4 min readJun 22, 2026 04:30 PM IST
First published on: Jun 22, 2026 at 04:29 PM IST
By Radhika Jagtap
Horror is what men inflict; women suffer its consequences — the recent Hollywood movie Obsession seems to remind us of this. As someone watching it in India, where the nation’s primetime has recently been dominated by images of a deceased young woman, allegedly a victim of dowry death, and her accused mother-in-law calling her out for not “fitting in”, it hits close to home that Obsession’s Nikki represents a woman who is forcibly made to distort her entire personality in order to “fit into” a man’s idea of love and possession. Aren’t women forcibly domesticated into relationships and marriages to fit gendered expectations? The never-declining rate of marital and intimate-partner violence indicates that modern relationships are flailing, and they are failing women first.
Simone de Beauvoir used the word “mutilates” in her pathbreaking The Second Sex (1949): “…the drama of marriage is not that it does not guarantee the wife the promised happiness — there is no guarantee of happiness — it is that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and routine”. There is no marriage in Obsession, but its protagonist Bear does try to retain control over Nikki — by making a wish that sets things into motion — and in the process, Nikki loses control of herself, inflicting violence on everyone around. Bear inflicts violence on Nikki; she embodies its consequences.
Nikki’s portrayal of the “crazy girlfriend” follows the aesthetics of the “Overly Attached Girlfriend” meme popularised by YouTuber Laina Morris in 2012. Director Curry Barker’s work makes people, especially men, question the power imbalance in romantic relationships, but here’s a concern: One cannot unsee how the plot did not spend even a few seconds on the horror experience from inside Nikki’s head. We only see it from Bear’s perspective, but where is her mental frame? In a few scenes, we see Nikki trying to differentiate between herself and the entity inside, but could Barker subtly want us to blame the entity and not Bear for Nikki’s condition? Are men on social media resonating with and understanding the violation of consent because a man is bearing the consequences of it? Is Obsession trying to normalise the idea that women’s emancipation, and the acknowledgement of their suffering, is heavily dependent upon how men perceive it? That men will only listen to other men about women’s experiences?
Although the audience is in on Bear’s culpability, there are scenes in which Nikki’s actions fall into familiar tropes of “crazy and possessive” female partners. One finds men bursting into laughter in theatres at these scenes — no wonder sexist jokes about men being “never allowed to talk by the Mrs” continue to persist.
Obsession also suffers from the “final girl” trope, as argued by academic Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), her book on slasher movies. She argues that men resonate with and align with the “final surviving girl” archetype in slasher movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). While Clover’s work was later critiqued by Black and non-cis scholarship, it could be possible that Obsession provides a revision of the theory by making men side with Nikki against the control of male desire, but sadly without demanding Nikki’s retelling. In that case, perhaps horror is not the genre of the movie; perhaps it lies in the consequences of not reading its politics deeply enough.
The writer teaches at the School of Law, UPES Dehradun
Although the audience is in on Bear's culpability, there are scenes in which Nikki’s actions fall into familiar tropes of “crazy and possessive” female partners. 
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