Obsession Is About A Pretty Normal Dude

Which is why no one shuts up about it. Spoilers abound, you've been warned.

Post inspired in part by friend of the blog Harjas Sandhu’s excellent review here.

Obsession analysis is everywhere. One of the most popular TikTok-header takes you’ll see is: “Bear [our protagonist] is the villain.” This is true, or it is depending on how you define it. It’s leaving out the bulk of what makes the movie so good, unfortunately.

Bear is a fascinating antagonist/anti-hero/protagonist because he can’t really make sense of how what he wants could be bad. It makes him so authentic, so human, and so (I wish I were sorry to say this) male onscreen, and it is the primary reason that the entire movie is duct-tape sticky as discourse fodder. Bear really struggles to move outside of his own frame of innocent desire until the horror movie consequences have cranked up from PG-13 to R.