Obsession [2025 Film], open spoilers

Cafe Society
1

So I’m a month late but saw it in theaters tonight to a surprisingly packed theater. It’s apparently getting incredible word of mouth because it’s still packing a relatively low traffic theater a month later.

It is an excellent movie. I won’t see it again.

Whether you’d enjoy it is: Are you okay with being uncomfortable? And I guess if you want to see a horror film, you are. Do you like a logical, no moralizing, serious take on what it would mean for there to be a “love potion” or “wish” that made someone love you, like in all a million stories we’ve had over human civilization? If that sounds interesting, then go see it. Or if you just like big idea horror movies in general, then absolutely. Otherwise… it’s a bit rough.

I think some people interpret this as a sort of twilight zone / monkey’s paw sort of film, and it’s not. Ian asked for a billion dollars and he got a billion dollars. No catch (that we saw) and no monkey’s paw curls. There were reports on the reddit-like site when he did a search that suggested that other people got genuine positive wishes with no catch (like that their physical appearance became far more beautiful).

The point is that this wish is not a trickster genie, it’s not trying to interpret your wish in a hostile way and punish you for it. It just fulfills your wish. You ask for something simple, you get it. But Bear didn’t ask for something simple. He asked for someone to fall in love with him. Which means that he’s essentially wishing another human being, another living entity with agency, into being a mind controlled slave to him. There’s simply no version of that which could work out elegantly. It’s doomed from the start. Because it’s a stupid, selfish, evil wish.

And humanity has made a million stories about this very thing. Love potions, rituals, spells - and all these stories are usually cowardly, they usually manufacture a happy ending. They usually show that the love potion gets the target of the spell to spend time with the wisher and act affectionately towards them, but somehow during this process the target of the wish realizes that once they gave the wisher a chance they found that they loved them after all. It’s a bullshit heart warming ending that would never actually happen, because that’s not what you get when you enslave and mind control someone. I’ve always despised those stories.

So I loved this film’s honest, non-sentimental examination of this cultural concept. This is what it would really have to look like for such things to exist. No trickster genie needed. The idea is inherently rotten to the core.

It was well shot, well acted, had hardly any budget but didn’t need it. It was all about the deep examination of an idea. The most horrifying scenes weren’t the sudden outbursts of violence or strange behavior - though those were unsettling - but the moments where the real Nikki would peek through from time to time. She’d suddenly be herself for a few moments and absolutely freak out, understandably, and there was one scene where she could inhabit her own body while the… uh… entity that was controlling her slept, where she begged him to kill her. It’s clear that she was essentially trapped behind the entity that was controlling her in horror and suffering the entire time.

And the worst scene? When the guy on the other end of the help line for the wish product gave him a chance to speak to the real Nikki and she was just screaming in horror the entire time. Who was that guy, exactly? That’s probably the biggest mystery of the film.

One more subtle aspect of this film is that I like that it attacks the idea that meek, shy people are always good people. Almost every movie portrays the shy, awkward people as having their heart in the right place but suffering because of their social impairments. But Bear was both meek and shy and a huge asshole. You could perhaps forgive him for wishing what he did when he wasn’t taking it seriously and he was reeling from rejection, but he kept living the delusion when he had some chance to get out of it. When the real Nikki begged him to kill her when she had the chance, he turned into a moment not to apologize or promise to fix the situation he created, but because he wanted to voice his resentment of her failing to be attracted to him. His thoughts in the moment were not “oh my god, I’m so sorry, I’ve locked you in hell”, but “what, is dating me so bad?” – completely missing the point but in an ego-serving way. He was reacting to her existential horror and torture to push his own entitled agenda. It was disgusting.

Anyway, it’s pretty great. I’m a big baby when it comes to horror films and hate being tense for 2 hours long. I kept thinking “this movie is awesome, can it please end already” which is a pretty unusual reaction to a movie. I’d see it in theaters if you’re interested.

The credits feature 3 or 4 minutes of the real Nikki screaming. Bold and correct choice.

2

I loved it, probably the best movie I’ve seen from 2026.

3

After reading some of the reddit discussion of the movie I’m somewhat disturbed because a lot of the audience doesn’t seem to understand that the protagonist is a monster. They seem sympathetic towards him, even thinking of him as a victim.

I think there are at least a couple of things at work. I mentioned this in the first post but the film language (and to some degree cultural image) of an asshole is someone brash, aggressive, confident. So when we see meek, shy, socially awkward people, we think they must not be an asshole, and that they’re probably decent people.

And I think a lot of them identify with Bear, which is deeply problematic. They’d probably try to mind control their crush too, if given the chance.

I don’t blame Bear for the initial wish. He didn’t really think it would work, he was just rejected, it was more of a frustrated gesture than anything. I don’t think anyone could reasonably think they were actually doing what ended up happening.

But… I can very much judge him for what happened after that. Because he figured out what was going on relatively early in the film and decided to still try to manage the situation and take advantage of it. He wasn’t horrified that he was torturing the real Nikki or that he was mind controlling her body or forcing her into slavery and raping her. He was just frustrated that as the relationship became strained and the entity controlling her became weirder it was scary for him.

Remember the call he made to the number on the back of the box for the one wish willow? At first, the guy asked if he wanted to cancel the wish. If Bear was a decent person - or really, just not a monster - he would’ve jumped at the chance. Yes, I realize now that I am torturing a real person, I want to undo this wish 100%. But he didn’t. He said “Can we.. like… alter it instead?” – what he did by asking that is say “I’m happy to continue torturing and enslaving this woman, but her behavior is really inconvenient and scary for me, so I’d like to tweak it so she’s closer to my fantasy”

It was only when the guy who answered the phone made it clear that no alterations were possible that Bear finally asked if cancellation was an option. Not out of moral concern for Nikki but because he had an unfixable problem on his hands for himself and wanted to undo it.

People viewing him as a sympathetic man in an unfortunate situation rather than a villain who completely overrided the will and freedom of another human being in a grotesque way … is deeply problematic.

4

Wow, I guess it depends where you look, because all the discourse I’ve read about it pretty much everyone sees Bear as the villain.

Sure you can’t really blame him for making the original wish, since no one honestly believes such a thing is possible, but once it is clear what has happened, that’s when he turns from victim to villain. When real Nikki asks him to kill her and his response is “what is so bad about dating me?,” as if that’s the problem, and not that Nikki has been completely stripped of her agency and is basically being trapped within her own body? Oh man there is no grey area there, Bear is a selfish little man who never actually cared about what Nikki wanted, just what she meant to him.

5

Sounds like the perfect film for our zeitgeist. And hardly surprising that many people are finding the Bear character as the hero, not the villain.

6

Yeah, we follow him, but he is the primary antagonist. The girl is the victim for sure.

“It’s not me! It’s not me!” is what she was screaming when she came to her senses briefly. It’s obviously rape and abuse being done to her.

7

Wow. Forgive me for thinking that this was going to be a remake of the Brian de Palma film, which is itself a remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

So, yeah-- looks like something I’d watch.

But forgive me if I’m not sure that the movie isn’t about “too much of a good thing,” like a lot of stories where you ask for your wish in an ambiguous way, and end up with the Midas touch, or something.

I get that he’s interfered with her agency, but he probably could have phrased his wish slightly differently for a vastly different outcome. Anyone who has ever tried to feed prompts to an AI video generator knows this. Whatever the thing is that grants the wishes may lack any kind of interpretive intelligence. If you say “Make her fall in love with me,” she remains in a constant state of falling in love, instead of falling in love and progressing to being in love.

I’m not saying that’s what happens, since I have not seen the film. I’m also not saying that an old idea can’t be polished and restored until it looks new. I’m also not saying that not taking the out when he’s offered it isn’t an asshole move, nor that your analysis of what people expect from movie assholes isn’t good. The guy sounds like a Reddit incel, and they don’t think women have a right to agency.

I’m just saying that I’ve seen other things where it doesn’t take a trickster genie to make your wish go wrong, just a misconception of what you are asking for.

8

The question you’re asking is a big part of what the film explores. And I don’t want to contaminate your view too much – I would recommend going in blind and enjoying the ride. I wouldn’t want to taint a new viewer’s experience by my extensive analysis of Bear’s motivations.

But if what you’re talking about - how a wish can go wrong, and how it works is interesting to you, you’d like much of what the film explores. It’s a serious treatment of how it could work.

But since this is an open spoilers thread I won’t hold back for the people who haven’t seen it, it’s your choice. My take on it is that there’s no ethical way to make it work. Even if you give caveats and a well created wish, you could make the situation a lot less unpleasant for yourself and more predictable and closer to the fantasy, but whenver you say “I wish that someone else would do this”, you’re inherently enslaving or mind controlling them and there’s really no getting around that.

9

True, and that was a big part of the goal of the movie from what I can tell. The fact that they named him Bear wasn’t a coincidence I’m sure. There are all these memes asking women would you rather run into a man or a bear if you are alone in the woods, and a lot of women pick the bear.

But a real life bear won’t enslave you, rape you and make you miserable and suicidal while pretending he loves you like the bear in this movie did. Worst case scenario, a real life bear quickly kills you. It doesn’t enslave and torture you for life.

One thing I’m confused about is who did the one wish willow at the end. Was it the real Nikki or the enslaved Nikki, and what did she wish for?

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It was the enslaved Nikki, I tend to refer to it as the entity that was controlling her body. She knew why he was in the bathroom and what he was doing and she was distressed about it. She/it found the one wish willow and tried to use it out of desperation (although I guess as an entity who was created by it, it might know how it works and that it works). I think it was pretty clear that she wished that he loved her as much as she/it loved him – the only thing it wanted, and it worked. He came out and tried to be affectionate with her for as long as he could.

11

I’ve seen online theories that she was possessed by the dead cat - she gave him a tiger’s eye, peed on the rug - stuff like that. I think it’s a reach.

12

It was wish Nikki. She wished that Bear would love her as much as she loves him. Which happened right before he was able to throw up the pills so oops.

13

That’s not just a reach, that’s… wtf. People are weird.

14

Hey, when a cat dies in the opening scene, you think it’s gotta figure into the plot somehow - Chekov’s Cat. But I guess coming back as his lunch counts too!

15

Oh, I should add to my previous post: The entity’s wish is what killed Bear. He was still a coward to the end and refused to take responsibility for what he’d done. He took the opioid overdose but he was about to throw it all up when the entity’s wish made him stop and immediately go to enslaved Nikki. Had she not intervened with the wish, he would’ve threw up the pills and not killed himself. I guess that’s dramatic irony, a suitable enough end to Bear, who wasn’t ever able to make an ethically correct or responsible decision at any point during the film.

16

I strongly disagree, the source of the wishes was very very obviously evil. When bear calls the support line they literally put the real screaming Nikki on the phone with him because she is in endless torture. There was nothing “logical” about the actions of fake Nikki either. And Ian dies literally almost immediately after making his wish, there was zero chance he was gonna have a happy life as a billionaire.

17

So the phone call is a good counterpoint, but when you say there was nothing logical about the actions of fake Nikki, what do you mean? How else would it work?

In order for the wish to be fulfilled, Nikki’s free will has to be taken away. And a replica of her techically doesn’t fulfill the wish, right? So if the wish is neutral, if the wish just literally tries to do whatever the wisher requests, then the wish has to take over Nikki’s mind/body in some way. How else could it work?

And it’s perfectly logical: Look what happens. When Bear decides not to look too hard at what’s happening, there’s a montage showing them in a happy relationship. One of the key moments of the film is when they’re at dinner and he asks her if her father is really dying, she freaks out and screams “no, no, no, why are you doing this” or something like that. The “this” she’s referring to is him trying to see through the deception. The entity who controlled her was in control of the situation so long as Bear played along, but as soon as he started trying to pick apart her / its story, that introduced a discord into the relationship that had to be managed. That was the point where her behavior started to become more and more irratic because she was struggling to fulfill the wish.

The story was well crafted as a neutral, genuine attempt to fill a nearly impossible wish.

And you can infer from the lack of any monkey’s paw curls anywhere else in the film that that’s not what the filmmaker intended. The hints we have – the billion dollars, the internet woman whose mother became beautiful, don’t indicate a twist. If it was meant to be a twilight zone sort of monkey’s paw curl film, you would’ve seen those turn into a twist.

I read somewhere today that the voice on the other end of the line was the director and now I’m thinking that he basically undercut and tried to ruin his own film with a cameo stunt because that phone call doesn’t really fit with the rest of the story at all. I mean, it’s basically introducing without introducing either the devil or a needful things type character that’s not supported at all in any other part of the movie in any other way. I’m fairly confident he just wanted to appear in a scene like that and didn’t think of whether it made sense or fit into the larger worldbuilding.

18

Well the director literally said he was inspired by the Monkey’s Paw episode of The Simpsons.

The Reddit thread about the wishes I don’t think we can take at face value, half the responses say it didn’t work, half say it does, plus it’s a reddit thread. “It made my ugly mom beautiful” is kinda the response you’d expect to see there. No evidence that is truthful. Ian gets killed minutes after making his wish, we have no idea what would have happened to him later on.

I really want to know what the shopkeeper wished for since he used his and seemed perfectly content with it.

But whether or not the wish is evil isn’t the point. It’s that wishing someone would love you takes away their agency and free will. That’s the real horror. The scene on the phone was devastating in that regard because that’s when you really hear the horror that real Nikki is going through, being stuck in her own body with no way to scream for help except through that call.

19

No, I agree, and that was my thesis in the original post, that the wish was evil, the wishing mechanism was neutral. And yes, that’s a good point about the shopkeeper seeming pretty chill. Maybe he just wished for good health. Something that didn’t have to take away something from someone else.

I agree that the phone call was absolutely devastating. It was a revealing character moment to, because Bear wanted to alter the deal at first - to make it better for him - rather than cancel it. But it’s sort of out of left field and the worldbuilding doesn’t explain who is on the end of the other line and how they had direct access to Nikki’s consciousness if it’s still suppressed in her body. Maybe I’m thinking too mechanistically about a horror film, but the rest of it seems pretty well thought through.

20

The original shopkeeper tells bear exactly what is going to happen, but she does it in a sarcastic manner that makes it sound like she is just tired of dealing with bullshit complaints. The wishes are all life ruining, she makes that quite clear.