Warning: This article contains in-depth analysis of topics including sexual violence, abuse, and suicide.
Seated in a dark movie theater, and gripping the edge of my seat, I watched the horrifying spectacle of Curry Barker’s “Obsession” unfold this past June. It was an incredibly uncomfortable experience — that I loved.
The movie spread by word-of-mouth in a way that was unprecedented by the industry, critics, and the creators behind the movie alike. Featuring fresh names at the center of the film, effective writing, and promising scares, crowds flocked to see it in the early summer.
Maybe one of, if not the largest factor in its success, was the conversation the movie managed to generate with its messaging. “Obsession”’s themes are as blatant as they are disturbing, with the central plot of the film hinging on the audience’s understanding of them.
The movie follows Bear, a young man in his early 20s, who has had a crush on his coworker Nikki for years, but is too scared of potential rejection to confess to her. Out of desperation, he purchases a novelty item called the “One Wish Willow,” and, unaware of the gimmicky toy’s true power, wishes on it that Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the world.” The willow branch grants him exactly what he asks for, and Nikki, under the influence of the wish, begins to spiral into increasingly terrifying actions to prove her love to him.
Similarly, “Mouthwashing” is a 2024 indie psychological horror game that unexpectedly took the gaming world by storm when it came out. Dialogue-focused, eerie, and hiding a simple yet shocking twist in its narrative, its success has even led to a recent acquisition of rights by Sony Studios to be turned into a movie. Similar to “Obsession,” “Mouthwashing”’s success was propelled by word-of-mouth and online conversation around the game’s meaning.
The basic elements of the story are as such: a crew of five consisting of Captain Curly, Co-Captain Jimmy, nurse Anya, mechanic Swansea and his apprentice Daisuke, are working for a space delivery company known as Pony Express. When Curly appears to suddenly crash their cargo ship into an asteroid, it leaves him maimed within an inch of his life, and the rest of the now-stranded crew to struggle for survival and puzzle over what caused him to commit such an act.
But to truly understand what made “Mouthwashing” so impactful, you have to understand the order the game decides to tell its events in, and the unwinding of its narrative.
The first scene begins with the player controlling a character they can soon infer is Captain Curly in the cockpit of the spaceship. Ignoring the computer’s warnings that an asteroid is approaching en route, the ship steers towards it and abruptly crashes.
Two months after the crash, Jimmy (who the player is now in the shoes of) has assumed the title of captain with Curly indisposed. Limbless, unable to speak, and covered in bloody bandages all but for one eye and his mouth, the previous captain is being kept alive solely on painkillers. The crew has grown increasingly agitated over their dwindling inventory, and decide to break into the cargo hold for supplies.
To their dismay, it’s revealed that the mystery mass shipment they have dedicated a year — and now potentially their lives — to, consists entirely of mouthwash.
In a flashback to six days before the crash, its revealed the crew was set to be laid off after they completed their current shipment, considerably heightening tensions among them.
By the fourth month post-crash, the crew begins to fall apart. Swansea and Daisuke regularly become drunk off of the mouthwash, Jimmy grows short-tempered under the weight of leadership, and Anya begins to shut down, her ineptness frustrating him. Five months after the crash, Anya locks herself inside the medical bay in a breakdown, as Jimmy yells at her to open the door, to no avail. Daisuke hesitantly tells Jimmy they can use an off limits vent to get inside, which Swansea has barricaded for its instability.
Daisuke and Jimmy use the last of the ship’s medical disinfectant to concoct a drink to knock Swansea out, and Jimmy pressures the young, guilty apprentice into climbing into the vent, where he is gravely injured.
Now left with few options, Jimmy resorts to attempting to use the mouthwash to disinfect Daisuke’s wounds, despite previous warnings from Anya that it’s medically useless. This only furthers Daisuke’s agony, and Swansea ignores Jimmy’s frantic insistence that he can still help, grabbing the ship’s utility axe and putting Daisuke out of his misery. Jimmy calls Swansea a monster, but Swansea has turned against him completely.
In a flashback to one day before the crash, Curly searches for the lockbox the ship’s emergency revolver is stashed in after it has gone missing. He finds Anya crouched beneath the dashboard of the cockpit, and assumes she is contemplating suicide with it in a sudden mental break.
Instead, Anya abruptly reveals to him that she is pregnant. When Curly, bewildered, asks who the father could possibly be, Anya only despondently says that she’s already told him.
It becomes apparent to the player that she is referring to Jimmy, and that this is not a new topic of conversation for them. Curly tries to tell her that he can still fix things and de-escalate the situation by simply talking to Jimmy, them being close friends. Anya, ignoring his reassurances, tells him she has hid the gun lock box out of fear that Jimmy will now resort to hurting her for exposing his actions. It is made clear that the circumstances that led to her pregnancy were not consensual.
In the present, Jimmy hurries off to find the gun after Daisuke’s death, set on killing Swansea. In the medical bay, he finds Anya’s dead body, where she has committed suicide using the last of Curly’s pills. Jimmy figures out the gun is in the drawer under Curly’s cot, and unlocks the box. Curly, helplessly watching Jimmy the entire time with his singular eye, bursts into grim laughter as he witnesses the destruction.
Curly finds Jimmy outside the cockpit, where he refuses Curly’s repeated offers to talk things out. He insists both of their careers will be over once news of Anya’s rape escapes back on Earth, especially with their impending layoffs. He offers to instead make the situation look like a tragedy, implying he is willing to kill himself and the entire crew to escape repercussions. The screen accusingly flashes the words “TAKE RESPONSIBILITY” as he speaks. Curly, perhaps realizing that he will also be held accountable in the assault as captain, or in simple disbelief Jimmy will act on such drastic words, does nothing as Jimmy tells him he will “take care of it” and walks away.
Later, Curly finds Jimmy on the floor outside of the cockpit, pathetically curled in on himself. Curly begs him “tell me you didn’t do it,” in a last, frantic moment of ignorant naivety. Curly rushes into the cockpit when Jimmy is only silent in return, and the ship crashes.
The horror of “Mouthwashing” is not an extraterrestrial alien lurking the spaceship. The horror of Mouthwashing isn’t even simply a man.
The real horror of “Mouthwashing” is two men. A man who was a monster, and a man who wasn’t; but ignored his friend’s monstrous actions, and a woman who was hurt by him’s cries for help, until it was far too late.
“Mouthwashing” ends on an incredibly bleak note, with Jimmy murdering Swansea with the revolver, and breaking down into insanity. His guilt over the deaths of his crewmates, and his lack thereof over what he has done to Anya, has consumed him. He hallucinates bizarre, visceral imagery as he spirals, his subconsciousness urging him to “TAKE RESPONSBILITY” the entire time.
Refusing, he decides dying a self-proclaimed martyr by “saving” Curly is better than living to confront what he has done. He puts Curly into the ship’s sole remaining emergency cryopod, the rest having been destroyed in the impact of the crash, and shoots himself. Curly is left to wait for rescue, indefinitely in a state of cryostasis.
It’s a fitting, ironic fate for Curly’s biggest character flaw: his inaction. When the reveal of Anya’s pregnancy comes to the audience, it is not even a true revelation for him. Anya has already told him about the assault, and Curly did nothing to help her. “Mouthwashing” takes the reality of many average men who would consider themselves good people, and turns the idea of the “nice guy” on its head.
Curly may as well have been a “nice guy,” a friendly captain, and a near-frantic mediator, but he could not step up when he was needed most. And after the crash, he is truly stripped of all autonomy, watching Jimmy destroy the crew with the knowledge he could have stopped it.
This is how rape culture functions in real life. Jimmy is a fundamentally insecure man that seeks positions of power to abuse and hurt others. Curly continuously turns a blind eye to Jimmy and his true nature, and clearly has for a long time by the events of the game. It is implied that Jimmy was given the job at Pony Express only because of Curly, unable to find employment elsewhere because of a history of trouble. With his behavior within the game, it isn’t hard to infer what that trouble might have been. Yet Curly is convinced at every turn of Jimmy’s supposed good nature, simply because he considers him a friend.
By spending the majority of the game in Jimmy’s shoes, the player is also originally deceived into believing he is a good-intentioned, albeit flawed, protagonist. It isn’t until the reveal of what he has done to Anya that it’s clear his narration of events is clouded by a narcissistic omission of his own actions.
Similarly, Bear is presented originally as a sympathetic protagonist to the viewer, unaware his wish will truly come to fruition. But as the plot progresses, it becomes harder and harder to defend his actions.
On a dinner date about halfway through “Obsession”’s events, Bear finally gets explicit confirmation that Nikki is under the influence of the wish when she repeats the exact wording of it to him. The movie then makes a decision immediately after this revelation to suddenly cut to a sex scene. There is an air of malice in this scene that wasn’t present before. Bear now knows for certain Nikki is not in control of her body, and yet continues to ignore the blatant evidence of this in favor of his own pleasure. The viewer is left to uncomfortably sit with this truth.
After Nikki begins to spiral out of control, a One Wish Willow customer service assistant on the phone asks Bear if he would like to take back his wish, but he instead asks to only alter it. The point is clear: Nikki’s lack of autonomy does not bother him; the increasingly violent effects of her lack of autonomy are what bothers him. Bear has no issue with the principle of essentially mind-controlling a woman into love with him until he begins to face repercussions.
The sharpest turning point in Bear’s redeemability as a character is when, deep into his twisted “relationship” with Nikki, he attempts to sneak off to see his friend Sarah while she is asleep. Breaking free from the entity’s hold for a moment, Nikki begs Bear to kill her as she lays paralyzed.
Bear’s only response to her disturbing request is, “What’s so bad about being with me?”
Bear is willing to leave her in torment because he is finally getting what he has always wanted: the illusion of romance. He never truly loved Nikki; he loved the idea of her loving him with zero conditions. He is so fundamentally insecure that, to him, taking away Nikki’s choice to reject him entirely is preferable to risking rejection. True reciprocation was never necessary in his fantasy, but controlling her was.
When he ignores her cries and still sneaks off to meet Sarah, Nikki follows him, and bashes Sarah’s head in to eliminate the biggest obstacle to their relationship. She then soothes a cowering, terrified Bear afterwards, telling him the chilling words, “You wanted this. You wished for this, it’s all your fault.” Nikki is right, Sarah’s death is ultimately Bear’s fault. He had a final chance to do the right thing and respect Nikki’s agency, but selfishly denied her it once again. And, now covered in gore, he sits there, pathetically shaking as the consequences of what he has done become impossible to ignore.
Even in the final sequence of the movie, when Bear kills himself to release the wish’s grip, it is not an act of selflessness. He tries to throw up the pills after he has taken them, unwilling to commit to his one and only true attempt to amend the situation. It’s too late, though, and when Nikki wishes on another One Wish Willow that he would love her as much as she does, he lives the last few moments of his life the way she had for months: trapped.
And when he indeed overdoses, he leaves a technically free, but traumatized Nikki with the mess he made, unable to take accountability to the very end. Just like Jimmy and, by extension, Curly.
“Mouthwashing” and “Obsession” both use the medium of horror to make startling commentary on how systems of toxic masculinity and rape culture continue to permeate our society. How men enable themselves, and each other, to disregard this culture of violent actions against women.
They both ultimately leave the audience with a single, chilling question: what does it mean to take responsibility?