows him to be a coward at heart even right up to the end who runs away from problems instead of solving them. His initial hesitation to respond to Freaky Nikki’s advances isn’t out of respect for her but out of fear about getting it wrong and being blamed. Then there’s how Ian is a pretty awful friend and deliberately gave Bear bad advice to keep him from getting together with Nikki. It’s a rather damning and effective indictment of male entitlement and the whole ‘nice guy’ archetype that worked so well that it was spared the usual pushback from the manosphere crowd. The writing here is brilliant but I do think that the actor Michael Johnston deserves more credit for pushing harder for a cowardly version of Bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love it that whenever people complain about there being nothing new coming out of Hollywood, something like Obsession <\/em>can come out and prove the critics wrong. New filmmakers appear all the time and audiences do respond positively to fresh ideas. Wonderful things can happen when budget constraints spark innovation as this film proves how much you can achieve with so little. I think they could have been the One Wish Willow more mysterious and less accessible because why isn’t this instantly known to everyone the first time it works? But it is a great horror film by a director who knows exactly what he is doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a time after its release, Obsession was all everyone could talk about on the Internet so I unavoidably absorbed some spoilers through osmosis. So I already knew going in that Bear is the real villain. Despite the lack of surprises, I enjoyed this a great deal for its near perfect execution which successfully invokes … Continue reading Obsession (2025)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83524"}],"version-history":[{"count":73,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83629,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83524\/revisions\/83629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}