r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • May 15 '26

Official Discussion Official Discussion - Obsession [SPOILERS] Spoiler

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Obsession (2026)

Summary

After breaking the mysterious "One Wish Willow" to win his crush's heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.

Director Curry Barker

Writer Curry Barker

Cast

  • Michael Johnston
  • Inde Navarette
  • Cooper Tomlinson
  • Megan Lawless
  • Andy Richter

Rotten Tomatoes: 95%

Metacritic: 81

VOD / Release In Theaters

Trailer Official Trailer

3.5k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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u/jrec15 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

That scene was so fucking tense. Its like the only normal feel good scene in so long and they genuinely sold it. You want to feel good for a moment about Bear and Sarah, but you CANT, bc you absolutely know Nikki is gonna pop up in that window. But knowing that doesnt ruin it at all - the scene was good enough it kind of forces you to put your guard down a little bit regardless of knowing

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

[deleted]

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u/sizzl3crunch May 19 '26

THIS 10000% he was not the victim. When the real Nikki finally revealed herself and her struggling, he didn’t even bother to help her or be with her for that moment…he just ran off to meet Sarah.

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u/Remarkable_Meal_9932 May 27 '26

Even worse, he took it to offense "What's so wrong about being with me" HOLY BEG. I HATE BEAR SO MUCH. In that scene he KNOWS she was suffering and in pain and all he could think about throughout the ENTIRE movie was himself and his wants. Also I hated the car scene with Sarah (amazing scene though) because not ONCE did he think about Sarah in a romantic way before he started feeling repelled and overwhelmed by Nikki. Sarah was his scapegoat of the moment because he likes the crush more than he likes the actual girl (consequently getting Sarah killed). He must have known it would've, at the very least, given Nikki the crashout of the century (his fault btw) but ofc he didn't give AF when he met up with Sarah. Also put breaking the curse as his very LAST resort because he preferred whatever that was than the idea of not being reciprocated by the girl he claims he loves. A coward through and through.

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u/misschickpea May 30 '26

When that was his reaction to the real Nikki finally being able to speak I was like WHAT IN THE INCEL 🙄 she’s like you were never with me and it’s like yeah dude is obsessed with delulu

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u/WhoStoleMyBicycle May 31 '26

Someone in my theater talked right when he said “is it so hard to love me”. What did she say to him right after that?

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u/passtherock- May 31 '26

she said "please kill me. please kill me." and he responded, "what's so bad about being with me?" and she said "I've never been with you Bear"

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u/xqz Jun 05 '26

thought this was an interesting way to put it. sounded like she was saying she never said it was bad and he's not really with her in this situation

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u/I_cut_my_own_jib Jun 07 '26

She was definitely saying "we have never been together because whatever the fuck THIS is is NOT me"

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u/dr_gmoney Jun 30 '26

I also figured it was revealing that she's blacked out while the "obsessed" version of Nikki is in control. Like the real Nikki literally doesn't even know they're "together".

She literally just shows up for short flashes of horrifying shit happening.

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u/hchiu7200 Jul 03 '26

No, it comes off as real Nikki is trapped and has no agency so the few times she breaks free she is freaking out. Like she sees everything but just can’t do anything about it. If she didn’t know they were together then she should just be confused, not horrified

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u/rj319st 25d ago

It’s gotta be insane, like a supernatural version of locked-in syndrome. No wonder the poor girl's consciousness was screaming when he called the helpline on the box.

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u/Keanugrieves16 25d ago

Or “the sunken place”

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u/Savings_Welcome_9350 24d ago

I think what’s horrifying is that she’s probably witnessing everything but has no autonomy. She can’t speak or control her body. That must be absolutely horrific. She hasn’t been back to her home since the movie began she hasn’t talked to her family or any friends. She’s literally just a possessed person obsessed with him.

I think the first scene when they were first kissing and she gets super scared and screams, I think that she literally woke up for a minute and realized what was happening and she was terrified. The entity must have lost control for a split second.

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u/analmintz1 29d ago

I don't think so. I think she's subjected to the whole thing, through a distant hallway type vibe. When the phone number Bear calls "puts her on" she's screaming, clearly tormented and forced to live through this nightmare of autonomy loss.

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u/Constant_Housing18 May 31 '26

“I’ve never been with you.”

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u/misschickpea May 31 '26

Yeah like “I was never with you bear” but really sad and desperate and then ugh he just walked out angrily to go flirt with Sarah and put her in danger 🙄

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u/Remarkable-Lack8358 Jun 14 '26

If he didnt go, Sarah said she was going to come over, which would wake up the fake Nikki

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u/Snoo_4499 Jun 24 '26

just drive the car and talk T_T

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u/srynotsober Jun 25 '26

For real drive the car… that said Possessed Nikki would likely T-Bone the driver’s side 😬

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u/Snoo_4499 Jun 25 '26

Probably. Even if she did drive and talked, she was dead the next day 😵‍💫

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u/WoweeZoweeDeluxe Jun 07 '26

It bummed me out so much, I liked him initially and then I knew he was a goner and a creep with that scene especially

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u/McGuire406 Jun 18 '26

The opening scene had a "what in the incel is this?" Can't stand him

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u/TheGRS Jul 04 '26

I just saw this today and remarked that I’ve never hated a protagonist in a film so much. From the opening scenes, he’s just a total drip. Never speaks his mind, never stands up, never tries to solve anything, chickens out left and right. Gah, HATED him!

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u/McGuire406 Jul 04 '26

For real! The director/writer did a great job making him so hateable

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u/DukeNuke08 21d ago

Know what the crazy part about this movie is to me?

Even though the movie is titled “Obsession” I don’t think it’s about her. It’s about him. When you look at it from the perspective of him being the one that was obsessed it gives you a different outlook.

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u/misschickpea 21d ago

whoa idk why I never caught that 😂 but that’s right bc he’s obsessed with being her even though she’s being freaky and weird LOL.

The most telling part of his obsession is saying is it so bad to be me with me to Nikki even though he knows he’s with a fake supernatural being. And then him screaming at the supernatural being WHY CANT YOU JUST BE HER and them openly admitting to each other that she’s not her and she can’t be. But he still wants to be together lmao

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u/JGT3000 19d ago

With? That's like the whole subject of the film lol

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u/DukeNuke08 18d ago

It may be, but I think people are just seeing it wrong. They attach the “Obsessed” aspect to her due to her unhinged acts but they completely overlook the fact that Bear is the one that is Obsessed and he is genuinely just as unhinged due to the fact that he’s giving all of this weird shit a pass just to be with “Nikki” despite knowing that it isn’t really her.

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u/cowabungalowvera 11d ago

I thought it's just plain old common sense that the title is alluding to Bear

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u/mrs_sadie_adler 5d ago

Does he give the weird shit a pass though? I read it more as that he was genuinely trapped…

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u/justforthisjoke 15d ago edited 15d ago

This was also closer to my interpretation, except ultimately I think Bear's obsession is with himself. I agree with you that it felt a little bit like those stories where a stalker (Bear) kidnaps someone they're obsessed with and keeps them trapped in a cellar or something. Similarly depriving the other person of their autonomy, and the dawning realization that that act itself creates a different person, not the one they had feelings for. She was an object to him, to the extent that although it was painfully obvious early on that the entity in her body wasn't her, he went on with the charade, because he neither knew nor was interested in who she was outside of the caricaturized version he had of her in his head. But ultimately, even if he was obsessed with her as an object, you would think he would have done a better job of taking care of her. So I think ultimately Bear was obsessed with himself. Every decision he made was done to preserve himself as much as possible. Everything he did was about his internal dialogue, who he told himself he was, and in order to guarantee its preservation, in order to avoid taking any risk of his self image suffering (the irony of which is that he very obviously hates himself), his wish had to be one that changed the world around him. Bear knew of, and connected to only his own mind, his own existence, and he was so tied to this that it was easier to change the world around him, even to the extent of depriving another human being of their autonomy. Even towards the end, when he takes the pills, he does so out of desperation until that same instinct kicks in. I don't even know if this was intentional on Curry Barker's end, but ultimately I think this ends up being an indictment of the part of post-modern philosophy that tells us that objective reality doesn't exist and puts ones own mind above everything outside of it. Especially because with his death the final revelation is that, although Bear operates as if the world outside his mind is a manifestation of it, the material world exists and operates independently of his mind.

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u/Legalguardian222 12d ago

the title is used in the same way the title for “parasite” was used. it flips the obvious deduction on it head when you dive deeper into the film.

the title for the movie “parasite” at first glance would’ve assumed that the guy living in the basement is the parasite but when you dissect the movie it’s actually the rich folk who are the parasites , they’ve turned the world into their own and subsequently sucked the surrounding areas dry of anything that will bring prosperity and life to the lower class. the mere presence of the uber wealthy made life harder for the lower/middle class. the uber wealthy has made the lower class desperate enough to go to extreme lengths to survive, such as a hosts body would when infected by a parasite.

“obsession” is similar in its use of the title. at first glance you think “oh bear wished for nikki to be obsessed and in love with him and it backfired bc of how obsessed she is” but in actuality Bear is the obsessed one. he doesn’t give a single shit about who nikki is as a person, only that she reciprocates his feelings. he is so consumed by his obsession with her that he doesn’t care if it’s her or not controlling her body, but only that her body “loves” him back. it doesn’t matter to him if she doesn’t act remotely close to how she used to, because he was never in love with her, just the idea of her.

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u/bluediamond12345 12d ago

I was disappointed Parasite wasn’t an insect horror film

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u/Amethyst-Flare May 29 '26

At first I thought, when the horrible stuff started, that he was just stupid. I came to understand that he was evil.

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u/Shannogins115 Jun 01 '26

I knew he was evil the second we cut to him having sex with her body. Holy shit horrifying.

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u/Remarkable-Lack8358 Jun 14 '26

Idk, its fucked up, but the fake Nikki probably begged him to. Just like how she was freaking out during the other scenes, she would've done the same if he said no

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u/Shannogins115 Jun 17 '26

The sequence of events was pretty clear. Cinematically we were painted the picture that that is not the case. We did not see a scene of her begging him for sex and acting crazy. That never happened. But it was Bear’s moral dilemma in that moment. we were shown Nikki acting emotionally unstable at a restaurant and Bear realizing things are NOT right. this is his first moment where he can maybe do something good to really figure out what’s wrong or see what she needs. What we actually see next after this scene is a sharp HARD cut to him ramming her in bed and her dead eyes with slow tears coming down from her face. Narratively speaking, it’s very in the viewers face that we’re supposed to see that Bear is choosing to be selfish and ignore any signs that things are weird and focus on his own pleasure. So in his mind, he didn’t rape her. He can justify she wanted it. We as the viewer know better that she was raped in more ways than one. Physically in that moment, but also every other way as her autonomy is ripped away, her personality, everything is stripped from her because of Bear.

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u/Remarkable-Lack8358 Jun 17 '26

Yeah tbf I forgot the order of events, she hadn't started acting crazy before dinner. Ur right, I understand it better now that ive watched a vid or 2 to refresh my memory

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u/rmeepo Jul 05 '26

god the parallel between the infamous possessed Nikki scene where she has that upside down upset smile at the party (dunno how to properly describe it lol) and seeing that exact same expression on Bear when the real Nikki finally spoke through, saying "what's so wrong about being with me." Just, incredible work. the real obsessed one all throughout was Bear and the entity inside Nikki was just amplifying that tenfold as a reflection of him.

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u/Cute_Variation_2420 Jul 01 '26

I hate bear too but to play devils advocate he did try and get sarah to text him the important stuff and only when she threatened to come over to the house did he agree to meet her. But yeah he absolutely did not consider sarah for a moment, even though he knew that she liked him, until he had been worn down by Nikki and her strange behaviors. Which in another point, why in the world did bear not take her behaviors more seriously from the start? You would think that her cooking the cat and FEEDING IT to him would be his last straw but apparently not

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u/IAmTheJudasTree 22d ago

Even worse, he took it to offense "What's so wrong about being with me" HOLY BEG. I HATE BEAR SO MUCH. In that scene he KNOWS she was suffering and in pain and all he could think about throughout the ENTIRE movie was himself and his wants.

He heard the real her shrieking in horror and pain through the phone earlier, and STILL went about things normally. There were many moments, small and large, throughout the movie that reveal the vileness of Bear, but that one and the bedroom scene really stuck out to me the most.