u/Freeril

Though the horror of a monkey's paw wish and the gore in the movie is plenty, Obsession excelled in being an allegory of women's fear in dating.

While Bear doesn't outright have insidious intention, his entitlement and cowardice are the root cause of Nikki's suffering. Bear never once remarks on what he truly likes about Nikki's character, instead focusing on how she makes him feel. This immediately gives a sense that he doesn't truly know her, even though they're childhood friends, and is just interested in her on a superficial level i.e. he didn't know about her relationship with her father, otherwise it wouldn't have made sense why she was so distraught about him supposedly dying.

This makes the scenes of their honeymoon and quick progression in the relationship even eerier; Bear seemingly doesn't mind that Nikki is singularly focused on him, neglecting her other relationships and her life in favour of spending time with him. In fact, it's never even mentioned how she quits her job and just waits around for him like a doll, living to serve his emotional needs. The movie is amazingly efficient in pivoting them into a codependent couple, but especially in changing Nikki's role as Bear's friend solely into being his girlfriend.

Rather than viewing Nikki as a human, Bear sees her as just an object of his affection and is able to willingly ignore all the signs of Freaky Nikki up until real Nikki acts up at the party. At first, he can blame it on the MDMA and alcohol, but if he truly viewed her as her own person, he would have questioned her lack of personality outside of being his girlfriend. I think the movie draws beautifully on women's fear of objectification and loss of autonomy. Without having done anything wrong, Nikki is forcefully subjected to Bear's affections and entitlement. While the movie shows the extremes of this, it made me think of how this manifests as a real fear for women; needing to reject a guy while being worried about setting him off, unwillingly sexualized and observed on social media or through AI, becoming a victim of stalking and/or rape.

As the movie goes on, Freaky Nikki seems to increasingly control the dynamic of their relationship, but the juxtaposition of real Nikki being the victim is truly ironic while Bear, the perpetrator, still benefits sexually from their toxic relationship and holds the choice of freeing real Nikki via death. Even when real Nikki asks Bear to kill her and forces him to acknowledge that it isn't her he's really dating, his response shows us that his ego is his core trait, contrasting with his cowardice and low self-esteem: traits prevalent in incel and alpha culture. I liked how the movie showed that Bear, for all his shy and awkward qualities, was ultimately evil in the selfish and self-serving actions he took. Cowardly in turning a blind eye to Nikki's imprisonment, entitled in controlling Nikki's fate purely for his benefit.

There's so many other aspects of the movie to talk about, but this was the one I felt made the movie truly horrifying to me!