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I don't consider myself someone who scares easily. Even horror films I enjoy don't necessarily scare me that much.
Yesterday evening I went to see Obsession in the cinema.
It scared the BEJESUS out of me. As soon as I got out of the cinema, I said to herself "I need a drink".
It took me a few hours before I felt normal again.
If you get a chance to watch it in the cinema, take it. The hype is warranted.
I’ve known more than a couple people with psycho ex’s in the background. Hopefully they blurbed this “Based on a true story.” I haven’t been to the movies in years but horror is my jam; I’ll definitely check this one out. I made a casual retreat from the genre after years of one supernatural thriller after another, it continually felt like horror had been in a drought.
Normally my fiancée scares much easier than me, but in this case I was more scared than her. I explained to her that it's a very male-coded style of horror: the horror of getting trapped in a relationship with an abusive BPD art hoe.
I haven't seen the movie, but going by the synopsis I would have thought this was the age-old warning about love potions: they don't work. You can't force someone to have feelings for you that they don't have, and historically such 'love potions' were more aphrodisiacs and the idea was "get the guy to have sex with you, then he has to marry you".
You can't magic someone into falling in love, and the movie sounds like the guy learns this the hard way. He tried changing her to be what he wanted, and to do that, the magic had to create an entire false personality that possessed her. It's the genie's wish granting, and how what you get is not the same as what you thought you wanted.
He wanted her to be obsessed with him, and when it happened, it wasn't the dream he imagined (I often feel this would be the same for guys who think they want a girlfriend/wife who is always ready for sex at the drop of a hat and who is the one who initiates it; if they got 24/7 'I want sex now' they'd rapidly get tired physically and mentally, and then it would be intrusive and even scary to have something you can't turn off when it's "yeah okay I've had enough now, go away").
Yeah, I personally find it somewhat alarming how many people seem eager to ignore the actual plot of the film in order to slot it into a preferred "bitches be crazy" gender war lens. I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite film of the year, and I personally found it extremely convicting; it's a very effective morality play about lust and the way that it poses as but is fundamentally incompatible with love. And the real, human lust in the film is Bear's, which led him to turn to the occult; "Nikki" is the demonic result of that. Sure, it sort of resembles a real type of mentally ill woman, but Bear did in point of fact impose that on her by calling on evil forces; he's a Faust figure.
I'm practically inclined to say that people are appreciating the film but desperately and disingenuously trying to reinterpret it as something less compatible with feminism, and I say that as someone with a pretty low view of feminism myself.
If anything, I was impressed with the restraint of the film itself. It could have dropped a lot more extraneous details or references to modern gender dating war cliches from one side or the other. My impression was one of the writer expressing his commentary, regrets and self-loathing regarding his younger-self stand-in MC. Other negative depictions of men just pile on buzzword stereotypes ("and then the tech-bro situation-shipped her due to his toxic insecurity and red-pill-negged her, something-something-agency, something-something narcissism, podcast")
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To be clear, my description of Nikki as an abusive BPD art hoe was facetious. The film hammers home that Bear is a selfish coward who brings his fate upon himself, and for all his so-called "love" of Nikki, he's more than willing to sacrifice her well-being on the altar of his own sexual and romantic gratification.
That being said, I don't think it's an accident that the possessed Nikki's obsessive love of Bear manifests in a way that pattern-matches to so much stereotypically borderline behaviour: violent mood swings, abrupt temper tantrums, empty apologies (and promises to change one's behaviour) and manipulative suicide threats. I find it interesting that, when the director began writing the screenplay, it was just a story about an abusive romantic relationship with no supernatural elements at all: it was only a chance viewing of an episode of The Simpsons that inspired him to incorporate the "monkey's paw"/possession element into the story.
Yeah Nikki's antics made me wonder if Bear was just a better person (cooler, more socially aware and had more going on) would Nikki have acted so crazy. They really hammer home how depressing his house is, how socially awkward he is.
Another thought I had on the bpd antics of Nikki, is this how 'powerless' people fight back? That jenga scene gave me such flashbacks to when a friend was dating a chick who would be huffing and puffing in corner sad over something during a party, I would say performatively trying to ruin the mood because she was upset and I literally learned not to care (not my monkey, not my circus).
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The last line caught me pretty good. I recall one from my past who was a screamer and big on direct eye contact and choking. The issues didn’t end there after the show was over either.
Not saying this was you, but that often seems to be the case, from what I've read about it. Guys start off "she's crazy but the sex is amazing", then it gradually dawns on them "she's crazy, and the crazy doesn't go away after I've had enough fucking for now".
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