Let's start with the ending. The ending works at multiple levels and it's the best part of the movie. From a material perspective you have wish-Nicky screaming at Bear, "why won't you love me?" and forcing him to say it back. He has enough, goes to the bathroom and tries to kill himself. Doesn't have the courage to do it with the gun, doesn't have the courage to do it with the pills, his lack of courage even at end here is important, and we'll get back to it later. But mid throwing up his pills, wish-Nicky makes her wish, which you can easily assume to be "I wish for Bear to love me more than anything in the world," and then he comes out of the bathroom, wish-Nicky and wish-Bear embrace each other and kiss, Bear starts dying, wish-Nicky starts screaming and crying, wish-Nicky gets the gun and is about to kill herself, Bear dying makes his own wish disappear, real-Nicky is finally free and starts screaming and crying as the camera pans down and she's surrounded by three corpses.

This works because it's the triggering of all the rules the movie just established, but it's also all of them in fairly quick succession, right? It's like when you hit a chain combo in a game, it's click click click click, and it just feels good to see it happen. None of it is overstated either, which is respectful and nice of the writer.

But I think this ending works even best at the thematic level. Thematically the story is about, what kids call these days, a "codependent relationship," usually "led" by the BPD girl with the man "taking advantage" of the situation while simultaneously not knowing how to deal with it before it ruins his life. And the ending works here because, thematically, you have real-Nicky at the center of a complete disaster with three people dead, truly feeling like she's not responsible for anything (which materially she isn't, but thematically she is), which is exactly the dissociation that happens during splitting. It wasn't her, they weren't her own actions, it's like a demon inside her took over. As real-Nicky comes back, she even screams something to the effect of "what did you do?" which is perfect, the immediate externalization of responsibility, it's the perfect thematic statement and makes the ending super tight at this level too.

This also works because it does what I mentioned in one of my earlier posts regarding bridging the emotional distance between viewer and character. If the goal of the story is talking about this codependent relationship, viewers who are identifying with the girl are identifying with her as a victim and with Bear as an abuser, which is exactly what happens in these kinds of relationships all the time. And most people watching this movie are going to be women, because I think most horror fans are women in general. There's that funny tweet I posted the other day, where was it...

@ladyaethernaut:

my mother was complaining about how a documentary my father is watching is boring and he just went "well im SORRY that nobody's been RAPED and KILLED for your liking"

And so the story focusing on real-Nicky as the identifiable character is the correct move, because the material reading here for most viewers matches the theme itself:

@buggirl:

OBSESSION was so disturbing and uncomfortable because the casual selfishness of a man is a terrifying thing. even a man you trust, even a man you think is your friend. you have no idea what autonomy they would steal from you if given the chance and that's horrifying

@tempermentaIs:

obsession was disturbing not because of the horror aspects but because you know there are men that would genuinely do the shit bear did

@boyishch4rm:

the #obsession movie should be every women's new litmus test for men. if a man watches this movie and says anything other than bear was a fucking weirdo who needed to die and ruined nikki's life, BLOCK HIM.

And you can't really identify with Bear because he's a passive protagonist. After he makes the wish, everything just happens to him pretty much. And then in the middle when real-Nicky asks him to kill her he, materially, fully shows himself to be the bad guy. But thematically this is where the codependent relationship theme gets fully stated, because such relationships require both participants being willing, and usually the form it takes is that the guy is too weak to say no and to break things off, because he enjoys the attention, it's very validating to have some hot girl be completely crazy over you, right? And this weakness shows itself over and over in the story, from the very start, where he doesn't even have the courage to confess to her, to the very end, where he doesn't even have the courage to kill himself.

His complete non-assertiveness is a necessary component, the story wouldn't work any other way. Were Bear a secure man in his own frame, he would have confessed to her long ago, because there's no such thing as friendship between men and women, and if she rejected him, great, good to know you, bye. But I don't even think she would have necessarily rejected him. Based on my reading of real-Nicky's expressions, I'm pretty sure he actually had a chance, if only he made the move, were I in his position I definitely would have, but he didn't, because he couldn't. If he did make the move and confessed to her, even if she rejected him, it would have made the movie lesser, because he needs to be weak and non-assertive for the theme to be fully expressed.

All this also explains why the movie is popular. The most common reading, the material one, allows women who identify with Nicky to come out of it thinking "she didn't really do those things, she was being controlled, it wasn't her fault, she's a victim," because it's true, Bear is to blame for everything, but it also allows them to feel, viscerally, that this is true, due to the bridging of the emotional gap that I mentioned earlier. I have some level of disdain at this, because while it's an objectively true reading, it's a pragmatically false one. The pragmatically true reading is the thematic one, the one where both Nicky and Bear are simultaneously abusers and victims of each other, not the one where only Bear is implicated.

But, if I had this idea for this ending and then had to write a story backwards from it, would I have written it differently? Absolutely not. I likely wouldn't have written the middle the exact same, but both the starting and the ending are perfect as they are, anything else would have been lesser. Trying to play my hand too hard with changing things because it annoys me that the audience would mostly read it wrong would have been a conditional offering to God and largely a mistake. It's also interesting that the script I found online has a different ending that is worse than the one that made it to the movie. Whoever changed it, if it was Curry himself or someone else who gave him the better idea, really hit it right.

Now, this is why the movie works intellectually for me, and why it works both intellectually and emotionally for most people. But emotionally, it did not work for me. This movie didn't make me feel anything. This is really odd, most movies make me feel something, anything, at one point or another, this one was unnaturally flat throughout. I clearly liked it at an intellectual level, but it didn't pull me in, it didn't hook me in any way. Why? When a movie makes me cry, I try to understand why, it's useful to do it if your aim is being a writer, right? But it happens rarely that a movie makes me feel nothing, so it seems like I should also try to understand it.

I think the most obvious reason is that I cannot identify with either character. Nicky because I'm not a girl and I don't have BPD, Bear because he's a passive man who simply has things happen to him. But it's not even a need to identify with characters, you can watch movies where you don't identify with characters and they still make you feel something, it's that the aspects of them that the movie focuses on don't collide with me in any way.

Let's look at Nicky. The person you're supposed to identify with is real-Nicky. Can I intellectually understand her position, how she's suffering, how she's trapped, how she was, theoretically, even raped, and the horror of it all? Yes. Does it make me feel anything? No. Because real-Nicky is a pure victim, she is a genuine good girl who has bad things happen to her in a manner that is completely forced on her and totally not her fault. If you try to think of characters like her, like, I don't know, who's the purest victim, say Jesus Christ, I can still identify with him, because he was trying to do something, he was stirring the pot, breaking tables, turning water into wine and shit, he was out there being an active participant in his own eventual demise, at the end of the day he had it coming, to put it crudely. I can feel that. I can't feel Nicky because she's not active, she's just a victim. I am the opposite of that, I want to be in full control, everything that happens is my fault, luck isn't real, etc. There's nothing left in me to viscerally identify with the pure victim, and that's all her character is, so there's no hook for me there.

And then there's Bear. Can I identify with some of Bear? Sure. I guess I can identify with being nervous about confessing to a girl. But that's the first 10-15 minutes of the movie or however long. After the inciting incident, Bear becomes completely passive, everything happens to him and nothing is his own doing. Again, there is an aspect of him being an active participant in his own demise here due to his weakness and non-assertiveness, which is true, but it doesn't hook me emotionally still, because I'm not like that. I think it's Brandon Sanderson who I heard this first from in one of his YouTube videos, but one of the things that makes a protagonist work is him being active and moving the story forward, right? This story has none of that. Bear moves the story forward up to the inciting incident, and after that it's all wish-Nicky with the occasional real-Nicky break.

Compare to Weapons (2025), that story has multiple leads, but the main one, and the one I identified with the most, is the boy. The boy is also fairly passive throughout the story, bad things simply happen to him, he is, in a sense, a pure victim. But the story spends quite a lot of time with him and there's room to show enough of him, such that even in his passivity, you can hook the viewer in one way or another. One of the scenes that got me the most was him opening the cans of food to feed his parents. Anyone who has had to take care of their aging parents or a disabled family member can feel that, right? It immediately gets you in a visceral way. But the movie also shows him to be observant, pragmatic, rational, calm, given the circumstances. There are a lot of good qualities to him that you can latch onto, and then at the end he uses all those qualities to solve the problem. It's a great movie that made me feel many great things, recommend watching if you haven't.

But this movie has none of that. The driver for this movie is wish-Nicky, who, for all we know, is just some demonic entity. There's nothing to latch onto, and there's no mystery either. Weapons largely works, beyond the identification, because it's structured as a mystery. Obsession is flat instead. Once the device shows itself at the inciting incident, it's just the same thing repeated over and over with increased intensity. Wish-Nicky is possessive, Bear is weirded out, she does some weird shit, real-Nicky breaks out and hurts herself, repeat. The reason why the movie feels disjointed is because the driver, wish-Nicky, is just doing random things that don't seem to make sense, which makes sense thematically, that's how the BPD girl goes, but it doesn't work entirely as the driver for the plot of a movie. It felt too much like her actions had the hand of the writer just doing weird shit because it's a horror movie, rather than it serving any purpose.

I think it's possible this happened because the writer had the good ending, he knew the ending was thematically sound, and then the middle has to be filled, but he tried too hard to fill the middle in a thematically sound way. Basically every scene of wish/real-Nicky doing something is a standard thing BPD girls will do, like, he really crammed it all in there. And those scenes work individually, but when you try to cohere them into a narrative it kind of just feels flat and wrong. I kind of made the same mistake with It Follows, except there the sin was that my special interest became writing the sex scenes, while here the special interest seemed to be making a too tight thematic argument. Either way, the story works structurally in the end at all those levels, right, so it's fine.

In any case, this is why, primarily, I didn't emotionally like the story. There's no emotional hook because characters are passive and there's no active component to them and their fate. I couldn't feel anything because I didn't feel that they had an active role in their demise, they were both fully passive, and there was not enough airtime for any of their good qualities to be shown (real-Nicky giving a homeless guy 20 bucks is not enough), so there's nothing for me to latch onto.

This is partly a me problem, partly a movie problem. Most people will not identify these issues because their identification with real-Nicky is enough to make them look past it, but since I didn't have it, the movie felt off, so I can see it more clearly. The moral is that, in a story, characters need to have agency or be shown to have agency, even in their demise. Purely passive sufferers will always put off a percentage of people, because people intuitively want to be agents of their own destiny.