The Wrong Monster: Mistaking Obsession for Love
Spoilers for the first half of the film Obsession (2026).
In 1982, Margaret Atwood asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women. He said they're afraid women will laugh at them. Then she asked a group of women students why women feel threatened by men. They said they're afraid of being killed.
Curry Barker's Obsession had me thinking about dysregulation, separation anxiety, coercive control, and what the film would have felt like if the genders were reversed.
The film starts by showing what it's like to experience limerence, which is what Bear is going through about Nikki. The psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence for an involuntary fixation on one person, intrusive thoughts, and a craving for them to feel the same so the tension finally stops. It can feel like the biggest love of your life. But it isn't love, because it's powered by anxiety rather than care. Nikki senses he has feelings for her, but when she asks him point-blank whether he likes her, he can't handle the risk of her rejecting him. So instead of answering honestly, he makes a wish on a novelty toy: that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world.
People have argued about whether Bear is entitled. I don't think entitlement is quite the word. Entitlement says she owes me. What Bear shows is something else: he would rather control the outcome than risk the answer. He is not owed Nikki. He simply cannot tolerate a no, so he removes her ability to give him one.
The wish changes Nikki, though not into someone who loves him. It turns her into someone obsessed with him. The next morning, she builds a memorial out of the remains of his dead cat. She duct-tapes his door shut so he can't leave. When another woman shows interest in him, Nikki kills her. And the whole time, the real Nikki is trapped inside, watching.
What makes it even scarier is that Nikki is doing the familiar things obsessive men do while calling it love. We're not used to seeing that type of violence coming from a woman.
Make the familiar strange, so we can see it again
Imagine the whole film with the genders swapped. A shy woman buys the toy and makes a man love her: that isn't horror, that's a love spell, and love spells cast by women are played for charm. Practical Magic, Bewitched. And a man doing what Nikki does, sobbing at the door, keeping her from leaving, killing the woman he sees as a rival, that's not new either. That's every stalker thriller ever made. It only works this way around, and that tells us something uncomfortable. A man doing these things is so ordinary it reads as a genre (still scary, but not as disturbingly scary as this). Put the same behavior in a woman, and it becomes the scariest horror movie we’ve seen all year.
Part of why we’ve normalized it in men is that we've been sold that man as a romantic lead. A man who watches her while she sleeps, who makes sure she can't leave, who won't take no for an answer. Played as horror, he's a stalker. Played as romance, he's Edward Cullen in Twilight, who watches Bella sleep and disables her truck so she can't see another boy. He's the Beast, keeping Belle in his castle until she loves him. Both of those men are literal monsters, and both stories ask us to see their control as love, and to believe the right woman's love can tame it. It isn't only fantasy, either. In The Notebook, Noah hangs from a Ferris wheel and threatens to let go unless Allie agrees to a date, and the scene is played as charm. When the monster is a man, we call it romance. When the monster is a woman, we call it horror. Our culture has strange definitions of love. Jealousy gets read as proof of how much someone cares. Possessiveness gets called passion. A man who won't accept a breakup is "fighting for her."
Those stories have real effects. When researcher Julia Lippman showed women films that framed a man's persistent pursuit as romantic, the ones most absorbed in the story came away more tolerant of stalking. When the same kind of pursuit was framed as frightening, viewers saw it for what it is: stalking.
The critic Viktor Shklovsky argued a century ago that art exists to make the familiar strange again, so we can actually see it. The strange thing in this film is watching a woman do the things men normally do in the name of love. Maybe this film is helping us see how normalized obsessive behavior in men has become.
Who we should actually be afraid of
Several people writing about the film have read possessed Nikki as a figure for dissociation in a controlling relationship: a person trapped and screaming behind her own eyes while someone else runs her life. It's part of what makes the film so scary for any of us who've experienced coercive control from someone who claims to love us.
Nikki's panic whenever Bear leaves, the sobbing at the door, the standing and waiting for hours, looks a lot like separation anxiety on steroids. It's almost like he traumatized her by making that wish; for the rest of the film, her dysregulated behavior is a direct result of his coercive control. She's the one we're afraid of. He's the one who did it. On the surface, it looks like he’s being victimized, but look deeper, and we see that she’s the one trapped.
When Nikki surfaces for a moment and begs Bear to kill her, he refuses, and he's offended. He can't believe she would rather die than be with him. Her suffering registers to him as rejection. He wants her more than he wants her to be freed from the nightmare. It was one of the scariest moments of the film for me. It's like proof, midway through, that the real Bear doesn't actually love the real Nikki; he still just wants to possess her.
Love vs. Obsession
Obsession has nothing to do with love. Love is (or should be) measured by how you care for your partner, with real, tangible, consistent, and reliable actions. Erich Fromm defined love as the active concern for the life and growth of the person we love. Active means "I love you" has to show up in what you do, not just what you say; growth means wanting the other person to flourish on their own terms, including terms that don't include you. bell hooks put it more bluntly: love is something you do, and love and abuse cannot coexist.
That's the hard truth underneath the greeting-card line about letting someone go. If you love someone, you want the best for them, and sometimes the best for them is a life without you in it. Love can hear no. It can grieve a no, rage about it, fall apart over it for a while. What it doesn't do is take away someone's freedom to say no or leave.
The version without magic
Bear used a magic toy to possess Nikki. Men in real life use other tools.
Here's a scenario that will be familiar to anyone who works with survivors of a controlling partner. A woman tells her boyfriend she's leaving. He says, "If you leave me, I'll make your life hell." What is she supposed to say to that? Okay, in that case, I'll stay?
She leaves anyway. And so he installs spyware on her computer and tells her, "I'm watching every move you make, every keystroke, every message, every phone call." The stalking makes her life hell, as promised.
That threat is Bear's wish without the magic toy. It leaves a woman feeling trapped and possessed. This kind of possessiveness is the subtext I see in many relationships where one person is motivated more by control and obsession than by love. We’ve been trained to think that maybe being stalked means they love us so much they can’t control themselves. But spyware isn’t someone losing control. It’s a plan. Like buying the magic toy and making the wish.
And people being stalked feel like they're living in a horror movie in broad daylight. When she tries to explain her terror to friends, they nod politely. Spyware sounds like a tech problem, something you fix with a new laptop, when in actuality it's a form of coercive control. We minimize this behavior most when it comes from someone she loved, which is exactly when it's most dangerous.
The sociologist Evan Stark gives us language for why this is so hard to convey. We measure abuse by injury, so we ask whether he hit her. Stark calls coercive control a liberty crime: what it takes is your freedom, your ability to have a private thought, a private conversation, a plan. It leaves no bruise, so it barely registers as harm. It should.
Her fear is well founded. One widely cited study found that 76% of women killed by an intimate partner had been stalked by him in the year before. Another, a landmark study of intimate partner homicides across 11 cities, found that for women already in an abusive relationship, separating from a controlling partner made them five times more likely to be killed. This is why "just leave" is such dangerous advice on its own, and why advocates help women plan how to leave safely, including checking their phones and computers for tracking.
According to victims interviewed in the federal government's most recent crime survey, men committed 75% of violent incidents, while making up 49% of the population. For women, the danger concentrates at home. The United Nations found that worldwide in 2024, 60% of women and girls who were intentionally killed died at the hands of a partner or family member. For men, the figure was 11%. Men are more at risk on the street. Women are more at risk from someone who says they love them.
Abuse happens in every kind of relationship. Men are harmed by partners too, and LGBTQ people experience partner violence at rates as high as or higher than straight people. I'm focusing on men and women here because that's the story the film tells, and the pattern that shows up most in the data.
Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Bear couldn't risk it, so he made sure Nikki never could. That's the part of the movie I'd call horror.
If a partner's devotion has started to feel like surveillance, trust that feeling. Your alarm is information. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is at 1-800-799-7233 and thehotline.org.
Sources: Margaret Atwood, "Writing the Male Character" (1982); Dorothy Tennov, Love and Limerence (1979); Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" (1917); Julia R. Lippman, "I Did It Because I Never Stopped Loving You," Communication Research (2018); Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956); bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000); Evan Stark, Coercive Control (2007); McFarlane et al., "Stalking and Intimate Partner Femicide," Homicide Studies (1999); Jacquelyn C. Campbell et al., "Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships," American Journal of Public Health (2003); Bureau of Justice Statistics, Criminal Victimization, 2023; UNODC and UN Women, Femicides in 2024; CDC, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2023/2024 Data Brief.
