i kinda wish obsession (2026) would happen to me ☹️

(alt: are the straights ok?)

this is the face of someone who hasn't gotten over their cat dying:

cat people like the feeling of being chosen. dog people are mad cats don't choose them. it's a universal fantasy. jk rowling imagined it into reality for harry potter, literally nicknaming him ‘the chosen one’ and Curry Barker gave Bear a One Wish Willow when his cat died.

and good old Bear wishes that the person he loved the most in the world (i’m guessing cat was the only other contender for that position) loves him the most in the world.

now, as someone who has never loved anything more than everything else in the whole world (except, briefly, communism), i can't truly imagine it, but god, i would love to be on the receiving end of it. which is, of course, funny, considering the moral of the movie seems to be somewhere in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ ballpark of things. but the truth just is that if my girlfriend asked me to stay home and fuck all day i would immediately call my boss and say sorry somebody cello-taped my whole main door shut, can i make like fifth harmony and work from home?

and of course there's the real horror of the movie which is finding out your girlfriend was lying to you about having daddy issues. now that would force you to confront that every time she called you daddy in bed was just words of affirmation to stroke your ego and not, as you had imagined, a freudian slip.

our beloved Indian CBFC gatekept big chunks of the movie, one of them including a scene, that Inde Navarrette described as an ‘intimate scene’ where you get to see the ‘underneath Nikki’, a detached face, even while we continue to hear sounds a ‘freaky Nikki’ would probably make. this scene, everyone bashing the CBFC argues, reveals something crucial: that Nikki never consented to any of the sex they were having. which a. we could infer even without that scene tbh and b. discounts the fact that the movie literally happens in a universe where it is possible to just magically hypnotise someone into wanting you (manosphere manifest). if it is a representation of rape, it's a damn lousy one. (fuck censorship tho.)

i wish i could say stuff like Obsession (2026) holds up a mirror to heterosexual monogamy in patriarchy etc etc but it really doesn't & it's better off for that. Barker says that he was trying to explore questions like- “At what point does something we call love stop being love? And beyond that, what does the word ‘love’ even mean?” & can we somehow ban filmmakers from talking about their movies, man? real abusive relationships look more like a colleen hoover novel than shitting your boyfriends dead cat sandwich on the floor while waiting by the door for him to come back home from work. this was written by a man. even the worst semiotics professor would agree that curtain was blue because it was just funnier that way.

i don't think the straights are suddenly becoming self aware. this is at best, one man’s fantasy turned nightmare. there's just nothing more horrifying to men than their actions have consequences. straight and self aware remain antonyms. i’m just lowkey glad someone’s making indie cinema that can stir up sm conversation. it’s probably worth remembering that with movies like this, what sticks more than the movie itself is how we talk about it.

i walked out from the theatre realising the only parts that immediately, physically scared me were the jumpscares. but this is the kind of movie where everyone finds different parts scary, funny, uncomfortable, etc. & that's kinda the point. the party scene where Bear is dared to kiss the person on his left and Nikki stands up, moves Sarah aside and kneels on his left, pouting for a kiss, and the entire theatre was in pin drop silence, i couldn't help but let out an ‘awwww’. but maybe i’m just freaky like that.

also, since no real review is complete without a fan theory, here's one: yk how in the scene before Bear meets Sarah, the ‘underneath/real Nikki’ talks in her sleep, begging Bear to “kill me pls” (brilliant writing btw cuz “kill me pls” was my literal same thought at that point). she explicitly refers to the sleeping Nikki in third person, kind of driving home the argument that this is not the ‘real’ Nikki talking but, that's a lazy reading imo. you have to suspend disbelief! my understanding is that it's all one Nikki, pretending to be asleep, desperate, and begging to be killed cuz she knows how the wish has programmed her to do what she's gonna do to Sarah and hates herself for it. kinda like how Bear tries to kill himself in the end to “free her”. very familiar tragic romance clichés actually. makes you think.

open question: how many years of therapy do you think it takes Nikki to process all this after the end of the movie?

anyway, manasvi & i walked out of the theatre feeling like we should make a movie asap which is always a good feeling. maybe movies that make you feel like making movies are the kind that really matter tbh.