I will start this exercise with an obvious statement: Spoilers are all over this post. I am talking about details of the film Obsession, and it will spoil the entire film. This film really is one you should go into knowing very little. The reveals are part if the fun here. Come back after you see the film and see if you agree with my thoughts below.
Obsession is a wild ride. That is almost all because of Inde Navarrette’s awesome performance of Nikki. Regular Nikki is a charming, delightful person, and you can really tell why Bear is love with her. After Bear makes the wish, things start to go poorly. I will start this off with the most important point: Bear making the wish is the worst choice. What he does is force a new persona onto Nikki. We know the real Nikki is still in there due to a few signs: Wish Nikki freaks out very briefly when she first kisses Bear, “doesn’t like her dreams”, while Wish Nikki is sleeping real Nikki asks Bear to kill her, the polaroid photos in the lunch box, and before she stabs herself with the bottle screams “it’s not me”. So, for this exercise, I’m going to rank the activities of Wish Nikki in terms of how cringy they are. We will get into why Bear is the worst at the end.
14. Shoots Ian
That this is the “best” one kind of says where things go in this film. To be fair, Ian wasn’t that great of a friend if we are being honest. He is sure the Bear is taking advantage of Nikki, and that is why they are so in love. It isn’t until later we learn that he and Nikki have been hooking up. So, all of Ian telling Bear to hold off on telling her his feelings at the beginning of the film is painted in a more selfish light. He also is not a believer when Bear tells him about the One Willow Stick. All Bear needs Ian to do is wish for Bear’s wish to have never happened. In Bear’s thinking, it will save him, and we aren’t given any sign that Nikki’s feeling are taken into account by him. Ian instead wishes for a billion dollars. So when Ian barges in during the climax and Nikki one-shots him as soon as he enters the room, the film doesn’t dwell on it all. It is just adds to the endgame.
13. Lies about her father having cancer
Yes, it isn’t great that Wish Nikki lies that her father has cancer, and we can tell almost immediately that she is lying. She first says it is her cat that died, and not Bear. I think the film puts a little too much on this to start, but we do reach the point where it comes to a breaking point (see number 14). There really isn’t anything that Wish Nikki says that should be believed. You can tell the wish is doing anything possible to come true.
12. At the restaurant, causes a scene when confronted with the cancer story
It is when Bear and Nikki go on a date that Bear asks her why she was lying. She then has a minor meltdown at the table, which after Bear promises that he won’t bring it up again, she snaps back to smiling mode. Nobody is comfortable when someone is making a scene out in public. Everyone is uncomfortable, and that is why this rather mundane episode is so low on this list. It only goes downhill from here.
11. Creates memorial for Bear’s recently deceased cat Sandy in the middle of the Kitchen
The first morning after the wish, and Nikki stays the night, Bear walks in to see his cat exhumed with candles around it right in the middle of the kitchen. It is a uncomfortable thing to walk into, but an almost understandable thing Nikki could have done (at least that early in the film). She know how much Sandy meant to Bear, so she apparently thought that there needed to be an official remembrance for her. Pets are important to their owners after all.
10. At a house party, physically moves Sarah because Bear drew the tile to kiss the person to his left
This again is less cringy, and more something that would be uncomfortable in a real world scenario. At the house party, while playing Jenga, one of the other guests draws a tile that he has to switch places with Bear. This, to the great dismay of Nikki, means Bear has to leave her side and go sit next to Sarah. It is when Bear draws a tile that says to kiss the person to his left where things get touchy. Nikki immediately stands up, and everyone is staring at her wondering what she is going to do. All she does is drag Sarah’s chair back so Niki can now be the kissing spot. This, I think to everyone’s thoughts, was the best case scenario, but the moments from where Nikki stands to when she moves the chair, we are at a point where anything could really happen, especially because Nikki knows about the feelings between Bear and Sarah.
9. Covers the whole door in duct tape to try and keep Bear in the house and not leave her
After the night where Nikki watches Bear sleep, he asks her the following morning “please no more weird thing”. After she says yes, he turns towards the door, and he sees the door closes with about 5 rolls of duct tape. This revelation was one of the parts that my audience chuckle, and it was creepy hearing Nikki in the background saying she guesses he is stuck in the house, all while Bear desperately tries to get it open. With all that goes on that day, I do wonder when Nikki found the time (and the tape) to get all this done. This also might be the most harmless thing she does. It might be the most annoying though.
8. Same party, tells incestuous version of Hansel and Gretel during drunk Jenga
Between the seat change and kiss incident, there was Nikki’s turn to draw a tile. We don’t know what her tile says, but what she does is starts reciting a very uncomfortable incestuous telling involving Hansel and Gretel. Nikki is telling the story so pleasantly, and is having the fun that no one else around the table is having. It is the first real sign to everyone else that something is wrong with Nikki, and it is also the point where Ian starts to believe Bear has something to do with what is happening to Nikki.
7. Breaks car window, slams Sarah’s face into a brick repeatedly, killing her
Now we are cooking with gas. Nikki is asleep as Bear gets text messages from Sarah. She wants him to come outside to talk with her. So as far as Bear knows, Nikki is not a threat for what he is about to do. What we then have is a very nice moment between two friends that if Bear had not made his grave mistake, could have been a lot more. It is moment we see through Bear that i think is supposed to make us feel sympathy for him, but I didn’t feel it. Sarah then hands him her final letter for her chance to go to art school. She wanted to find out if she was accepted with her friend. It is in that quiet thoughtful moment that Nikki Kool-Aid Man’s right into the window and crushes Sarah’s face in with a brick. It is as graphic as it is sudden, and it is really is the point where Bear sees his life basically over. We will see Sarah again at the end where we see Nikki has her naked and displayed at Bear’s house.
6. Same party, breaks bottle and stabs herself in the face
There are a couple levels to what happens after the kiss situation after the party. Immediately after the moment, Nikki has a look of satisfaction, then starts screaming and falling away from the group. What she is yelling is it is not her. To anyone else at the party, Nikki is just freaking out. To us, and presumably Bear, this is the real Nikki breaking though the wish. She hangs around enough to break a nearby bottle and start stabbing her self in the face. She only gets two shots in before Wish Nikki is back in control, but what happened seemed pretty to clear to me: she was trying to kill herself. This theory is confirmed for me when Nikki asks Bear to kill her later that night. To everyone at the party, it’s a strange thing that needs hospitalization. To us the viewer, it’s a crushing action by someone who just wants the torture to end.
5. After Bear dies, Nikki “wakes up”
The film ends with Bear taking pills that will caused an overdose, but as he does that, we can hear in the background someone is making their own wish. We then see Bear perk up, walk out of the bathroom, and go kiss Wish Nikki. It is obvious the Wish Nikki has made the same wish Bear did. What doesn’t make this a happy ending for Wish Nikki is Bear then overdoses and dies. Overcome with grief, Wish Nikki is about to shoot herself when the wish ends due to Bear’s death. We then see the real Nikki look around the room and crying as the credits roll. Assuming Nikki can’t see what Wish Nikki does, let’s just go around the room and talk about what Nikki is discovering. First off, the person who she considers a little brother has overdosed at her feet, her friend Ian is shot and dead at the door, she is covered in blood, in a gross room with a shrine she has made for Bear. One assumes the rest of the cat is somewhere around there. We also don’t see her look in the other room and see Sarah. If this film was 5 minutes longer, we probably would get more “closure” for Nikki, but what we are left with are just questions. Does she get blamed for the three deaths in the house? Her prints are on nearly all the murder weapons. One would assume therapy is in her future, but there is most likely not happy ending for her unfortunately. At least she is still alive though.
4. Asks Bear to kill her
Before Bear goes out for the doomed conversation with Sarah, he hears a still asleep Nikki speaking to him. This is the real Nikki speaking, and asking Bear to kill her. We have already got a sense of what she is feeling in film. A little earlier, Bear tries to call the help desk for the Wish Stick. The person on the other line says he can’t help, but he can get him in touch with the real Nikki, who is constantly screaming. The added part of this, and the part that caused me to lose any goodwill for Bear, is his follow-up to Nikki’s request is to ask what is so wrong with being with him. Completely at that point in time writing off any feelings from the real Nikki, because the one everyone can see loves him. He finally gets it later on in the film, but this is after Sarah has been smashed and supposedly disposed of by Wish Nikki. If only he was more concerned for Nikki, Sarah and Ian would still be alive. I am not saying Bear had to kill Nikki either. He end the film overdosing on the same pills that killed his cat at the start of the film. He could have done that a day earlier and saved everyone. Instead, nearly everyone dies.
3. Watches Bear sleep from the corner of the room at 3 am
This occurred following the episode at the restaurant, and is the first major thing that really terrifies Bear. He wakes up and notices she isn’t next two him, and looks around the room. We see a dark shape in the corner, and my immediate thought was the film is tricking me to thinking that was her. Until her voice came from that corner. It’s when she says she just loves watching him sleep and tells him to go back to sleep where this adds to the terror. Bear is so uncomfortable that I wasn’t the only one to laugh a bit at the situation. I know if I was in that situation, that would be a deal breaker, but I also probably wouldn’t have made it impossible for my girlfriend to not love me severely.
2. Makes sandwich out of the cat and pack it in Bear’s lunchbox
The trick this film does is it takes any scene Wish Nikki isn’t in, and waits until we are deep in the scene before it unleashs her crazy. For example, the scene with Sarah and Bear during lunch at the music store. Earlier in the film, Bear tells Nikki he would like to be a food critic. So when we see the post-it note on the sandwich container playfully noting this, we don’t think too much of it. The sandwich looks fine. It is later in the scene when Sarah turns over the note and reads “What’s the verdict? Cat?” that Wish Nikki has entered the chat. It’s a great payoff to what we think is a very rare normal scene, that builds up the possible feelings between Sarah and Bear. There is another side to the sandwich that makes things more interesting. What if it was the real Nikki that put the cat in the sandwich to attack Bear? The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make sense that Wish Nikki would do it. She makes the sandwich before Bear says he has to go to work and won’t stay home with her. Especially with the pictures in the lunchbox, it makes more sense that Nikki put it together and not Wish Nikki.
1. When he leaves, proceeds to stand in the same position, smiling. Later found when Bear returns home in the same position covered in vomit and bodily wastes
Just keep in mind that these top three issues happen in the film within 25 minutes of each other. Watching him sleep leads into this the next morning, and this bookends what I have at number two. That next morning, Bear tells Nikki how terrifying the night was for him, and begs her for no more weird stuff. She agrees and hands him a lunchbox she put together (see number 2 above). He turns to go to the door and that is where we see the duct tape door. Once he is gone, Nikki starts smiling and staying perfectly still. Oh, she also starts to urinate. I will tell you this. That smile Navarrette has when she is doing this will haunt me for a bit, and might be the most unsettling thing in the film. It also puts the thought in your mind of what is going to happen when Bear comes back. It is a variation to me of Hitchcock’s “bomb under the table” analogy. We know what is happening in the house, but Bear does not. We also don’t know what more Nikki is going to do or what she will look like when we come back to her. It is when we do later in the film, and Bear sees the her covered in vomit and the pile of filth that has accumulated under her that the “bomb” goes off. It is just an awful thing on it’s own, but we also get hints in the film that the real Nikki is very aware of what is going on, as she is trapped beneath the “magic” of Wish Nikki. This only gets worse when you think about it.
I know all of that highlights what Wish Nikki did, but what shouldn’t be overlooked is how what Bear did was such an awful, incelly thing to do. Some of those things make it seem that Nikki is the monster, and Bear is the victim here, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He knows that Nikki doesn’t like him in that way, and by making that wish, he locks the real Nikki behind a new facade that is what he views as the perfect girlfriend. Well, she is perfect for that montage we are shown. The telling thing we have through the film is Nikki’s eyes give away the real Nikki through the film. Yes, she is smiling, but her eyes are giving her away in at so many points. It is also telling that Barker films her in quite a few scenes in shadow where we only see her eyes. It makes us think that this version of Nikki is not real, and what we have here is a borderline evil version of her that has hijacked the controls. While it is good that Bear did the right thing finally at the end of the film and killed himself, what he leaves Nikki behind with is a reality that is broken for her going forward. Ideally, no more cats in sandwiches going forward though.
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