Obsession · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the thing you can't unsee: a boy's hand snapping a branch off a plastic willow. It's a 1960s novelty toy, the kind of kitsch that promises a wish for a quarter, and Bear breaks it the way you'd pluck a daisy — casually, hopefully, sure the universe owes him this. He wishes for Nikki to love him. She does. And the rest of Curry Barker's film is the slow, sickening discovery that the wish worked. Nothing here is a curse in the monkey's-paw sense, no clever punishment, no fine print. He got exactly what he asked for. That's the horror.

What makes the film unbearable — and I mean that as praise — is where the camera stands. It never leaves Bear. We see Nikki only as he sees her, in the light he casts, framed by his idea of what's happening between them. Deleuze has a name for this kind of shot: the dicisign, the moment when the camera doesn't just show us a world but shows us a character in the act of perceiving one, so that we feel the frame as HIS frame. You're not watching Bear. You're watching through the narrow aperture of a man who has decided what love looks like. Barker inherits this apparatus almost directly from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, where the lens is welded to a killer's gaze so that his sight becomes ours whether we consent or not. Obsession does the same trick without a camera-as-weapon; the weapon is point of view itself.

Here is where the film gets genuinely strange, and where a second Deleuzian idea does real work. Because we are locked to Bear, and because we understand what he refuses to, the movie splits our knowledge from his. Deleuze calls the image built out of relations the viewer holds — the meaning that lives in the audience as a knowing third party — the mental-image, the relation-image. Dramatic irony IS a relation-image: the gap between what the shot shows and what you, watching, assemble around it. When Bear beams at a compliant, glassy Nikki and reads it as romance, you read it as a woman erased. The film hands you a mark — the customary sign, 'this is a happy couple' — and then lets the demark leak through, the wrongness in her stillness, the thing that breaks the pattern and forces you to interpret. The dread is not in a monster jumping out. It's in you doing arithmetic Bear won't do.

And what, exactly, is the Nikki we're looking at? This is the film's deepest move. The wished-for Nikki is a replica — the dossier's word — a version of her drained of will, composed to Bear's specification and standing where the real woman used to be. Deleuze, working through the powers of the false, describes crystalline description: an image that composes its own object and then quietly replaces it, until you can no longer reach the thing it stood in for. That is precisely what the wish does. It doesn't add a fake Nikki alongside the true one; it overwrites her, so the false description occupies the space of the real and Bear can no longer tell — will not let himself tell — the difference. He becomes what Deleuze calls the forger, le faussaire: not a liar exactly, but someone who creates a truth by forcing it into being. Bear forges love. The atrocity is that forgery is indistinguishable, from the inside, from the real thing he wanted. The false doesn't lose to the true. It swallows it.

This matters beyond one film because of the contract cinema has always half-relied on — the sense that the camera, whatever it stages, isn't lying to you about what's in front of it. Obsession weaponizes that contract. It photographs a romance and dares you to believe your own eyes, then makes believing your eyes the trap. That's the powers of the false as a moral engine, not a puzzle-box gimmick.

Place it in the family and you see what Barker is doing. From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — both the 1974 original he names as his origin and the glossy 2003 remake — he takes the lesson that cheap, grainy proximity can feel like unbearable closeness, that texture is dread. From Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer he takes the refusal to ever cut away to a moral vantage; the intimacy stays flat and unbroken. From American Psycho, the charming predator whose interior seduces even as it damns. From Audition, the hour of gentle courtship engineered to make the flip into atrocity land like betrayal. Barker's own contribution, formed in the total-authorship crucible of YouTube where he writes, directs, and cuts alone, is to fuse the wish-fairy-tale to perpetrator-lock so tightly that the fantasy and the crime are the same event. There's no possession scene, no threshold you cross into horror. The wish coming true IS the crossing.

What it did, arriving in 2026 for less than a million dollars and leaving with hundreds of millions, was prove that the queasiest kind of complicity still sells — that an audience will pay to be implicated. It refined 'nice guy' horror into something colder than satire: a first-person love story where getting the girl and unmaking her are one wish. Watch it again and watch Nikki, not Bear. The film has been begging you to the whole time.