I watched Obsession. The CBFC watched it too and decided what other adults could see

My post-film high didn’t last long. Scrolling through Instagram on my way home, I came across a reel about a sex scene between Bear and Nikki. People in the comments were disturbed by it; calling it difficult to watch. Saying it was the scene where you first understand — clearly, without room for misreading — that Nikki is not a willing participant. That the wish has not changed her feelings for Bear but it has taken her autonomy and she is trapped inside her own body.

A still from Obsession

I had no memory of this scene. Then there is another one, later in the film, there is a scene where Sarah is killed by Nikki. Her face is barely recognisable, her features destroyed, her eyes protruding out. I had wondered in the theatre: how did she end up like that? Nikki had only banged her head against a car window. The leap in damage made no sense. I’d filed it away and moved on. The reel told me what I had missed: the scene of Nikki smashing Sarah’s face repeatedly into a brick had been cut. I had watched the consequence without the cause, the wound without the weapon.

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I dug further. The Central Board of Film Certification had deleted 38 seconds from Obsession before clearing it for Indian theatres. Fourteen seconds of “graphic sexual activity.” Twenty-four seconds of “extreme violence.” And they had already rated the film ‘A’.

Let’s be precise about what was cut and why it matters.

The sex scene sits inside a montage — a warm, domestic sequence showing Bear and Nikki’s relationship growing in the weeks after the wish. It is supposed to look like love. And then, for just a few seconds, the film cuts to them in bed. Bear is there. And Nikki’s face — turned toward the camera, carries a look of traumatic detachment. Hollow. It is a fleeting shot, almost easy to miss. But it reframes everything around it.

What looked like a relationship suddenly looks like something else entirely. That is why viewers who saw the uncut version found it so difficult to watch. This is for the first time you understand Nikki’s captivity and it also shows you Bear’s wilful blindness. That is when the audience stops seeing him as a lovesick fool and starts seeing him for exactly what he is. Though just a few seconds long, without it you spend much longer in the film giving Bear the benefit of the doubt and reading Nikki’s entrapment as something else entirely. The scene makes you see both of them clearly, much sooner than the film would otherwise allow.

A still from Obsession.

The CBFC did not cut a steamy scene. They cut a scene that was saying something. A scene through which the filmmaker, no matter how briefly, was making a point — giving you his vision of who these people are and what is really happening between them.

And they did it to a film that they had already rated ‘A’ — meant for adult audiences. They looked at this film and said — yes, this is for grown-ups — and then in the same breath decided that grown-ups cannot be trusted with the grown-up content that makes the film what it is.

What exactly is the point of an adult certificate if the adults are still being protected from the film?

This isn’t the first time.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge — Ranveer Singh’s blockbuster sequel, ‘A’ certified — came back from the CBFC with 21 cuts. Violence reduced, abusive words half-muted. They were not muted, they were half-muted. As actor-director Deepak Tijori pointed out publicly: what is the logic of muting the first syllable of an abuse but not the second? The same film, fully uncut, was already on OTT. The CBFC policed the theatre while the internet watched the real version.

Then there is Punjab ’95. Diljit Dosanjh’s film about Jaswant Singh Khalra, drawn from judicial records and CBI findings, has been stuck with the CBFC since December 2022, with 127 cuts demanded. The director said if cuts are implemented, “only the trailer will be left.” Among the demands: change Khalra’s name, call the Punjab Police just “Police,” don’t mention Indira Gandhi. It still has no Indian release date. The very people whose history it tells cannot see it.

And then there’s Santosh. The Shahana Goswami film has been to the Cannes film festival, it was Britain’s official Oscar entry, and was BAFTA nominated, but was blocked entirely because the CBFC’s cuts were so sweeping the filmmakers called them impossible to implement without destroying the film. Goswami said it plainly: “The CBFC is meant to be a board of certification, not of censorship.” That sentence contains the entire problem.

The CBFC was never supposed to be a moral guardian. It was supposed to be an age-classification body. Look at a film, decide who it’s appropriate for, stamp it accordingly. That is the whole job. It should not decide what adults can process emotionally, to sand down the sharp edges of difficult art, to snip out the scenes that challenge or confront. And yet that is exactly what it does — year after year, film after film, 14 seconds here, 38 seconds there.

Obsession is a film about a woman imprisoned inside her own body by a wish someone else made for her. The deleted sex scene was a few seconds tucked inside a montage of what looked like love — and in those few seconds, Nikki’s face tells you everything the rest of the montage is trying to hide. The deleted violence scene was the moment that horror becomes physical and irreversible.

A still from Obsession.

The CBFC watched both. They understood what they were removing. And they removed them anyway — from an adult-rated film, for adult audiences.

Bear stole Nikki’s autonomy with a wish. The CBFC stole ours with 38 seconds. Neither asked. Both decided they knew better.