Obsession (2025) became a hype, so I had to see what that hype is all about. A young man, Bear (Michael Johnston), is too shy to confess his feelings for his co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette), so he uses a new-age novelty item, One Wish Willow, to make her fall madly in love with him. She does and won’t so much as let him breathe, with even more dire consequences for anyone or anything that may pose a threat. But, typically for me, I had to make a sci-fi comparison in the bitter and bloody aftermath. Namely, Electric Dreams (1984)!
By Emad Aysha
I’m a child of the 1980s, but that’s the whole point. The sci-fi movie has a similar premise: an artificially intelligent computer becomes too attached to its creator and jealous of the guy’s girlfriend. There are dire consequences, but the ending is wholesome and benign.
ALGORITHMS OF LOVE: 1980s screen princess Virginia Masden in 'Electric Dreams'. Notice the drooping frown of the jealous computer soon to fall in love with her himself.
The opening scene says it all. You have the aspiring young programmer in an airport, answering questions from a woman sitting next to him, only for him to discover she’s listening to a practice tape.
You get that same vibe in Obsession, with the erstwhile dope of a hero losing his pet cat Sandy. The poor thing committed inadvertent suicide, swallowing too much of his medication. He only has two basic friends, Sara (Megan Lawless) and Ian (Cooper Tomlinson). Even Nikki is cut off from her father.
The scenes when someone is in a car are eerie. You can’t hear anything from the outside, and condensation obscures everything. You really feel cut off, and that’s despite all the text messaging and internet searches that dominate Bear’s life.
An extra insight here from Camilla’s Corner, noting that text messages are a form of generational shortcut. Just like the One Wish Willow Bear uses instead of actually saying what he feels. I’d add the lack of male role models as another contributor to ineptitude.
You see this with the dweeb programmer in Electric Dreams, Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen). And all these fancy gadgets really began in the 1980s, including mobile phones.
The 1970s-80s were also the era of slasher movies, with a special place for crazy women stalkers. The classic, of course, is Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), but there were also particularly creepy episodes of Hart to Hart and even Hardcastle and McCormick with female stalkers.
Paranoia about who to trust and who has ulterior motives was on the rise then too. The sci-fi horror classic The Thing (1982) has the communications guy, named Windows (Thomas Waites) – isolation again. And the hero MacReady (Kurt Russell) observes casually that it’s better to trust in the Lord because trust is a difficult thing to come by these days.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Screenshots of Youtuber Camilla sheltering her adorable cat Peanut from the horrors to come. Against man, woman 'and' beast!
Similar themes were echoed in an earlier arctic SF thriller, A Cold Night’s Death (1973). Nonetheless, the 1980s were an era of masculine confidence in law enforcement and the second Cold War.
You can even see a hint of this ‘absence’ in Obsession, with the tiger’s eye stone that Nikki gives to Bear, inherited from the women in her family. (His grandma raised Bear himself.)
The sentient computer in Electric Dreams does get nasty too. Still, it soon falls in love with the guy’s girlfriend – the ever lovely Virginia Masden – and eventually decides to sacrifice itself for her happiness. It’s the computer that commits suicide in this movie, not the protagonist.
As for the poor cat Sandy in Obsession, I presume she killed herself because her owner wasn’t showing her the same kind of love and devotion in return. A prelude of coming attractions.
Oh, and there’s a nobody-can-be-trusted vibe here too, since Ian secretly was sleeping with Nikki in the beginning, which is why he was trying to get Bear not to hit on her. (Recollect the mistrust in the SF drama Vanilla Sky [2001].)
People are shrivelling into themselves in the 21st century, terrified of relationships and shifting to the ‘friend zone’ as it’s called. These psycho-social lessons aside, Obsession is very well made, from set design to music and cinematography.
The camera angles and lighting are particularly eerie, obscuring Nikki’s face in critical scenes, making her eyes glow reflectively instead. She’s a stranger to Bear, and our instincts keep telling us he should run for his life.
Even the nighttime scene where she transforms outside her house at night is lit creepily. Reminiscent of a similar scene in The Exorcist (1973).
EXERCISING LOGIC: A screenshot of Youtubers Laura (Bulgaria) and Magy (Spain) reacting to Nikki's face stretching antics, and the selfish dweeb of a man responsible for it all.
The movie also sneakily has Nikki speaking like Bear – saying no, no, no just like he did when his cat died. As if every man wants a clone of himself in his girl.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on female dating psychology, but Magic Magy and Laura insist these mood swings and childlike obsessions are accurate. I’ll take their word for it!
Inde Navarrette was absolutely amazing. She’s small physically, so she looks completely harmless. She has dark hair and eyes and bronze brownish skin, from her Mexican heritage, making her incredibly warm and huggable in appearance.
At the same time, she has a very flexible face, smiles or frowns stretching all her features, while her eyes are crazy from early on. The actress also knows how to freak you out with the intonations of her voice, doing accents really well too.
According to Movie Munchies she had to work at walking dogs after this film, which only cost $10 million to make. (These Vietnamese girl reviewers also hated Bear, calling him a coward, adding that such suicidal obsession happen in their country too. Gen Z has gone global!)
Man, I’ll take AI any day. At least you can reason with it and give it a chance to redeem itself, in fairy-tale mode. Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger in T2: Judgement Day (1991). Electric Dreams describes itself as a fairy tale early on.
Love potions are a fairy-tale concoction too. But in the hands of Gen Z, everything turns ugly. You hear and see the real Nikki is crying out for help as the wish-fulfilment Nikki takes over, and it’s positively heartbreaking.
APPRAISALS AT LARGE: A screenshot of Chi, Katie and Ivy from Vietnam's Movie Munchies 'voicing' their own verdict on the Indie movie extraordinaire. Facial expressions speak louder than words!
Somebody's really got to bridge the generational gap on magic and AI!!
