My thoughts on Obsession (Spoilers).

I watched Obsession today. It was a phenomenal film, even though there are not really any moments I can say were particularly enjoyable. It is not a film I would want to watch twice. My interpretation of it was something about how one small, rash decision he made caused immense suffering and ruined his entire life. I looked reviews of the film, and people were calling Bear controlling, manipulative, and a rapist. I had no clue where they got that from so I looked it up, and I can understand how people interpret it as primarily about abuse, but I still don't see it that way. 

Anyone that loves someone wants that person to honestly love them back, and him making the wish is not him attempting to force her to do anything, it was a minor comment he made out of desperation with something he considered a useless toy that he did not expect to work. For someone to be truly manipulative or abusive, there needs to be an intentional effort to control. He can definitely be called a bad person, but I don't believe his actions were ever out of pure malice.

My problems with Bear only come with his handling of the situation later on in the film. Even when Nikki acts completely insane and out of character, he still wants to keep the relationship alive up until she kills Sarah, for example by asking the One Wish Willow employee if he can "alter" the wish rather than cancel it, still choosing to have sex with Nikki despite the fact that that was the worst thing to do in that scenario, or eventually trying to save himself after taking the pills even though it would end the suffering of Nikki which he knows he is responsible for. Even his attempted suicide was a desire to end his own suffering, not to help Nikki. 

Calling his wish a desire to control or manipulate her also doesn't really make sense with the result of the wish. If he genuinely wanted Nikki to be a mindless slave for him to control, he would have been fine with her when she became exactly that. The fact that he is completely horrified with the way she began to act is evidence that his original desire was for her to genuinely love him and for them to be a semi-normal couple, but because of the rash nature of his wish, he wished for a highly literal version of his true desire. He was ultimately punished for his wish because it is impossible to wish true love into existence. 

The best scenes were the scene were the real Nikki is speaking through the body of the Wish Nikki when she is sleeping because is the first moment where we truly understand that Nikki's soul is trapped inside her body whilst her actions are controlled by the Wish Nikki; the sex scene, because it shows the contrast between the consent and "enjoyment" of the fake Nikki and the tears of the real Nikki; the scene were Nikki screams through the phone for the fact that it is just purely horrific body horror; the Hansel and Gretel scene, because the real Nikki had previously described Bear as a like little brother, which explains why she wrote an incestous story about two siblings; and then of course the end scene, where she made the wish that he would love her and he experienced the same love she felt for him in a sick kind of way before dying.

On the sex scene, he only figures out that "Nikki" is not the real Nikki once he hears the Nikki screaming on the phone. Because of his ignorance and immaturity, he thinks that having sex with her is fine because he has convinced himself that she is either grieving from the illness of her father or on drugs. He can only really be judged for intentional malice once he becomes aware of what he has done. 

In the end scene, Bear becomes trapped inside his own body and acts differently to how the Real Bear wanted to act, which implies that he doesn't truly love Nikki. When he made the wish that Nikki would love him, because she didn't, her consciousness had to be replaced to satisfy his wish. If she had already loved him, that wouldn't have been necessary. So when Nikki wishes that Bear would love her, if he already did, his consciousness doesn't need to become replaced by a fake version of him that does love her. Because of this, I think that Bear's love for her started fading once he realised the implications of his wish, and was completely gone by the end of the film.  

The only purely evil irredeemable characters were Ian and the One Wish Willow Company. Ian was the most evil and insufferable character. He tried to ruin any chance Bear had with the girl he loved for 7 years, doesn't try to help his friend when he comes covered in blood pleading at his doorstep for the most minor act of service, and then comes to him later bragging about the billion dollars he just made. He got what he deserved for not freeing the real Nikki. Sarah represents the complete opposite of Ian, and she is the only moral character in the whole film. Everything she did was out of a love and care for her friends, which was ultimately destroyed by the consequences Bear's wish. And the One Wish Willow company is sort of self explanatory: trapping people's' souls in conscious torment in a state of sleep paralysis. 

Also, Bear looks like if Charlie Kirk and Morrissey had a child. 

9/10