Bear (Michael Johnston) is hopelessly infatuated with Nikki (Inde Navarrette) but—due to his fear of rejection and insecurity—he cannot bring himself to reveal how he truly feels. After several failed attempts of trying to escape the “friend zone”, he breaks the ‘One Wish Willow’, a novelty gift for Nikki that he bought in a crystal shop. Wishing that she would love him more than anything else in the world, Bear instantly has Nikki under his spell and the pair go home together, only for him to realise that her love will soon devolve into excessive affection and violence.

Bear’s initial “obsession” with Nikki is driven by his loneliness and emotional vulnerability. The film opens with a close-up shot posed opposite Bear as he expresses the alarming extent of his love and desire for Nikki to a friend for practice. This sequence establishes the claustrophobic and airless tone of Obsession. Bear is the typical “nice guy”: he sees himself as a victim of Nikki’s lack of affection, forever condemned to the “friend zone” because of his own insecurity.

Male loneliness is a crucial trope dissected by Barker in the film. Bear lives alone in his deceased grandmother’s house (no indication of parents), aside from his cat Sandy, who passes away shortly after the opening scene. Barker is unafraid to show his protagonist sobbing onscreen, but crucially shows how Bear takes emotional refuge in his obsession over Nikki as he scrolls through her social media posts.

The manosphere also overlaps with far-right rhetoric, whose beliefs have driven many radicalised men into perpetrating violence against women. Jack Thorne’s recent mini series Adolescence (2025) profoundly portrays the effect this has on Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a 13-year-old who murders a girl he had a crush on at school. In both cases, rejection is a sign of misandry, rather than simply a woman’s right.

Unlike Adolescence, however, Obsession fails to condemn Bear’s actions as sufficiently as Jamie’s. Bear treads the line between victim and perpetrator, but for the most part we are rooting for his survival. We are more scared of psychotic Nikki than we are of obsessive Bear, even though Nikki is the clear victim.

One scene shows the real Nikki talking to Bear while psychotic her is sleeping. Sleep-talking Nikki reveals that she has no affection for Bear and that they were never together. Under his wish, this scene strips away Nikki’s bodily autonomy and consent, especially to the sexual relationship Bear profits from. A brief scene shows the two having sex; Nikki’s face is still, even lifeless.