The thing about this movie is that you can get pretty much what you want from this movie.

Apparently, this was censored somewhat. I don’t know how much, since the is still very gory at times. I guess it’s partly quantity, not quality.

Bear (or Baron) is obsessed with his long-time friend and current colleague, Nikki. But he can’t bring himself to act on it. Even when she directly asks him whether he likes her, he can’t get the words out of himself. But he finds a novelty gift which grants a wish. He tries it and since this is a horror movie, the wish is granted. The wish, of course, being that Nikki would fall hopelessly in love with him. I guess the exact wording matters, which is something like she will love him more than anything else in the world. This fucked up relationship (if you can call it that) turns very toxic quite quickly, because Nikki has nothing in her life now than her love for Bear.

So, the surface-level is that you don’t really want what you think you want. It doesn’t take long before the constant adoring by Nikki becomes overbearing for Bear (there might have been room for a stupid dad-joke level pun there, but I’m too tired to come up with one). Nikki’s behavior is very aggressive and just weird.

A more misogynistic read would be to point out that women can be volatile, but I don’t think that’s what the movie is trying to say. But yeah, that’s how some people are going to choose to understand this movie. The movie does give plenty of ammunition for this take. Then again, it is not her decision to do what she does.

Another way to see this movie is to think of it as a story of a toxic relationship. After all, this kind of erratic behavior is a kind of domestic abuse where the point is to keep the partner from leaving. This is very obvious. The partner is put constantly into situations where he (in this case) is forced to act in a specific way so that the other half of the relationship want cause a scene.

Oh yeah, it is indeed a wonderful movie.

It is based on a quite common fear: rejection. I mean, I’ve always found it difficult to approach someone in this way. Especially, if they are your friend and coworker. It might get awkward otherwise. I lie to myself that I would rather have the woman make the first move (which is true), but rationally I know that I should be more active in these matters. Bear’s fear of rejection causes him to actually mess the whole situation up in a much grander manner.

Apparently, the budget for the movie was quite low at less than a million, but it doesn’t show. Actually, one might argue that they had to make interesting choices based on the lack of resources. The style is interesting and I’m not saying this to be cute. There are a few places where I wondered about editing choices, but it turned out that they paid off.

I do like the movie quite a bit. It is perhaps a little too long at 108 minutes. Horror tends to be better at a brisk 90 minutes or so. At some point you just start to expect the movie to end, but it just isn’t happening.

Spoiler time:

About halfway through, Bear calls the customer service number for the “novelty” gift he got the wish from. It’s a pretty funny scene where the customer service person doesn’t seem that interested and there seems to be some kind of supernatural knowledge of what’s going on with Bear and Nikki. However, the movie teases the ending here by telling us that the wish is cancelled if Bear dies. How will he die? There’s a Checkov’s Gun early in the movie: Bear’s cat dies because somehow she got access to some medicine Bear’s grandmother used and Bear is still keeping around for some reason. So, of course, the coward that he is, Bear can’t find it in himself to shoot himself in the head, so he takes a handful of those drugs to kill himself.

However, and this, was a nice twist, Bear had brought Nikki one of those novelty gifts as well, so that he could ask her to wish herself to get back to their former relationship. He doesn’t manage this, but instead, Nikki makes the natural wish while Bear is in the bathroom trying to figure out how to kill himself: She wishes him to fall in love with her in the same way she loves him. So, now there’s two of them under this spell. Except that Bear has already taken the drugs, so now he dies in the arms of Nikki, who snaps out of the spell at that very moment.

That was beautifully orchestrated. The elements had been written out for us previously (the drugs and the end of the wish), but they managed to use them in an interesting way.

The movie did project quite a few things in this way and it wasn’t always as neatly done, but sure, whatever.