Why Incels Don't Understand Obsession (Deep Dive)

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to Nightmare Masterclass. My name is David Stockdale.

[00:00:05]I'll be your host on this excursion into the dark unknown. Tonight we're going to do a deeper dive on Obsession, the new Curry Barker film starring Michael Johnston and Indie Navaret. I made a video on this one a bit ago covering my basic take on the film, The Grandmother's House, the prescription pills, the male loneliness stuff. You can find that linked in the description if you want more context. I've spent more time with the film since then.

[00:00:36]Perhaps more importantly, I've bared witness to some deeply disturbing reactions to this film that I want to take some time to unpack. Uh, this video is going to be spoilers all the way through. So, I'm just warning you up front. If you haven't seen Obsession yet and you don't want it ruined, I would suggest you go watch it first. You don't need to have seen my first video for this one to make total sense. I'll give you context as needed as we go along here. But the first thing I really want to talk about is this take on the film that I've heard. Basically, the idea is that Bear, the protagonist, deserves more sympathy. This is especially telling in reaction to my video because I never actually said in my review that I thought Bear was like the villain of this film. Although he does do some incredibly depraved things as the film progresses.

[00:01:38]I I think that it's a bit more nuanced.

[00:01:41]It's not black and white, but there is a strain of commentary about this film that wants Bear to be kind of off the hook. That was a common theme among some of the comments I received. The argument goes, I guess, that he's like, he's a sad, lonely guy. He made one mistake and the universe handed him a magic object he didn't fully understand. Reading him as anything worse than that is uncharitable. That's kind of that's the general sentiment of some of the comments I've received. You know, he didn't mean for any of this to happen, right?

[00:02:20]Okay. Bear is sympathetic. Yes, I agree.

[00:02:24]But the film makes him sympathetic on purpose. It's a trap. The film is not asking you whether Bear is a nice guy.

[00:02:34]The film is asking you what a nice guy does when they're handed the means to violate someone else's autonomy. Bear wishes for Nikki to love him more than anyone in the world. It's actually inscribed in the wish itself. This is him consciously saying, "Yes, if I had the option, I would override her autonomy. I would override what she wants, whatever it happens to be, because he's too cowardly to really find out. But yes, I will override whatever she happens to want with my wish. That is what he expresses at that time. He wants her to be stripped of the ability not to love him. The fact that he didn't predict the specific consequences of that wish doesn't really negate the fact that he made the wish. And again, I think it is telling um that I received so many responses trying to defend Bear, the protagonist, when I didn't even particularly make a solid case that Bear is notably evil. I think he makes certain decisions at certain points in the movie that make you kind of lose sympathy for him. When he calls up the company, he is explicitly told that the Nikki he is interacting with is not the real Nikki and that the real Nikki is trapped in some kind of hell. Like there there is a point in the movie where Nikki, the real Nikki is able to communicate with Bear while she's sleeping. So, she's talking in her sleep and the real Nikki is coming out and she is begging Bear to kill her and Bear's response is, "Well, what's so wrong with being with me?" That's the point at which I lost all sympathy for him because you can clearly see that she's suffering. And at that point in time, he nonetheless chooses to ignore her and continue along with this situation.

[00:04:41]That's not really the arc of a guy who made one bad mistake. That's the arc of a guy who keeps choosing the wish over and over until reality forces his hand.

[00:04:51]That's the film telling you right there, guys. I know I know we set you up for this. I know that you sympathize with the protagonist in the first act, but at this point in time, there's a turnaround. There's a shift, right?

[00:05:06]Something happens here. The character is now culpable for what follows. I would say the sympathy that the film extends to bear in the first act is a very elaborate and effective form of misdirection. The film is saying this is what guys like this look like. They're not monsters. They're sad. Oftentimes seemingly decent, low stakes guys who you would not necessarily flag as dangerous if you met them at trivia night. And look, sometimes guys like this will fucking destroy a woman's life if given a chance. And they will tell themselves a narrative about it that makes them the protagonist. The horror of this film is not that Bear is exceptionally bad. The horror is that he is mundane, that he is benal. He is a normal guy. He is a nice guy. Right?

[00:06:03]This is the nice guy trope. That's kind of what I think the crowd who is more sympathetic towards Bear is missing.

[00:06:12]They're identifying with Bear and they kind of uh seem to at a certain level understand his sadness. They use that to look away from what he actually does. If the takeaway from this film is, "Oh, poor Bear," then I I honestly I think you watched the film wrong. I'm going to go ahead and put that out there. The film gave you his interiority in the first act. So, you would have to sit with the fact that interiority, like someone's mental state does not absolve them. Bear's loneliness is real, but so is what he did. So, so are his actions.

[00:06:54]Both of those things are true. and pretending like the first one cancels out the second is exactly the move that the film is built to expose. I also think like there's something weirdly parasocial going on here. Like I said, I think certain people are identifying with Bear. Um, and there are certain points in my life where I would have been kind of like this guy. I would like to think that I would have made different decisions if given the opportunity. The point of the film is not that Bear is some kind of evil piece of shit. The point is rather that this guy with this specific set of psychological issues made these choices and these choices had ramifications for everybody in the film. Obsession ha has a certain heightened reality to it.

[00:07:46]Ultimately, you need to start thinking in metaphorical terms when you watch a film like this. When you see that kind of heightened reality, what is being conveyed, what is being kind of telegraphed to you in the audience is not that you should be interpreting what is happening literally. People need to stop being so literal. One particularly insane comment I received was trying to argue that everyone needs to stop being so hard on Bear because actually the company is liable. The company that created One Wish Willow is liable. I mean some people watching this film they want to redirect responsibility for what happens to Nikki onto this company. So the the logic is like the corporation makes the product. The product is dangerous. The help desk is apparently staffed by one board guy who clearly doesn't give a shit. So where's where's the liability? Is there going to be a class action lawsuit against the company that made One Wish Willow? This relates to what I was saying before about taking the film too literally. the the company that made One wish Willow is not really a character in this film. They are kind of just a vehicle to deliver the story.

[00:09:10]The film needs bear to have access to a wish. So, the film puts a wish vending business in the setting. There is perhaps a bit of corporate satire going on here, but that it's kind of ambient.

[00:09:26]The help desk scene is funny because it's kind of absurd. Not because the film is gearing up to make an argument about like consumer protections, although of course that's important as well. You could ask the same question about basically any horror movie with a cursed object. Like who's responsible for the videotape in the ring? Who manufactured the monkeykey's paw? Who's licensing the the rights to the Necronomicon? Nobody. Right? Because the cursed object exists to put the protagonist in front of the decision they need to make. The film is interested in the decision, not the supply chain necessarily. Bearer chose to buy the one wish Willow. He broke it.

[00:10:12]He made the wish. The fact that this one wish willow could be purchased at a strip mall type shop is a joke about the benality of evil, not a sort of exculpatory clause for the person who used it. I think the reason this type of comment shows up at all is again related to this recurring theme that some viewers don't want to sit with Bear's decision as the central event of this film. Pushing the blame onto a company is a way of making the wish feel like kind of an accident. Like Bear stumbled into a situation rather than walking into a store, putting money down, and intentionally activating a magic object whose function he at least theoretically understood. The company didn't necessarily trick him, per se. He wanted what he wished for. The film is built around that decision and any reading that displaces the decision onto the surrounding apparatus is reading the film with the volume turned all the way down. I think like there's there's something going on. You're missing something critical here. So, I talk a lot about the so-called male loneliness epidemic in my first video, and a few people responded by trying to kind of galaxy brain this take and say like, "Well, actually, it's not about male loneliness because Bear has friends. He has Ian, right, and Sarah and Nikki, and they go out to trivia night." So, this is not the portrait of someone who is an incel. This is not the portrait of someone who is prototypically associated with the so-called male loneliness epidemic. This is troubling to me as well because uh the film is practically beating you over the head with the fact that all of Bear's relationships are somewhat superficial in this film. If you look at Bear's relationship with Ian for like 30 seconds, I think you will realize this. Ian has been sleeping with the woman that Bear is in love with and uh he's never told him. Ian gives Bear deliberately bad advice about how to approach Nikki. He tells him to call her by a nickname that she hates. He tries to convince Bear not to ask Nikki out at trivia night. He interrupts him when he tries to. Ian is is quietly sabotaging Bear's life as a baseline social practice and Bear cannot see it really because he has no calibration for what friendship is supposed to feel like.

[00:12:53]When the wish goes sideways and Bear finally asks Ian for help, Ian doesn't believe him and subsequently wishes for a billion dollars on a lark. That says all you need to say about the friendship. And that's the friendship Bear has been investing in. That's the guy he's been showing up with for trivia night for years. And when Bear finally needs him for something, not something small, the literal life of the woman they both supposedly care about, Ian uses this wish to enrich himself. That is the actual on-screen content of the closest male relationship in Bear's life. I have a couple of best friends that I trust, you know, and if one of them came to me and said, "I know this is going to sound crazy, and I know you are going to want to have me committed after saying this, but there's something going on here, and I need your help." If my friend came to me with something like that, I would at the very least hear them out. If you look at that relationship and conclude that Bear has friendship and therefore isn't suffering from this male loneliness problem, you have no idea what friendship is. I'm sorry. You're identifying friendship with like proximity. They they happen to work together and share the same social calendar. That's not what friendship is.

[00:14:24]He has a friend group, but he has no actual friends. And the moment a real demand is made on those connections, they collapse instantly. Bear doesn't have the kind of relationships that can save Nikki because Bear hasn't built any real relationships. This is a common theme throughout the film. Now, potentially, of course, there is the possibility of Bear having a relationship with Sarah. This is another thing that people brought up. But if Bear is so blinkered by his fixation on Nikki that he cannot see that Sarah is offering him something more, the film kills her halfway through the third act precisely because Bear could not recognize what she was offering him in the first place. You know, if he had recognized that, none of this would have happened and they wouldn't be in this situation. What I will say is uh I very conspicuously avoided talking about Sarah in my initial review and um that's my bad. She is uh Sarah is a genuinely tragic character in Obsession and the film is doing some of its most interesting thematic work through her as a character. Sarah was the obvious match for Bear in basically every way. She's in his social circle. She paid attention to him. She actually saw him. She treated him with care. The film sort of telegraphs this in the first act when you see that Sarah is the only person that Bear told about his dead cat. He was only comfortable sharing that information with Sarah. He did not tell Nikki on the phone because he wanted to go out with her and he wanted to have his opportunity to ask her out. So, he didn't want to use that as an excuse to stay in. He was withholding this critical information from her. Um, he did certainly did not tell Ian because Ian is an insensitive jackass who is really just not going to offer any kind of emotional support. When his cat died, Sarah is the one who offered him sincere condolences. When Nikki starts acting unhinged, Sarah is the one who reaches out to him. She tries to warn him and tries to pull him out of it cuz she doesn't actually realize what's happening. Sarah is what could have happened if Bear had been capable of recognizing reciprocal interest when it was offered to him. And uh no good deed goes unpunished. So, of course, Sarah has to die. That was the most brutal part of this movie for me. And I think that is the film's verdict on what happens to women who try to genuinely care for emotionally avoidant men who are fixated on other things. They become collateral damage. Nikki's possessed jealousy reads as supernatural horror in that moment when she kills Sarah. But there is some interesting symbolic work going on here as well. Like the woman Bear is obsessed with literally destroys the woman who actually loved him because Bear's obsession has no room in it for anybody else. Sarah dies because Bear was not able to see her. She was right there.

[00:17:52]She was offering him exactly the kind of connection he claimed to want. and he was too busy staring at his fantasy of Nikki to notice. The film makes her a precise match for Bear precisely so that can be taken away from him. She is not a viable alternative for Bear in the film's logic. the possibility of being with Sarah was already foreclosed by the time this movie began because he's narrowed his entire emotional life down to one singular fixation, Nikki. You know, and one thing I will say that is really telling here is if you just watch the opening sequence of Obsession, a lot of information is already being conveyed in that scene. The film opens with Bear confessing his love, telling somebody how he really feels. Actually, he's just revealing his feelings to a waitress.

[00:18:52]And this is all just practice. Ian is there advising on how Bear should conduct himself, how Bear should operate in this scenario. The waitress is being used as a prop, and they casually just tell her to go away. And then Ian tells Bear, "Hey, you need to drop all this sappy shit and just like make fun of Nikki." There is so much information being conveyed in that opening scene. I mean, that says all you need to know right there. Bear is suffering from a lack of friends in this film, from a lack of real friends. All of his relationships are superficial. Either because he can't open up to the people in his life or because the people that he opens up to, like Ian, ridicule him for it. This is a big part of the male loneliness epidemic. Men are socially conditioned not to share their emotions with other men, and when they do, they're ridiculed for it. So what what happens? They stop doing it. The film is showing you exactly what loneliness looks like in a guy who superficially has people around him. And if you watched it and concluded, well, he has friends, so that's not loneliness, you miss the entire point. Bear obsesses over Nikki precisely because he has nowhere else for any of his feelings to go because the relationships that look like friendship from the outside are not actually functioning as real friendships from the inside. Saying but he has friends so it doesn't count is repeating the exact error the film was built to expose. Like it seems to me that one of the major reasons Bear fixates on Nikki in the first place is precisely because he has no functional friendships to absorb any of what he's feeling. Ian is not able to fulfill that role for whatever reason. He's just too repressed and u insensitive. So all of it, the grief about his grandmother, the grief about his dead cat Sandy, bless his little cat's heart, the loneliness of living in a dead relative's house, the sense that his life isn't going anywhere. All of it gets routed towards Nikki, who is just a woman he just so happens to know and is she's kind to him. So uh she's not a therapist. She did not agree to be his partner. She is not someone who signed up to be the receptacle for everything bear cannot say out loud to another human being. So again, the friendship deficit and the romantic infatuation obsession, the titular obsession, these are not two separate things. The obsession is what the friendship deficit produces when that emotional energy has nowhere else to go. I'm excited to watch this movie again. Honestly, I'm still thinking about it a few days later. I'm really excited to see what Curry Barker does next because he is perhaps one of the most promising upcoming horror directors that I can think of right now. All right, that wraps it up for this installment of Nightmare Masterclass.

[00:22:17]Again, if you like my videos and want to support me on a monthly basis, you can do so at patreon.com/nightmaremasterclass.

[00:22:26]You can also join as a YouTube member.

[00:22:29]If you would, if that is your preferred method of supporting creators if you would like to do that, just hit the join button. And uh that's all for now. Thank you for watching. Have a good night.