Dead Girls Can't Say No: An Analysis of Obsession

Indie director and former YouTuber Curry Baker’s film Obsession was an instant smash hit. With a modest 700,000 dollar budget and an obscene 400,00000 dollars earned, it’s one of the most financially successful films ever made. As a fan of really intense horror and art that makes me feel like shit, when something gets this popular I do have the habit of tending to write it off a little bit. Not assuming that it won’t be good, but I assumed the horror will be more palatable or sanded down. There’s a project called Science of Scare that was started in 2020 that “scientifically” finds the supposed scariest movies. In their most recent list there’s about five movies that actively scared me. And to be fair, two of those are Hereditary and Skinamarink, two of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen. But the list is also filled with movies like the middling Sinister and the absolute garbage Insidious series. All this to say, I don’t engage with horror in art solely for the purpose of actually getting scared, it’s a nice bonus I don’t get often since I don’t share the general public’s taste in horror. Obsession really pleasantly surprised me, though. And by that I mean it made me feel terrible and I had a great time. This is, yes, due to it’s disturbing imagery, violent deaths, unnerving score, and the lack of restraint it has in its willingness go there. This is all great, but the things that have and will continue to make it stick with me

I’m far from the first person to make this observation, and I won’t be the last, but I wonder if the explanation for its mega-hit status has to do with playing both sides of the cishetero binary culture war. By watching an entitled man get his comeuppance, but also by playing into male fantasies of intense and excessive female hysteria. By no means does that mean it plays both sides ideologically, though. The film, in the short time since its initial release, has gone the way of Fight Club and American Psycho in becoming litmus tests in basic media literacy and awareness of male toxicity. Where it differs from those two is giving you a female presence to be both frightened by and sympathetic to that’s impossible to ignore. It goes without saying the movie wouldn’t reach anywhere near the heights that it does without Inde Navarette’s layered leading performance. But also of great import is the way her character is written. Yes, she does bad things and she’s terrifying in both very grounded and very reality-bending ways, but it’s impossible to ignore how clearly and deeply she’s suffering. Obviously, this goes for the real Nikki, trapped as a passenger in her own body, wants and needs and dreams and humanity swallowed by Bear’s selfish desires. But also for Wish Nikki, saddled with emotions too intense for any human to handle, forced into existence to deal with them, and not knowing how to cope with her feelings or be what Bear wanted her to be when he brought her to life in the first place.

The film avoids the pitfalls of feeling like “baby’s first feminism” in two really important ways. One of them is the aforementioned empathetic portrayal of Wish Nikki. When we aren’t watching her uncanny valley backwards walking through the gaps between our fingers, she plays like a very mentally ill woman in all of the really boring normal ways it would in real life. The horror genre has a checkered past with its portrayal of the mentally ill, even with how the genre attracts neurodivergent fans and troubled creatives. And to be fair, it’s hard to make something scary while also making you feel sorry for it. But Obsession rides that line really well. As someone with borderline personality disorder, I did see a bit of myself in Nikki’s manic codependency. Listening to her sob and beg for approval and love from Bear hit me hard. Watching her cry to Bear that she felt like he doesn’t love her like she loves him was heartwrenching. Hearing her desperately scream WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME!? resonated with a deep, awful part of me that hates to be seen. I have to wonder if it’s an intentional nod towards how often cishet men fantasize about having a mentally ill or disabled girlfriend, only to turn around and dump them once the fetishized versions of the traits they believed they wanted dissolve and become ‘too real’. These men want the idea of codependency, of utter reliance, of obsession, without any of the real world responsibility and hardship it entails. Seeing the film through Bear’s eyes makes the bedroom scene even harder to stomach. When she has this breakdown, deep into the hours of the night, refusing to sleep for fear the real Nikki will come back and take her away from her love, we don’t really get to see her as herself. Shadowed in darkness, her face gets distorted and her voice comes out like it’s being played through a glitchy speaker. Bear’s view, his male gaze if you will, only serves to remove more of her humanity.

Speaking of seeing through Bear’s eyes, that brings me to the second important thing that sets this film apart from a lot of the shallow baby feminist discourse people still attempt to make it apart of. The kind of shitty man Bear is the kind that many don’t want to talk about. He’s not the overtly aggressively misogynist incel, or the angry malnourished gymbro, or the easy to homophobically stereotype performative male. He doesn’t fit any stereotypes people have come to default to when talking about shitty men. This is because Bear is a nothing person. His existence is apathetic, cowardly passivity. Going through the motions, being normal-passing and people-facing, but never letting himself be a full, and vulnerable, person. Bear has three friends he talks to. All three of them have very little screen time, but in that screen time we find out at least a little bit about who they are as people. Nikki is a little messy, but she’s very kind. She works at a music store presumably out of a general appreciation for art. She’s an aspiring writer who seems to have a lot of talent from the little bits we see. She’s seeking the connection she’s missing from her romantic and platonic relationships both for emotional satisfaction and to improve herself as an artist. Sarah is an aspiring tattoo artist who’s trying to get off the ground but can’t since she’s being rejected from every single art school she applies to. She works for her father’s music store and feels like she’s leeching off of him and only needs fate to go her way. She’s more cynical than Nikki, but she’s still shown to be empathetic with her utter shock and dismay at the news of Bear’s cat’s death and her lack of attempt to stop Nikki from giving her money to a homeless man. Even Ian, who reads as a fairly shallow stereotype of a frat bro, still has details that show the kind of person he is and why others would want to befriend him. He loves trivia, which tells us he has some amount of knowledge he likes to flex for others. And he’s a very social person, his house decorated top to bottom with the perfect setup for a fun-loving party boy. Alcohol paraphernalia and pinup posters surround his place, and he has stacks of board games to play with his friends. He’s also very sociable and funny, which makes him seem like a fun conversationalist.

Contrast this to Bear. His house is inherited from his deceased grandmother and he’s made no attempts to alter it or fix it to his tastes. His wardrobe consists of almost cartoonishly similar clothes, to the point that there was one scene where I thought to myself he’d been wearing the same sweater for multiple days, only to realize it was simply one that looked near identical to his previous one. He never speaks about his interests or aspirations, even to the point of obfuscating his actual goals, dreams and interests when Wish Nikki asks him in favor of a dumb joke. He self admittedly is a closed book. The only insight we get is a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse at his search history, most of which is about necessary questions he needs to answer to fulfill his social obligations, and everything else we’re left with is still pretty nothing and mostly revolves around his infatuation with Nikki. (Except that he apparently plays marimba…?????)

What I’m saying is that Bear is the kind of guy the discourse is afraid to acknowledge. He is the sole architect of his own male loneliness problem. He’s the kind of guy that’s too hard to stereotype for a shallow ‘feminist’ TikTok skit because he has nothing to stereotype. In not allowing himself his own personhood and guarding himself emotionally in the way he does, it’s impossible for him to make the connections he obviously craves. He wants to be loved but there’s nothing about him to fall for. There’s nobody to get to know. Nikki says before the wish is made that he’s the only one she can have vulnerable conversations with, but that doesn’t seem to be because he’s a strong presence for empathy and comfort. He’s a good listener, but not out of effort made on his part. Talking to Bear is like talking to an empty room. It absorbs the words and it doesn’t offer anything back. The only real input he gives Nikki in this conversation is not knowing the difference between a romance and a love story, which goes to show that he’s genuinely never thought about it before. In a way, he dehumanizes himself, which makes him unable to see others for their humanity in turn. There’s a couple of subtle nods to this, with the search history being in a Gemini like AI chatbot, showing he won’t even put the effort in to fully research something and think for himself about it. But also in a moment where he creates a piece of AI generated art for Nikki. No thought or artistic intent is put into it outside of a simple prompt, just allowing something else to do the work for him in wooing the girl who’s already head over heels for him. (This is also a neat nod to real Nikki being a passionate creative and wish Nikki accepting the slop put in front of her as long as it comes from Bear)

The loudest voices preaching about the supposed male loneliness epidemic are just like Bear. Going through the motions of the monotonous routine of American capitalist existence while never putting in the effort to form connections or find the things that make life worth living. It can’t even be framed as a refusal when there’s not any effort being put into actively rejecting anything in the first place. He doesn’t change during the course of the film, not improving or devolving. The same shell of a man he was from frame one. The way he lacks the drive or desire to humanize himself mirrors the way he dehumanizes Nikki, and it reflects the real victims of the male loneliness epidemic: the women that are expected to ‘solve’ this problem.

Nikki is made into the most literal form of the phrase “object of affection”. This is literal in a physical sense, where her body is turned into the avatar for Bear’s fantasies after he makes the wish, an actual objectification of herself. But it’s also true in the emotional sense. Bear’s wish is for Nikki to love him “more than anyone else in the entire fucking world.” This strips her of all of her actually meaningful connections. Any chance she could have to reconcile or sufficiently cut ties with her estranged family is gone. Her platonic relationship with Sarah disappears. Her sexual and possibly romantic connection with Ian is stolen away. She has no care for the other people around her that aren’t Bear, a saddening contrast to the kind and bubbly person she was before. She has no care for animals, given how freely she desecrates the corpse of Bear’s cat. She’s no longer even allowed to love or care for herself. The second Bear leaves her side she ceases to move, even when she needs to take care of herself physically. She simply stands there and waits for him, to the detriment of her own physical health and safety, and he comes back to her literally covered in her own piss, shit and vomit. When the real Nikki briefly takes control at the party and hurts herself, possibly in an attempt to kill herself, Wish Nikki refuses to admit herself into the hospital and follows Bear home covered in her own blood.

This literal objectification process is underscored by the horrifically genius lighting and framing choices. They say eyes are the windows to the soul, well Nikki’s eyes are hardly ever visible. So much emphasis is put on her face pre-wish. Her eyes and her smile especially. This is the image Bear fixates on. The fantasy of the gorgeous girl next door with eyes only on him. Only for him. But after he makes the wish, there are numerous shots of her eyes being covered. Either by herself, an object, the frame of the shot, or most commonly, complete shadow and pitch black darkness. We don’t get to see all of her little micro-expressions or the looks she gives Bear most of the time. We only see her silhouette. She has literally become the shape of a person, and anything deeper than her conceptual self is hidden in Bear’s shadow.

The most notable time we see her unobscured face after Bear makes the wish, is in the horrific scene where Bear first rapes her. She makes the sexy, pleasing noises Bear wants to hear, but he can’t see her face. There is nothing in her eyes as she looks directly at the audience, notably in one of the only shots where she looks at the viewer like this. She doesn’t struggle, she doesn’t silently plead and ask whatever voyeur or God might be watching to save her from her own body. She simply stares blankly into endless nothing. Frankly, she looks dead. And with her humanity, her life, stolen away from her, she may as well be. Barker has gone to great lengths in interviews and post-mortem discussions of his own work to clarify that the One Wish Willow’s only supernatural trait is granting wishes. Which means Nikki is not possessed, there’s no secondary entity controlling her body. She’s trapped inside herself, puppeted by the wants of someone else who only seeks to use her. Nikki is a living dead girl.

Lastly, I want to talk about their relationship dynamic as a pair, somehow a slightly underdiscussed aspect of the movie in my experience. Stick with me here, I know how this is gonna sound. Especially coming from a self-proclaimed sex positive pervert who often indulges in the taboo side of erotic fiction. …Why is no one talking about the incestuous undertones of Bear and Nikki’s relationship?

There’s one really obvious example that your mind likely jumped to after reading that. One of the most important pieces of dialogue is the previously mentioned romance vs love story exchange. Well, later, we get some insight into what Nikki was writing. It seemed to be a Hansel and Gretel retelling. Likely, the love story she was referring to was not a romantic story, but a story of familial love. Not only does this tie in with the undertones of her being alienated from her typical nuclear family relationships, considering she says she needs to find love to write it, but it also ties in with something she previously told Sarah. She sees Bear like a brother. When the wish takes over Nikki, she writes more of her story and reads it out loud in an infamous scene. The previously familial love story Nikki was writing is perverted by Bear’s desire. To quote it: “You’re not my wife, Gretel.” “I’m more than your wife… I’m your sister.” The wording here is interesting. Other than this scene bringing up the perversion of the familial dynamic Nikki had with Bear, it also says something interesting about Bear through Wish Nikki’s reflection of his desires. Commonly, romantic love is framed as above familial and platonic love. “We’re more than family.” “I don’t see you as just a friend.” etc. But the Hansel and Gretel portrays the familial above the romantic. “I’m more than your wife.” There’s a lot of debate about if Nikki was interested in Bear before the wish, and it was made intentionally ambiguous. To me, though, this scene proves she wasn’t. Besides seeking to further other Wish Nikki from societal normalcy, it also underscores Bear’s preoccupation with Nikki’s view of him and the concept of the friendzone. She doesn’t see him as a potential romantic partner, she sees him as a platonic and familial presence in her life. He doesn’t seek to change her view of him, he wants her to put that above romance. Remember, more than anyone else in the world means above all others, including friends and family.

Outside that obvious example, I think their dynamic reads very similarly to parent and child a lot of the time. (Or maybe owner and pet.)

Wish Nikki acts very childish. Pouting, throwing tantrums, stomping and whining when she doesn’t get her way. She also has a hard time with really basic concepts and words. Her constant parading around of Bear’s dead cat reads a lot less malicious if a child with a loose understanding of right and wrong is doing it. When she creates the shrine for her in the kitchen, Bear tells her it’s fucked up. She asks if that’s bad, seemingly very genuinely confused and grasping for knowledge. It brings to mind the wording of Bear’s wish, “more than anyone in the entire fucking world.” Does Wish Nikki comprehend this particular word only in positive contexts? Does she need to learn the negative connotations it has in average, adult conversation? In the Hansel and Gretel story, mention is made of an old woman who “taught Hansel and Gretel to lie together.” This calls to mind imagery of child sexual abuse as well as incest, which is especially distressing in the context of Wish Nikki being childish and placed into a warped familial role. But it also reinforces the idea of adults teaching her things, and teaching them wrong in a way that harms her and eventually others.

In the script, a lot of Nikki’s dialogue and stage directions are tagged with ‘childlike’ or ‘childish’, and many of her actions and mannerisms are described similarly. A quick Ctrl+F search of the script shows 10 uses of the word child or with child in them, and all but one is ascribed to Nikki, and the first is one of the very first moments after the wish is made. The moment she turns into the object of affection, she becomes a child. A lot of misogynistic cishet men describe their ideal partners similarly to a family member or a child. A mother who will fuck you. A pure virgin you can trick into your bed. A sister you can marry. Wish Nikki reads like the logical extreme of this phenomenon. She literally acts like an unruly child, and Bear has to parent her like one. Tell her right from wrong, calm her down when she has a tantrum, clean up after her messes, tell her what to do. Another example of his fetishistic fantasies disappointing him when he understands the reality of them. Notably, also in the original script, Wish Nikki initiates makeup sex after the party. How does she do this? By telling Bear to “rail my guts like Hansel fucks his sister.”

Bear, much like adults who abuse children, refuses take responsibility for his actions. It’s his worst trait and the thing that eventually gets him and all his friends killed. But in the context of reading their dynamic as the logical extreme of paternalistic cishetero patriarchal sexual norms, it becomes even more distressing. Everybody has their moment that killed any chance of Bear becoming a redeemable or likeable character for them, mind came early. When real Nikki briefly snaps back to reality and pushes herself off of Bear, he freaks out and says “you made me feel like I did something you didn’t like.” Never once does he ask if she’s alright, he’s worried about himself and his own reputation. I phrased it to a friend I mentioned it to like he’s building up a preemptive court case, but thinking on it more I believe a better description is that he’s trying to get out ahead of a Me Too story. This, once again, feels more similar with the parent-child coding and the uneven power dynamic at play. His inability, or refusal, to take accountability for his actions also echoes a neglectful parent. He’s told directly multiple times what he has to do to save Nikki, but it figuratively and literally fades into the background. He has someone he says is important to him, someone he says he loves, someone he forced into existence. But when it’s time to man up and make the necessary sacrifices for her well-being, he ignores the possibility entirely.

The dichotomy between the real Nikki and Wish Nikki also becomes even more tragic with this reading in mind. It’s easy for a child to feel trapped within their own body and the role they’re forced to adhere to by parents and by society, unable to claim any of their own agency over what happens to them or who they’re allowed to be. And adult women are treated like children, especially by abusive partners, and it’s so normalized most don’t even give it a second thought.

All of this stolen agency and lack of control over the wants of others dictating her life comes to a head in one of the most tragic horror endings, and endings period, that I’ve ever seen.

Bear’s death, which he’s only forced away from chickening out of by having his agency over his body stolen by Nikki’s wish, snaps Nikki back to her body. Now, surrounded by death ‘she’s’ responsible for, finally not a passenger in her own body, she will be forced to take the responsibility Bear refused to. Once again, and for the final time, the victim of the whims of one selfish man. Forced to pay for the crime of kindness towards the wrong person. 

There’s a lot more I could talk about in Obsession. The way that the wish directly pits against a positive female presence in her life, mirroring the ways women often see each other as competition for male affection. The fact that the One Wish Willow is notably not a monkey’s paw, and the problem is Bear’s entitlement and selfishness. The disgusting, depressing, and terrifying exchange when the real Nikki is finally lucid enough to beg for Bear to kill her, and he leaves her alone, feeling petty and offended that she doesn’t want to be controlled anymore. The way that the film exists in the uncanny valley, in an odd secondary reality that feels familiar but just wrong enough to unsettle you. I could even go more in depth with how genius the filmmaking techniques are, and the use of non-diagetic sound and visuals to create terror that only exists for the audience and not the characters. But I think I’ll leave it here, with a final thought…

Yo this shit gave me crazy nightmares man fuck this movie.